To include your git branch in your bash shell prompt, add this to your .bashrc and start a new shell window. This is what you end up with. The git branch only shows up when you are in a directory that is part of a git repository. This implementation relies on gawk. If you do […]

I just got a Google Slate, largely because it can run Linux programs. By default, ssh-agent is not running when you open a terminal window. To add it, I created and enabled a systemd service for ssh-agent and I created the environment variable. Create ~/.config/systemd/user/ssh-agent.service [Unit] Description=ssh-agent service [Service] Type=simple Environment=SSH_AUTH_SOCK=%t/ssh-agent.socket ExecStart=/usr/bin/ssh-agent -D -a $SSH_AUTH_SOCK […]

I’ll admit it: I have previously tried and failed to get the new HTTP REST client in JetBrains PhpStorm to do what I wanted, especially with POST requests and file uploads. This morning, the stars aligned properly and my magic beans sprouted and life is beautiful. Here is the code. It does a POST call […]

Yesterday, I spent longer than I care to admit debugging an update to an old PHP script. It fetched a string from a MySQL database and (here’s the new part) passed the string to json_encode(). That call failed when the data included the multibyte characters ¼ or ½ or ¾. All of my attempts to remove the multibyte […]

I needed a singleton database class in a Python 2.7 program and wrote it this way. class Singleton(type): _instances = {} def __call__(cls, *args, **kwargs): if cls not in cls._instances: cls._instances[cls] = super(Singleton, cls).__call__(*args, **kwargs) return cls._instances[cls] class Database(): __metaclass__ = Singleton def __init__(self): self.db = MySQLdb.connect(…) I like this pattern but I realized that […]