Linux/Unix

Analyzing ~425 days of Hacker News posts with standard shell commands

January 05, 2016

(About) 425 days ago (at the time of this writing) I started scraping Hacker News via its shiny new API. And then I promptly forgot about it. That is, until I noticed my cronjob had been throwing errors constantly for a few weeks:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/dummy/projects/hn-cron/hn.py", line 62, in <module>
main()
File "/home/dummy/projects/hn-cron/hn.py", line 53, in main
log_line = str(details['id']) + "\t" + details['title'] + "\t" + details['url'] + "\t" + str(details['score']) + "\n"
KeyError: 'url'

Instead of fixing anything, I just commented out the cronjob. But now I feel somewhat obligated to do at least a rudimentary analysis of this data. In keeping with my extreme negligence/laziness throughout this project, I hacked together a few bash commands to do just that.

dot-man

September 28, 2015

I recently hacked together a little 300-line bash script to manage my dotfiles called dot-man . Basically, it will let you manage your dotfiles in a git repository, and you can run it every so often to keep your local / remote dotfiles up to date.

Install is as simple as:

git clone git@github.com:cneill/dot-man.git
OR
git clone https://github.com/cneill/dot-man.git

Let me know what you think! You can find me on Twitter @ccneill .

7 Small Reasons to Love Vim

July 08, 2014

These are some cool things you can do with Vim that save time and can help prevent mistakes from mouse selection. They’re mostly little things, but altogether they make up an editing environment that I simply love.

1. NERDTree ( Docs ) file deletion

<Ctrl-L> to open NERDTree, hjkl to move, mdy to delete

2. Easymotion ( Docs ). Check out their example GIFs, and you’ll never see movement with the keyboard the same again.

50 Linux Resources For Developers

May 24, 2014

I try to always bookmark interesting things I find as I bumble around the internet. I’ve collected thousands of bookmarks over the years, and I want to share some of the cool stuff I’ve found. I call these Nuggets .

Today, I want to bring you a list of links that might help you on your path to understanding and appreciating Linux. I don’t consider myself some wizened Linux guru, but I have spent many, many hours looking for guides and tools to make my life easier while using it.