Lots of people forget about the usefulness of the core utilities (the tools available in Bash). I am even pretty guilty of it at times with such quick and easy things like Perl, Ruby, or Python that allow you to process items from the command line. However, they load up an entire interpreter. It is usually better to use the coreutils.
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Erics Tech Blog Thoughts, musings, and other idealistic (sometimes useful) systems and development hoopla.
Counting Frequencies of Frequencies
16 Aug 2010 — ericGetting a Random Record From a MongoDB Collection
9 Aug 2010 — ericOne of my issues with MongoDB is that, as of this writing, there is no way to retrieve a random record. In SQL, you can simply do something similar to “ORDER BY RAND()” (this varies depending on your flavor) and you can retrieve random records (at a slightly expensive query cost). There is not yet an equivalent in MongoDB because of its sequential access nature. There is a purely Javascript method in the MongoDB cookbook here. If you are really interested, I would also read the Jira ticket thread #533 on this issue.
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Sharing a Screen Session
23 Jul 2010 — ericAnyone who has spent any time in a shell and has been cut off while working should know about screen. If not, then I recommend reading up on it (here or here). But I’m not here to tell you about screen as a general tool, I want to show you how to use it for screen sharing. I found a couple of forum posts and other scattered information, so here’s a little centralizing of information.
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Stopping Curb From Segfaulting
8 Jul 2010 — ericWhile trying to get the curb gem up and running using Ruby 1.8.7p174, I kept getting segmentation faults. I Google’d around and really wasn’t able to come up with much other than lots of people saying not to use ports here. Since I don’t use Mac Ports, I use Homebrew, I figured this wasn’t an issue. I had also recently installed the latest XCode so I incorrectly assumed there was no issue there either. (Note: I am running on a freshly upgraded version of Mac OS X Snow Leopard).
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