Author: Jason 'vanRijn' Kasper

Or, possibly titled “How to hang that pesky, 50-pound window air conditioner unit in those purty little vinyl windows that you can’t stick screws into.” We have beautiful, wonderful double-hung vinyl windows, yay us. They’re very pretty, very functional, operate very smoothly, etc., etc. HOWEVER, they do NOT play nicely with window-unit air conditioners (you can’t screw the air conditioner into the vinyl window parts). So after getting a brilliant idea from a newsgroup post, and not willing to pay $40 for a metal air conditioner brace that I can’t really use anyway (again, vinyl window sill), I set out to make my own air conditioner brace out of a 2×4, some white paint, and a little sweat. Turned out Read more…

I had need to convert some files today from being newline-separated (one line per file, key-value pairs) to ‘###’-separated. In other words, instead of this: foo=bar smith=wibble neo=smith I needed this: foo=bar###smith=wibble###neo=smith My first inclination was to try using tr solely like this: cat $file | tr “\n” “###” This resulted, however, in only one “#” being used to join the lines. Not quite what I wanted. My next thought was sed: cat $file | sed ‘s,\n,###,g’ But that didn’t work at all. So, my good friend Mr. Google and I were just starting to look into the deeper mysteries of sed when I found this little newsgroup posting which opened my eyes to some of the magic of awk: Read more…

A, Burying K & J, originally uploaded by vanRijn. We had an absolutely fantastical time today. I decided that we needed to find a beach to go to and go… to… it. Yah. So, we found a really, really nice beach here in RI that reminded me of both Mission Beach and La Jolla Shores from my back-home town of sunny San Diego. I had the best day I could have wanted with my little family, hopping over the waves, diving through them, eating sand on occasion as I took a wave in too close to shore, teaching my kids a little about body-surfing, and taking a nice walk with my beautiful bride along the beach. Oh. Along the way, Read more…

100_3311.JPG, originally uploaded by vanRijn. We had a fun day at church a couple of weeks ago, doing a “Father/Buddy Day”. J & I decorated our own shirts (spiffy, eh?), and participated in a series of grueling events designed specifically for the enjoyment of the mothers and other family members in attendance. But that didn’t stop us gallant warriors, no sir. We came home with smiles on our faces, sun-screen in our pores, the perfume of victory in our flaring nostrils, second-place and third-place ribbons, and wet bellies (a leaking water balloon, travelling at high velocity between son and Father cannot be cajoled into a soft landing, no matter how great the skill, sadly).

Just had to say… it certainly feels great to get into the midst of code I’ve never seen before, debug a problem, find the solution, test it, and submit a patch to the author. Man I wish I had more time for coding at home. Maybe God will let me code in heaven for Him! =:) So, anyway, what prompted this post is that I’ve been trying to use kflickr to upload my photos to my flickr account and kept getting stopped by an annoying error. So I donned my Superman outfit, pulled on my hip-huggers, dove in, found what looks to be the problem, fixed it, and am now happily uploading my pictures to my flickr account. Cool! This Read more…

Oh yes. Ph34r m3!!!

“Contentical” as in “pretty okey dokey with how things are going as of late” that is. My beautiful children and bride are sort of settling in in our new home. My bride is making some friends here and there, as are my kiddos. There is reportedly a homeschooling luncheon/picnic/get-together thingey tomorrow that we’ll be partaking in!! We have a Father/Kiddo thing going on at church this Sunday. And we’ll be joining in on the church July 4th picnic celebration thinger 2 weeks following that. Feels good to start getting involved with and meeting people again. Despite having to pay $250 recently to get a Terminix contract going on our new home (I’d like it if carpenter ants don’t destroy the Read more…