Hidden Interfaces

I fly around my world with lots of keyboard shortcuts.  The hot-corner UI stuff in Windows 8 doesn't really bother me, except for that part where it's hard to hit in a windowed virtual machine... but they provided some new shortcuts like Win+C to get there, or I can run it full screen.


But there's something interesting about this: my parents have a much worse time using Windows 8.x than I do, and the gap is greater than it was in the XP/7 days.  And it occurs to me that I use a lot of 'secret' interfaces that are invisible to them.

find: arguments are not actually one big expression

I first learned about find somewhere around 12 years ago, so the documentation today might contradict me, but I’ve been carrying around in my head this false notion: that flags like -print0 participate in the conditions as a true value while they update a flag that sets the eventual output format.

They don’t, in fact, participate.  find accepts them with -print0 -a «expr» syntax just to mess with you, and outputs the filename as soon as it sees the -print0 option.  That means these two commands are equivalent:

find . -print0 -a «expr»
find . -print0

And in fact, if you offer multiple -print options, you'll get each filename printed out multiple times.

I was intending to do CRLF→LF translations only on text files, and the extension-matching came after the -print0.  Since find emitted no warning, I only noticed the damage when I deployed the website and looked at Firefox valiantly trying to make sense of all the broken images.

The correct way to write the command is actually:

find . «expr» -print0

This triggers the -print0 “option” only once the complete expression has matched.  And suppresses the regular/default -print, of course.

The Trouble with REST

Note: this post has been superseded.

REST is easy to describe.  It goes a little something like this: "You have some representation, and you send (or receive) the whole thing to read it or make changes."  People coming from Clojure would understand it as REST sends values.  I can GET an object, receive the value, manipulate it, and PUT the new value.  It's so easy because it just uses HTTP!

Right?  Maybe not.  If REST is so easy, why is there HATEOAS*?  Shouldn't that have been obvious?  Why do we have arguments about versioning and parameters and formats and headers on Reddit?

Pagelib Retrospective

I have always been in love with magic: one of the first languages I taught myself once I was old enough to understand what I was doing was Perl, and it fit me like a skin-tight sci-fi spacesuit that we thought we were all going to wear in the future, back in the 1980's.  Steve Yegge's rant about Perl was entertaining, but I can't say as I identified with it much, since references weren't hard for me, nor do I have his problem of forgetting everything when I don't use the language for a while.  Maybe I don't drink enough.

Still, being in love with magic and DWIM doesn't mean that there aren't any hazards.  It's rather like fairy-tale magic, which can result in nasty, surprising, unexpected consequences if used without the utmost care.  This is a story about me exercising a complete and utter lack of care, utmost or otherwise.