Welcome to LukeMcReynolds.com!
This is my place to put stuff online so I won't forget it, show the world that I can make a decent website, and share my thoughts with family and friends. It's also a place for me to share Linux/web development tips and tricks with the world at large, and a place for me to post pictures of my cat. If you don't know me and would like to, please get in touch with me - I'll try to respond right away.
We’re Moving to Sacramento!
Lauren and I are moving to Sacramento! Lauren was offered a job 20 minutes after her phone interview, she accepted, and we’re moving!
We’re both glad to move back to California, even though we’ve grown to like Michigan a lot. The people in Grand Rapids are great, Michigan’s outdoors is stunning - even though it’s no Lake Tahoe or San Francisco Bay - and overall, it’s a really, really friendly place. I like Michigan.
But bigger and better things are calling to us. Lauren is flying out a day or two early with our cat, Lion. We’re having our stuff shipped there, and I’m driving our car to California with my Grandpa.
Lauren’s new job is in advertising and marketing, like she does now, and I’ll keep on doing my freelance web/ExpressionEngine development thing. We’re both excited. Pray for us for the trip and for the transition - it’s our first major move, ever.
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split - Invaluable Tool for Dealing with .csv Files
I just learned about split. It’s a linux command line utility that splits a text file in to however separate files, each however many lines you specify.
Here’s a usage example. I have a mailing list of about 20,000 names and addresses. It’s stored as a .csv file, so it’s basically just a big text file. Each name/address is on a separate line. Because the responses will be overwhelming if we send something out to all 20,000 people at once, we want to stretch the mailings out over a period of time - say 600 names/addresses per day.
Unfortunately, your mailing house needs separate files for each of the mailings - they somehow can’t split the file into parts of 600 names each. So, instead of spending half an hour copying and pasting rows in Excel or OpenOffice, just use split.
The basic syntax is
split -l 600 yourfile.csv
, where 600 is the number of lines you want per file, and yourfile.csv is, of course, the file you want to have split. With a list of almost 21,000 names, the result for me was the original file, plus 35 text files with 600 names in them. The files that split creates are, by default, named xaa, xab, xac, etc. For me, my files went all the way through xbi.
split is part of GNU coreutils, so nearly all linux distributions should have a copy of it. I hope this helps someone - I know it saved me a lot of work. 
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Dog in Kensington Market, Toronto
I saw this dog while in Kensington Market in Toronto last week.
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Spring is Here, It’s Official
Photos of two flowers growing outside my front porch.
Click on the small photos for full-size versions.
Posted on Apr 04, 2009 - 01:49 AM Categories: Local, Photoblogread more | 0 comments
Lupe Fiasco at Calvin College
Lupe Fiasco came to Calvin College tonight. Awesome show - here’s a video of “Hello/Goodbye” - to download - I haven’t converted it to Flash video yet.
Posted on Apr 04, 2009 - 12:53 AM Categories: Art, Photoblog, Videosread more | 0 comments
Quick Tip for HostGator Customers Using .htaccess and PHP
If you have an .htaccess directive telling Apache to serve all or certain types of files as PHP, HostGator’s setup is just a little bit different.
On a stock WHM/cPanel/CentOS 5 server,
DefaultType application/x-httpd-php
DefaultType application/x-httpd-php5
Without that, Apache will ask you to download the the unparsed PHP file, complete with original code.
Posted on Apr 02, 2009 - 10:23 AM Categories: Geekread more | 0 comments
Cool Old Photo - Eiffel Tower in the 1990s
I took this photo on July 4, 1997. It’s the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France - the big sign on it says that there are 911 more days until January 1, 2000.
I think the sign itself is pretty ugly, actually, but it’s cool to be able to look at a picture of an iconic monument like this and know exactly when the photo was taken.
Posted on Mar 28, 2009 - 01:15 PM Categories: Photoblogread more | 0 comments
One More Thing to Try if Removing index.php Doesn’t Work
If you’ve just moved your ExpressionEngine installation to a new server and suddenly find that your .htaccess index.php removal doesn’t work, here’s one more thing to try.
Just add a question mark at the end of “index.php” on the last line of your .htaccess file. (If you already have a question mark there, try removing it.)
The last line of your .htaccess file should look like
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php?/$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [L]
before.
Removing/adding the question mark should work regardless of whether or not you’re using the include or exclude method to remove index.php.
Posted on Mar 22, 2009 - 11:45 AM Categories: ExpressionEngineread more | 0 comments
StreamSend Isn’t Quite There Yet
Alright, some complaints about StreamSend:
- You can’t edit scheduled campaigns. Instead of quickly changing the subject line, you have to cancel the whole campaign and start it again from scratch.
- No “Unsubscribe Date” for users
- Filters are cool, but they’re kinda weak. And you can’t exclude them from your sending lists.
- No number-based list segmenting. If you have a list of 35,000 people, and you want to send the same e-mail to them 1,000 at a time over 35 days, you have to manually cut the list into segments of 1,000, and then upload 35 different lists.
- FAR too easy to accidentally “unsubscribe” all your recipients. In the list upload process, you can’t specify a status.
- Related, unsubscribed recipients can be turned active just by uploading their e-mail address again. That should never happen. They should stay unsibscribed.
I haven’t used triggers or the API very much, although they seem pretty useful. I like CampaignMonitor a lot better. :-(
Posted on Mar 13, 2009 - 12:51 PM Categories: Geekread more | 0 comments
On the Quality of Craigslist Job Ads
Here’s a recent ad on Craigslist for a person/company looking for a web developer:
I want to set up a web site that not like anything that any one else is doing but it kinda complcated and im not good at these things,but me and the team i have they know more about the computer than i do,I need someone that knows how too program NOT A PEARSON THAT CAN BUY TEMPLATE AND PUT IT UP.We can do that ourself..If we need too.I want someone local please.email me if your intrested thank you
I have no idea who this person is, but I’m sure they would be a nightmare to work for. Jeez.
While it’s still available, here’s the link to the full ad: http://grandrapids.craigslist.org/web/1070667779.html
Posted on Mar 12, 2009 - 12:39 AM Categories: Geek, Local, Personalread more | 0 comments
