Will's Blog

When working in other peoples code I almost always notice mixed tabs and spaces. Like many programmers, this makes my skin crawl since it usually causes formatting to look horrible or incomprehensible. First I'll double check that there are mixed tabs and spaces by highlighting the tabs. /\t If I see some whitespace highlighted and some not highlighted I'll look at the indentation and figure out how many spaces each tab should be, then do a replace. This will perform a replace on the entire file ( %s ) for all tabs ( \t ) into four spaces ( \ \ \ \ ), the g at the end will allow the match to be done multiple times per line: :%s/\t/\ \ \ \ /g If your tab expand matches the file, you can also use the vim built-in retab: :%retab

Not much to this one. The case is a nice size for a project box, which is why it was picked up in the first place. The mess of wires inside is impressive. As usual click the pictures for more (and in higher resolution).

ps1 and ps2 are pointers to a character array, what does this do? while (*ps2++=*ps1++); It is my favorite example of bizarre looking C code which utilizes pointers, pointer increments, unary operation precedence, C-string null termination and the evaluation of an assignment. Breaking it down a little "*ps2++=*ps1++" means the same thing as this: *ps2 = *ps1; ps2++; ps1++; Since ps1 and ps2 are character pointers the first line dereferences each and sets the value of ps1 to the memory pointed to by ps2. The second and third lines just increment each pointer. Both are pointing to character arrays, so they now point to the next character in the array. The final important detail is that a cstring ends with a null terminator. So eventually the loop will get to the strings end and assign "'\0' = '\0'", which evaluates to '\0', which is false. Thus ending the loop. Here's a full example: Here it is in the form of strcpy (from ...

I've been wanting to setup some sort of automatic backup on my personal data for quite some time, but have always settled on manually copying important documents to a second hard drive. Well thanks to THIS nice guide to setting up rsync and cron I now have it setup. Short guide shorter: 1) Create a bash script with the following (note there are only two lines below, the command is long): #!/bin/bash sudo rsync -av --progress --delete --log-file=<location to put log file>/$(date +%Y%m%d)_rsync.log <directory to backup> <directory to put backed up directory in> 2) Run "sudo crontab -e" and enter the following line to have your backup done every morning at 4am: 0 4 * * * /root/rsync-shell.sh

One of my favourite things in Linux is having multiple workspaces. Something I didn't know until recently is that you could name your workspaces, and with a simple trick have the name displayed on your top or bottom panel.

Took the first steps on a new project, an automatic cat feeder. The plan is to have it completed by Thanksgiving so that the cats have something to eat while I'm out of town. That being said, I cut the pieces for the box out of some 1/4" MDF and have a lot of work to do.

More treasures from the landfill, this is something I took apart a year or two ago. The only reason its still kicking around is because of the motor, which will be re-purposed in another project someday. There's nothing left to identify what model it is, anyone know? There isn't much left for the front. Everything interesting has been ripped out including an old bulb, lens and a switch. The bulb's reflector was actually used in another project. In the top corners are a couple spokes which were probably used to attach the reels, film would go through the slot in the bottom right where the bulb and lens used to be.