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Change file extensions en masse with this easy line of code:

for f in *.txt; do base=`basename $f .txt`; mv $f $base.md; done

Perfect…

This regular expression will parse most phone numbers into four groups: country code, area code, number, and extension. It works most of the time, see the examples below…

I just discovered, after months of RubyMine use, that the GoTo functions work like fuzzyfinder in Textmate. There are a lot of useful shortcuts under the GoTo menu; the ones I am finding most useful are Ctrl+Shft+N for finding and opening a file, Ctrl+N for a class, and Alt+Shft+N for jumping to a corresponding Rails object. For instance, if I am in the People controller, I can jump to the Person model, People views, etc, bringing me that much closer to fulfilling my dream of never having to leave the keyboard when developing.

Yesterday was my birthday, and — what do you know? — I got an invitation to join Google+. Pretty exciting! I was one of the first of my friends to get on, so I had the opportunity to invite a lot of my buddies and colleagues. My inbox stayed full today with notices from Google that another one of my contacts had joined the network, and would I like to add her to one of my circles. Circles, by the way, are what sets Google+ apart from other services in this space. As a friend pointed out today, Google+ is kind of like a combination of Twitter and Facebook. You don’t friend people like in Facebook; you follow them like on Twitter. Come to think of it, all day people have been comparing Google+ to Facebook, but it’s actually a lot more like Twitter than one would think at first glance…

I started using Wordpress to design my blog because I like the all the free stuff I got out of the box. It is definitely the best turn-key blogging software solution out there — at least it was when I set up my site a year or so ago. What I really liked about Wordpress was the plethora of nice looking, free themes out there. It was really easy to set up a cool looking blog in just a few minutes…

First, add the Hardy repositories to apt-get sources. If this file does not already exist, create it.

sudo vim /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hardy.list

Finding all the .svn directories is easy

$ find . -type d -name .svn
./.svn
./sourceA/.svn
./sourceB/.svn
./sourceB/module/.svn
./sourceC/.svn

Now use command substitution with rm -rf.

rm -rf `find . -type d -name .svn`

Note the use of the backtick symbol (located under the