This is an example finding the word ‘giraffes’ in all PHP source files from the current directory recursively.

This works for Ubuntu, CentOS and Mac OS X.

And now I’m going to Taipei. It’s okay to be envious, even I am envious of myself. I know however that it’s probably the only time I can go for two holidays in one month. My excuse is I didn’t take much leave from work last year.

The two holidays make up I guess. I want to try doing a lot more in Taiwan though. Perhaps pack my itinerary with so much activities just to experience the place more. My holidays are always extremely laid back which I suspect has something to do with my inability to reconcile with failures to commit.

Anyway, I’ll bring my laptop over to Taipei. Maybe do some writing and research there on where to travel to. I will love suggestions. My hotel will be at the Ximen MRT Station area, in Taipei city. First stop is likely Ximending.

English is a melding of the languages of the many different peoples who have lived in Britain; it has also changed through commerce and conquest. English has always been a ragbag, and that encouraged further permissiveness. In the past half century or so, however, this situation has produced a serious quarrel, political as well as linguistic, with two combatant parties: the prescriptivists, who were bent on instructing us in how to write and speak; and the descriptivists, who felt that all we could legitimately do in discussing language was to say what the current practice was.

But the most curious flaw in the descriptivists’ reasoning is their failure to notice that it is now they who are doing the prescribing. By the eighties, the goal of objectivity had been replaced, at least in the universities, by the postmodern view that there is no such thing as objectivity: every statement is subjective, partial, full of biases and secret messages. And so the descriptivists, with what they regarded as their trump card—that they were being accurate—came to look naïve, and the prescriptivists, with their admission that they held a specific point of view, became the realists, the wised-up.

Source: New Yorker

I guess that will make me closer to a descriptivist since I think there’s nothing wrong with Singlish.

Additionally in the directories ./protected/runtime and ./assets I also added a .gitignore file containing the following:

This allows both folders to be committed into my Git repository despite them being empty. Think of it as CakePHP’s !empty. Both directories will be populated during application run time.

Every request I made to gladlyCode.local takes 5 seconds to resolve to my local Apache server. Something was wrong!

If it does and you’re on Mac OS X Lion, you should change your VirtualHost names to something else. It turns out that Mac OS X Lion no longer looks up /etc/hosts first when you try to lookup a .local domain since are technically reserved for Multicast DNS (MDNS), or Bonjour. Starting Lion, it will lookup through MDNS first, and after the 5 second timeout, it checks with /etc/hosts.

This is at a cost of developer productivity and I have to change all my .local domains to .internal.kw.sg which is a domain name I own. I figured that if it is a domain name I own, it will never clash unknowingly. I changed ‘gladlycode.local’ into ‘gladlycode.internal.kw.sg’ and point it to 127.0.0.1 now. Now testing gladlyCode no longer takes 5 seconds per request (ridiculous!).

Alternatively you can use another top level domain (TLD) instead of .local and the common ones such as .com.

Daniel Simonsen on Good News

Here’s how to merge origin master by default.

You never have to see the following message again:

If money doesn’t make you happy, then you probably aren’t spending it right

The relationship between money and happiness is surprisingly weak, which may stem in part from the way people spend it.

We suggest that consumers should

1. buy more experiences and fewer material goods;
2. use their money to benefit others rather than themselves;
3. buy many small pleasures rather than fewer large ones;
4. eschew extended warranties and other forms of overpriced insurance;
5. delay consumption;
6. consider how peripheral features of their purchases may affect their day-to-day lives;
7. beware of comparison shopping; and
8. pay close attention to the happiness of others.

On point 2, use their money to benefit others rather than themselves:

Choosing to give money away—or even being forced to do so—led to activation in brain areas typically associated with receiving rewards (Harbaugh, Mayr, & Burghart, 2007).

On point 5, delay consumption:

…there is a second reason why “consume now, pay later” is a bad idea: it eliminates anticipation, and anticipation is a source of “free” happiness. The person who buys a cookie and eats it right away may get X units of pleasure from it, but the person who saves the cookie until later gets X units of pleasure when it is eventually eaten plus all the additional pleasure of looking forward to the event.

Source

I’ve been thinking about the times that I could otherwise be spending in building, what I would describe with my limited vocabulary, a lasting pleasure. I have been distracted and once in a while I will wake up realizing people are ahead of me.

It has been a long dream, and it is about time.