It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of Blizzard games in general, and I’ve been waiting for HearthStone to release to have a Blizzard title to enjoy casually on my iPad. Now that that time is here — my biases aside — let’s dive in for a quick look.

Once you go through the initial setup of your account and get the game started up for the first time, you’ll notice it looks just like the desktop edition for Mac or Windows.

Getting started is hard. The best way to start when you can’t seem to, is to merely start. Being afraid to fail has claimed countless projects, blog posts, ideas, and other things from coming into existence. I bet more often than not never starting is more of a failure than having to listen to critique, edit, make changes, or try something completely new.

…back to writing the actual thing I was afraid to start.

I’ve helped a number of people at work and elsewhere with “personal productivity stuff” by steering them to David Allen’s book “Getting Things Done”, things Merlin Mann has written or said on a podcast, Scott Hanselman’s talk “Scale Yourself” — among other resources.

While I’m happy to be able to help others make improvements where I have also iterated and improved, I can’t help but feel like sort of a “Second-hand meta wizard”.

Here is a very handy method for updating all of the software on your FreeBSD box. This gives you the ability to just “walk away” while your machine merrily hums along recompiling all your software without you having to sit around to answer prompts.

Update your ports tree

portsnap fetch && portsnap update

Check for updates and choose / update any options

portmaster -an --no-confirm

Update all ports without any confirmation questions

portmaster -aydbg --no-confirm

…Or update only specific ports without any confirmation questions

portmaster -ydbg --no-confirm portdir/port portdir2/port2

Explanations of options from the portmaster man page

-y  answer yes to all user prompts for the features below

-d  always clean distfiles

-b  create and keep a backup package of an installed port

-g  create a package of the new port

--no-confirm  
do not ask the user to confirm the list of ports to be installed and/or updated before proceeding

Stress

The past few weeks at the office have been more stressful than most. I do fairly technical work on a regular basis and manage a small team of people at the same time. When there are outages caused by things ranging from equipment failures to widespread fallout from “denial of service attacks” online; it can quickly become a daunting task to fix problems, direct people, and manage expectations.

The problem is, this was just the most recent piece of a larger recent pattern. I realized this when someone very close to me stated, “You just don’t seem happy anymore.” Now they were not saying that I don’t joke around or enjoy life — it’s that my default resting state had become one that exhibits being down, worn out, and seemingly slightly depressed.

I’ll start this post by stating that I’ve been a Google fan for years. I’ve been a Gmail user since I snagged a beta invite in college. I followed the development of Android from before the time the G1 was announced. I was labeled “another one of those annoying people that have to use Chrome” when it was still in early single digit releases. ¹ Who would be the first to quote “Do no evil”? — This guy.

When you see the word procrastination what do you think of?

• Laziness?
• Poor work ethic?
• Lack of care?

Those things can be true — but let’s face it — the fact that we’re skimming an article like this this is a form of “care” and therefore a pretty good sign those things are mostly untrue of us. What I believe happens more often than not is that our brain gets in the way. I’ll give you a quick example of something I’ve been neglecting lately, my expense report.

Wow; that sounds pretty exciting doesn’t it?

If you do much shell scripting (I frequent bash) at some point you’ll come across “IFS” and learn to appreciate the usefulness in manipulating it. Let’s look at a script showing that — and then dive into the details.

#!/usr/bin/env bash

## test function
ifs_test()
{
	cd ~/tmp || exit 1
	for entry in `ls -lah`
	do
		echo $entry
	done
}

## let’s see how it behaves
ifs_test

## let’s modify IFS and run it again
oIFS=$IFS
IFS="
"
ifs_test

## let’s be anal and restore IFS explicitly
IFS=$oIFS

exit

So what’s happening here and how is it relevant?

A number of times I’ve had to write scripts to automate the processing of files, which can turn out to be any combination of renaming them, moving them around, or checking if they are valid based on some set of rules. One thing that can often bite me is file names with unexpected spaces. You may say, “but people know how to name the files correctly, there’s documentation for it even.” I’m sure you’re right, but you’re not accounting for the fact that these people are human. Humans make mistakes. You can get clever and pass results through another Unix tool, but I prefer to avoid extra dependencies when the shell I’m working in can handle it cleanly and efficiently.