In my ever increasing quest to write better code, a friend of mine suggested that I use PerlTidy on everything I do. Every time I touch a piece of perl code, run PerlTidy. (Make sure it still works afterwards, of course, but that’s just common sense). So, here’s a Unix Filter for BBEdit to make PerlTidy a part of the editor. Save it into a file (mine is cleverly called PerlTidy.pl), and stick it into:

~/Library/Application Support/BBEdit/Unix Support/Unix Filters/

`In my ever increasing quest to write better code, a friend of mine suggested that I use PerlTidy on everything I do. Every time I touch a piece of perl code, run PerlTidy. (Make sure it still works afterwards, of course, but that’s just common sense). So, here’s a Unix Filter for BBEdit to make PerlTidy a part of the editor. Save it into a file (mine is cleverly called PerlTidy.pl), and stick it into:

~/Library/Application Support/BBEdit/Unix Support/Unix Filters/

`

OpenSolaris is dead. Now, time to find a migration strategy away from OpenSolaris 2009.06.

I’m selling my Sigma 10-20mm Wide Angle lens. It’s for Nikon’s DX format cameras, and it’s the last piece holding me back from going to a D700 (or it’s replacement, in the spring of 2011 – possibly March). I don’t do as much wide angle work as I need to in order to justify keeping it, and on a full frame camera body, it’s not going to be all that useful. That said, it’s a very good lens, nice for wide work as long as you keep it above f/8. Any faster than that and overall sharpness starts to slip away. Considering that I can handhold the lens at 1/30th of a second regardless, and I’ve got very unsteady hands, running at f/8 isn’t hard to do unless you’re shooting indoors at night.

So, I’m selling mine. I’m asking $400, and I’m going to include the $70 HOYA Pro1 UV[0] filter I have for it. This is a low-profile filter designed for wide-angle lenses, to avoid vignetting when shooting at 10mm.

I love snapshots. The ability to do something like this warms my heart:

1. Shut down all VMs
2. Turn off VMWare
3. zfs snapshot tank/Media/VM@`hostname`-`date +%s`
4. Turn VMWare back on
5. Boot the VMs
6. Schedule the movement of the snapshot to the backup host while you are doing development work on the images you just saved

The only thing that could make this better is if I had a separate ZFS dataset for each VMFS (so I could snapshot them individually), and if I could trigger the snapshots from VMWare. Yes, VMWare Fusion has internal snapshots, but I’ve not found them all that reliable. And I’m thinking of moving to VirtualBox anyway – my ZFS snapshots live until I migrate off OpenSolaris. (Which I hope never happens).

You know it’s time to clean up when you see this:

Today, Adobe Acrobat Reader asked again to install the security update. I let it, thinking it would fail in the same place. No! This time, no problems at all. Of course, it installed the AdobePDFViewer for all my browsers. Time to roll up my sleves and put a stop to this, once and for all:

sudo rm -rf /Library/Internet\ Plug-Ins/AdobePDFViewer.plugin

sudo touch /Library/Internet\ Plug-Ins/AdobePDFViewer.plugin

sudo chflags schg /Library/Internet\ Plug-Ins/AdobePDFViewer.plugin

As fair warning: that last line means it’s VERY hard to ever do anything to the file again. Even root can’t directly remove the file. However, this means Adobe’s shitty installer can’t remove it either.