setting up printer Brother HL-1212W on Linux Mint 17.2

it was underwhelming:

Click on the Mint button-> search for Printers -> add printer -> Network -> wait 1 second until the printer is found and the name is shown -> add it -> pick the recommended driver -> print test page to make sure. Total time: about 3 minutes.

You need to configure it to connect to the wireless network from windows first though.

using UUIDs as primary keys in MySQL

Using uuids as primary keys efficiently in MySQL: see this Store UUID in an optimized way, it has benchmarks and everything you might need; apparently their way is a bit more efficient than using large integers and a lot more efficient than using the UUID strings.

Also interesting Storing UUID Values in MySQL Tables.

amusing Mojolicious error


Can't use string ("Zug::CMS::Admin::Users") as a HASH ref while "strict refs" in use
at Mojo::Base::__ANON__(~/perl5/perlbrew/perls/perl-5.20.2/lib/site_perl/5.20.3/Mojo/Base.pm line 59



The problem was I had a new sub in "Zug::CMS::Admin::Users" ; renamed the new and everything works fine.

poor man's web analytics

"000000-0" is part of the name of a tracking image I use on another personal site. To count unique IPs which visited that site I use the command line

grep 000000-0 access.log | awk '{ print $1 }' | uniq -c

kill hanging steam processes with bash

ps aux | grep steam | awk '{ print $2 }' | xargs kill -9

Javascript is weirder than Perl

Found something weird in here https://github.com/happypoulp/redux-tutorial.git: a Javascript object/associative array declared without keys. First I thought it might be a fat-comma-is-just-a-comma situation like in Perl, but there were three elements between { and }. So I investigated.

If you thought that in Perl there are too many ways to do it, run this with ES6 enabled:

const bla = () => { console.log("ran bla") };
const gar = () => { console.log("ran gar") };
function asdf () {
    console.log("ran asdf");
}

const xxx = { bla, gar, asdf };

console.log(xxx);

for the impatient, this is the output

{ bla: [Function], gar: [Function], asdf: [Function: asdf] }

I did not expect that.

execute ES6 scripts with ease

with modules installed privately

mkdir my_tests

cd my_tests

# you need an npm project to install npm modules locally
npm init -y

npm install --save-dev babel-core babel-cli babel-preset-es2015

# let babel know what version you want to use
echo '{ "presets":["es2015"] } ' > .babelrc

# use the new "import" syntax; here I imported something from redux just to get it to fail
echo 'import { createStore } from "redux";' > t1.js

# this will fail 
node t1.js 

# this will not fail 
./node_modules/.bin/babel-node t1.js

with modules installed globally you don't need a npm project file

mkdir my_other_tests

cd my_other_tests

npm install -g babel-core babel-cli babel-preset-es2015

# specify the ES version in the command line or create a .babelrc file like above
babel-node --presets es2015 t1.js