Tech Archives

All things technology. Very popular here on Justinsomnia.

Starting fresh with Raring Ringtail

Ubuntu logoAs I was getting perilously close to filling up my old 256GB hard drive, I decided to treat myself to a 512GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD, which created an opportunity to upgrade to the latest Ubuntu, a task I’d neglected for two years. I usually relish Ubuntu’s semiannual releases—that is, until the Unity user interface landed.

First look at Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail
First look at Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail

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· Tech

Fun with polymorphic shell scripts

Imagine you have two shell scripts in the same directory.

test1.sh:

#!/bin/bash

echo "I am test1"
cp test2.sh test1.sh

test2.sh:

#!/bin/bash

echo "I am test2"
cp test2.sh test1.sh

echo "This should not get printed"

Now run test1.sh. What do you expect the output to be?

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· Tech

Long overdue for a redesign

The last time Justinsomnia went under the knife was 2007, and the web has changed a lot since then. Allow me to impress this upon you with a single image. The graph below represents the percentage of mobile browser traffic to my blog over those last 5 years. Hello iPhone and Android users!

Percentage of all mobile traffic to Justinsomnia from November 2007 to October 2012
Mobile traffic from November 2007 to October 2012

In the span of a single year, mobile traffic jumped from almost nothing to nearly a third of my total traffic (before settling down around 15% this year). Given that there’s now a significant global audience of people browsing the web with smaller screens, I decided it was time to get up to speed on responsive web design. (If you’re in the same boat, I highly recommend checking out Apple’s developer docs on Configuring the Viewport. It was eye-opening.)

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Happy Birthday Grandmommy

I spent last weekend in Indiana, celebrating the 90th birthday of my grandmother, Mary Elizabeth Barnette, known affectionately as Grandmommy to her six grandchildren, and Mary Lib to everyone else.

Justin, Stephanie, and Grandmommy on her 90th Birthday
Justin and Stephanie with Grandmommy

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Google-powered, reader-antagonistic, content-obscuring survey-ads: W-T-F?

I’ve seen something like this a few times on a dictionary website, where the text on the page has been replaced by gray boxes. There’s nothing more aggravating than looking up a word only to find the definition permanently obscured unless I interact with an ad. Merriam AND Webster must be rolling in their graves.

So you can only imagine my disappointment to find the bottom third of a local news article (that I had recently linked to) obscured in a similar manner. But what surprised me the most was to learn it was powered by Google! Really Google? Really!?

Here’s a screenshot of the survey in situ:

Google-powered, reader-antagonistic, content-obscuring survey-ads

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