Optimising my feeding experience.

I’ve been pretty dark for a few months in my blogging practices and I’ve been feeling distinctly disconnected. I think that one of the reasons was that I changed the way that I was consuming feeds - rather than the feeds coming to me in my Inbox I had to go to them in Bloglines, or even Internet Explorer 7.0.

Today I decided to go back to using Squeet - inspired by Geoff’s recent round of experimentation (hey - who says you can’t experiment with an old friend, err, don’t take that the wrong way).

Anyway - I can already feel that I am more inspired to respond to others blog posts and it is stimulating my own creativity. It also helps that “the super team” that I am working with also pretty much nailed their deliveries today (two projects closing down and one finishing an iteration).

I think that the way that you choose to process input is a very personal choice - I think that some people can’t handle things popping up at them every five seconds, whilst others (myself included) actually find ways to fill the void with “other stuff” - unfortunately that other stuff is often pure work as opposed to more fun geeky endeavours (as well as the usual allocation of family time and sleep).

Fun with scripting shells (how to rename multiple files in PowerShell).

I stumbled across this post by Rob Newcater on RootPrompt.org which points to this post on BasicallyTech.com. It shows the various ways that you can rename or manipulate filenames in groups using the bash shell and a smattering of standard UNIX utilities.

The sample given was renaming a directory full of *.mp3 files such that all the spaces were replaced with underscores - here is the script in BASH:

for FILE in *.mp3 ; do NEWFILE=`echo $FILE | sed ’s/ /_/g’` ; echo “$FILE will be renamed as $NEWFILE” ; done

That is pretty cool, although it is much more concise in PowerShell:

get-childitem *.mp3 | foreach { rename-item $_ $_.Name.Replace(” “, “_”) }

And by concise, I don’t mean shorter. One of the advantages of PowerShell over traditional text-piping shells is that you are dealing with objects which provide a lot more data to the next part of the processing pipeline. If you are into punctuation you could express it as:

gci *.mp3 | % { rename-item $_ $_.Name.Replace(” “, “_”) }

But to be honest, I prefer it the first way.

Third Top Australian Consumer Technology Blogger

I picked up this post by Paul Montgomery which lists me as the third top Australian consumer technology blogger (who aren’t journalists). Cool - although I think you can be the top five if only you start getting selective with the search criteria. I’m probably the number one Australian consumer technology blogger with the word “not” and “gartner” in the URL.

P.S. Paul - I tried to use Tinfinger - I reckon you could improve usability by providing a few samples of search terms.

Update: Corrected spelling of Tinfinger (was: Tin Finger).