Programming on Adam Koszek - Personal Website

wget in 9 lines of Python For Hostile Environments

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 04 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

HTTPS seems to be everywhere these days, including GitHub. It’s great to see the security of the Web improved, but sometimes this comes at a cost. Recently I wanted to actually fetch and test my own repository for bootstrapping my storage box from Synology:

https://github.com/wkoszek/synology

The DS214play model which I have comes with the wget program without HTTPS, so doing a command line bootstrapping is difficult. This is one of this weird chicken-and-egg problems we sometimes experience, and to test my software releases published on GitHub, I wrote this simple thing, which lets me fetch the release and do further bootstrapping and testing:

Do You Have a Favorite Shell Trick?

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 28 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The very first scripting programming language I learned was Perl. It was circa 2000; Python wasn’t that popular back then, and my choice leaned towards Perl since I could get a decent books about it in Polish. I remember squeezing $20 and getting something that seemed like the thickest book ever.

Several years later I came back to Perl because Xilinx was using it too, and since then I’ve had the chance to come back and polish some of my Perl chops. We had a very nice build system written in Perl which let you check out files selectively. You would check out a file to a clean directory, hit “build”, and it’d build a project for you from vanilla sources. Then you’d check out a file you wanted to modify and keep hacking on it. Next you’d hit “build” again, but this time the system would use the modified file instead of the plain file from the repository. All the junk files from C and Verilog compiler would be put in the obj/ directory for you, so you never had to see them. I liked it, since my workspace was really neat and tidy (two to three source code files plus some log files).

(Probably) the single biggest collection of Ruby scripts

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 01 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Quickstart

https://github.com/wkoszek/book-programming-ruby

Explanation

To evaluate the feasibility of different Ruby interpreters I wanted to investigate how any of Ruby 1.8, 1.9, 2.x and Rubinius will deal with subsets of scripts fed to them. I did it because I’ve noticed regressions with Rubinius in the past, and I wanted to understand whether this situation is similar for a larger code base and basically how serious these issues are.

On the separate now, for learning Ruby I used couple of books, and one of them was:

I wish Ruby and Python stopped changing so much

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 17 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

In my article on Go, I expressed my frustration on trying to make gdrive work in no time. Unfortunately, I failed to do so in a predicted time back then. Many users commented on wrong title and problems with the content. While I still believe tools that just don’t work are likely to drive users away, I must say that one of the reader’s comments on my article expressed a point of view, which I can identify with:

Command Line Interface to GoDaddy.com

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 03 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

For quite some time now I’ve been a user of GoDaddy. I remember my frustration with the Polish registrar holding some of my .pl domains: their user interface was terrible, since after logging to your account all you could see was an advertisement:

The website with an ad always loaded very quickly. Then you had to switch to “Control Panel”, which was always very slow. I could complain more about the amount of time I have spent trying to do basic things there, but I’ll leave it as a topic for my usability website.

Why the Go Language Won't Be Successful

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 22 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Since I wrote this post two years ago, I changed my mind: Go is OK.

The other day I stumbled upon a Google Drive command line client. It’s a software project written in the Go language. It lets you access Google Drive from the command line. I felt it was a great project, and I wanted to give it a shot, so I started reading. Unfortunately, the program is distributed in binary form, and given several problems that GitHub has had over the past 2 years or so, I’d rather not run binaries from GitHub on my machine. Makes sense, right?

Source Code from "Programmer Guide to NCurses" by Dan Gookin

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 08 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Even though I’ve never read Gookin’s book, I’ve noticed that his website tarball with C sources is quite useful, as it contains small self-contained programs. To the sources I’ve added a makefile to make build automated and I’ve fixed programs which weren’t compiling.

Dependencies

For MacOSX I didn’t need anything. For Ubuntu you’ll probably have to type:

apt-get install libncurses5-dev libncurses5

How to build?

Fetch the source, enter its folder and type make: