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A Useful Sybase Tool

defncopy is possibly the best way to retrieve a script of any Sybase database objects if you do not have access to a decent database development tools such as Aqua Data Studio

This utility comes with Sybase distribution. Here is its usage:

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$ defncopy
 
defncopy Syntax Error
Usage: defncopy
    [-v]
    [-W]
    [-X]
    [-a <display_charset>]
    [-I <interfaces_file>]
    [-J [<client_charset>]]
    [-K <keytab_file>]
    [-P <password>]
    [-R <remote_server_principal>]
    [-S [<server_name>]]
    [-U <user_name>]
    [-V <security_options>]
    [-Z <security_mechanism>]
    [-z <language>]
    { in <file_name> <database_name> |
      out <file_name> <database_name> [<owner>.]<object_name>
          [[<owner>.]<object_name>...] }

Switch and Enum in Objective-c

Do not implement a default case in switch statements that handle enumerated types. This helps if you add to the enumeration, because the compiler will warn that the switch does not handle all the values.

from Matt Galloway

Ruby Quirk?

Have absolutely zero knowledge of Ruby, although I am planning to learn more about this langauge since I started using Octopress.

Came across this code snippet in this tweet

The behavior does look a bit odd from a python prespective.

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mbp002:~ me$ irb
2.0.0p195 :001 > 1,2
SyntaxError: (irb):1: syntax error, unexpected ',', expecting end-of-input
    from /Users/me/.rvm/rubies/ruby-2.0.0-p195/bin/irb:16:in `<main>'
2.0.0p195 :003 > x=1,y=2
 => [1, 2] 
2.0.0p195 :004 > x
 => [1, 2] 
2.0.0p195 :005 > y
 => 2

Apparently it is treated like

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>> x = [1, (y = 2)]

Simple Script to Convert Blogger Posts to Github Pages

I wanted to convert my old blogs on Blogger to markdown files in Github Pages. I went to the Blogger settings and exported my blog. The result was a xml file. The xml file from Google is not easy to parse. As far as I know there is no documentation on the structure of the xml file.

After some trial and error, I have come up with this script that can parse the xml file and emit the contents in a set of markdown files:

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import xml.dom.minidom
from xml.dom import Node
import re

list_text = []

def handle_node(feeds):
    for f in feeds:
        for sf in f.childNodes:
            if sf.nodeType == Node.ELEMENT_NODE:
                handle_node(sf.childNodes)
            elif sf.nodeType == Node.TEXT_NODE:
                list_text.append((sf.parentNode.nodeName, sf.data))
                handle_node(sf.childNodes)
            else:
                handle_node(sf.childNodes)

TMPL="""---
layout: post
title: %(title)s
date:  %(date)s
comments: true
categories:
meta: 
---
"""

def gen_post(list_of_post):
    for post in list_of_post:
        post_id = post['id']
        m = re.match(".*tag:blogger.com.*blog-\d*.settings.*", post_id)
        if m:
            continue # do not process
        m = re.match(".*tag:blogger.com.*blog-\d*.layout.*", post_id)
        if m:
            continue # do not process
        pd = post['published']
        pdd = pd[0:10]
        pdt = pd[11:16]
        fn = post['id'].split("-")[-1]
        f = open(pdd + "-" + fn +".markdown", "w")
        f.write (TMPL % {'title':post['title'], 'date':pdd + " " + pdt, 'id':post['id']})
        try:
            f.write (post.get('content', ''))
        except:
            print("error with %s, %s" % (post['title'], fn))
        f.close()

def parse_xml():
    ifile = open('blog-06-26-2013.xml') # change input file here

    dom = xml.dom.minidom.parseString(ifile.read())

    nodes = dom.childNodes
    handle_node(nodes)

    list_post = []
    last_id = None
    tmp = {}
    for k, v in list_text:
        # print "[%s] >\t %s" % (k, v)
        if k == 'id':
            if last_id and last_id != v:
                list_post.append(tmp)
                tmp = {}
            last_id = v
            tmp['id'] = v
        if k == 'updated': tmp['updated'] = v
        if k == 'name': tmp['name'] = v
        if k == 'title': tmp['title'] = v
        if k == 'email': tmp['email'] = v
        if k == 'content': tmp['content'] = v
        if k == 'published': tmp['published'] = v

    return list_post

def main():
    posts = parse_xml()
    gen_post(posts)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

It is not very polished. For example, it will not capture the tags of a blog post. But it is good enough for my purpose.