March 2, 2008

Inline Search and Replace

I was going through some old code tonight from college that had my student id(SS #) in it and I wanted to strip out my SS # from it. I run into this situation a lot where I need to do a mass inline search and replace. I hope this command is useful to anyone else

find . -type f -exec sed -i 's/MyIdentity//' {} \;

March 2, 2008

Optimal Configuration for 3 vs 3 seats: PART 1

THE PROBLEM

The LIRR has a section of seats in each car that are 3 seats facing one another (see diagram to right). I always aim to sit in these set of seats due to the fact that I’m 6’5 and sitting in the regular seats hardly offers me enough leg room to sit comfortably for an hour long train ride. Of course this only works in my favor if no one sits across from me. If they do, I gain nothing from this seat and in fact I’m no better off than I would have been sitting in a seat with my knees in the back of the seat in front of me. This fails in every situation a person sits across from me no matter how old they are. I’ve calculated the only way this could work out is if the person were to have no legs at all.

March 1, 2008

Credit Woes

…Most over used 2 words in newspapers this year. Searching google news for “credit woes” in the last day(Feb 29th 2008) produces 914 hits. Everyday the market is down I see the same couple of words in financial headlines over and over again.

When the market is down we have a mix of the following words…. Investors, Credit Concerns/Woes, Fear, Inflation, Worries, Economic, Fall, Drop, Housing, Outlook, Profit Taking, Dollar Weakening, Write-offs, Pullback. I’m pretty sure if you do some combinatorics, you can come up with every possible news headline for a financial news site when the market is down for the day. Am I the only one who thinks these headlines are beginning to get a bit bland?