Cristobal posted this on the Trilug Planet and I thought it would be interesting. Here’s my list of most oft used commands on my workstation.  Yes, I use nano.  I keep thinking about using Vim, but just don’t feel like I can build a good business case for it.

jjtuttle@dli-020102:~$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -nr|head
117 sudo
57 ls
49 clear
34 ssh
29 cd
27 nano
25 mount
21 exit
13 ps
11 rm


Here are a couple of pictures. First, this is the car we bought:

Second, here is photo of the side curtain airbags deployed. A comparable picture of our Kia would have shown razor blades being deployed probably.

And finally, we just liked the feel.

We bought a 2008 Honda Civic EX (5-speed Auto) in Durham recently and I thought others might be interested in the numbers. We wanted to trade in our 2005 Kia Spectra 5 for something safer and more economical. We orginally thought about used Hondas, but the price difference between a new Civic and a 2 year old Civic was pretty minimal especially considering the warranty.

We did a lot of online shopping with the usual suspects including Edmonds.com, Yahoo Autos, and Consumer Reports. We also got quotes from the car buying services at the North Carolina State Employees’ Credit Union and USAA. We got internet quotes from local 4 local dealerships including Leith Honda and Crown Honda.

NCSECU Car Buying Service actually got us the lowest price, but we didn’t buy with them. Car buying services rock, though. Call them up, tell them what you want, they call the regional sales office for the best price, and call you back. They’ll even pick it up and deliver it to you. The USAA Car Buying Service just sent us an email to take to the dealership instructing them to give us $300 above invoice.

We ended up buying from Leith Honda. We did all of the negotiating via email. I negotiated Crown Honda down, sent that information to Leith, they offered to beat it, I sent that back to Crown, Crown declined to negotiate further. No sales people!

Here’s the information our credit union provided us with about the cost of the car from chromecarbook.com:

Information from USAA:

Crown told us the MSRP was $20,145. They also added mudflaps for $199. They offered us the car for $19,293 and offered us $5,500 for our Kia. Ouch!
According to Consumer Reports, a good price to aim for is 4% to 8% above dealer their bottom line price, which is Dealer Invoice Price minus Dealer Incentives and Dealer Holdback. Here’s their information:

We ended up buying the car from Leith for $18,455 and getting $6,500 for our car. We got the promoted 2.9% interest rate, which is nice. We also paid the Documentation Fee of $398 and Sales Tax of $358.65.
We love the car and feel like we got a decent deal. Unfortunately, while we were at Leith closing the deal, our salesman from Crown called me and browbeat me on the phone. He yelled that we had a deal and how could I do that to him. I’ll never go there for service even though it’s closer to our house. No thanks.
Really, though, the car is fantastic. It’s much, much quicker than the Kia, more comfortable, quieter, and more economical. We get about 32 MPG city/highway (hard to differentiate since we drive both equally each week). The entire cockpit becomes an airbag and it has 4 wheel disk brakes. I wish it had traction control, but that’s life. It’s a great car and, although I couldn’t care less about cars, I’ve always wanted a Honda.

Never trouble trouble till trouble troubles you.

I just added a twitter widget to the sidebar of the blog.  I’ve been largely undecided about twitter, but have recently seen some great uses of it and have come around to see the handiness of the idea.  While in SoCal, I saw people using it to get together.  It went something like this:  Alice is bored at home on Friday night.  She looks at twitter and sees that Bob is out at wine bar with some mutual friends from work.  Alice can then call Bob or just show up.  I remember that in college people used to leave situational outgoing messages on their voice mail/answering machines.  They’d say things like, “Hey, we’re out at the High Dive tonight.  Hope to see you there.”

Additionally, I agree with Clive Thompson in How Twitter Creates a Social Sixth Sense.  I think it gives one a real sense of the lives of friends.  I have friends I don’t see or talk to often, but it’s nice to have an easy means to keep up with them.  I find twitter has a much lower barrier to entry than blogging.  Check out my twitter, if you like.

I’ve moved my site, obviously. I didn’t have time to plan it, but scrambled last night to move all my content, fix all the broken stuff, and work on a redirect for the old site. I’m glad I used a lot of server side includes and tried to keep site-specific paths and url’s to a minimum. I put considerable thought and work into managing traffic redirection and search engine optimization. I’ll sketch it out.

I used a .htaccess rule to redirect all traffic to a single php page. Perhaps the most important function of this page is to return a ‘301: Moved Permanently’ HTTP status code to alert search engines that the intended page has moved. I did it with this line <?php header(”HTTP/1.0 301 Moved Permanently”); ?> Also, I captured the requested URI and used it to build a new URI to the page in it’s new location. I used the new URI to build a meta refresh tag in the header and a link for the visitor to click if they don’t feel like waiting the 4 seconds to be redirected.

In the header I have this:

<?php

$newuri = ltrim($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], “/~jtuttle/”);
echo “<meta http-equiv=\”refresh\” content=\”4;url=http://www.braggtown.com/$newuri\”>”;
?>
and in the body I have this:

<?php
$uri = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
$ref = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
$newuri = ltrim($uri, “/~jtuttle/”);
echo “The page you were looking for should be at <a href=\”http://www.braggtown.com/$newuri\”>www.braggtown.com/$newuri</a>.”;
?>

I’m also keeping tracking of referrers to the page to request URI changes where I think it’s possible. I’ve submitted a new site map to Google, too. Nothing to do now but wait to see what happens. It’s not like this is a for-profit site so it’s really just an academic exercise. Using curl I can see the status code is working:

me@unix:~$ curl –head “http://www.prairienet.org/~jtuttle/stuff.php”
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2007 21:02:33 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.34 (Unix) PHP/5.1.6
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.1.6
Content-Type: text/html

Looking at the analytics for this site I realized something that should have been obvious even without looking. Every link into this blog, including those provided by search engines, is wrong. People are searching for things like Ubuntu Qube, following the links they find, and landing on a 404 Not Found page. Then they leave. This is bad for visitors and for my page rank.

I don’t really have time to fool with it and my blog isn’t of such compelling interest (e.g., it doesn’t generate revenue) that I feel motivated to do anything about it. However, as a mental exercise I was thinking of how to deal with it. Here’s my plan:

Old links point to things to articles with URL’s in the form of www.prairienet.org/~jtuttle/blog/item/134/.
I could code my 404 page to parse the URL, determine if it’s an old bBlog link, and to obtain the article ID to the old bBlog article. I could then query the bBlog article table for that ID and return the article title. With the article title I could query the new Wordpress article table for that article. If found, I could automatically return the correct article with a 301 Moved Permanently header. I’d have also have to accommodate /section/section_name links. Easy. I’m still not going to do. It’s spring.

I’ve migrated my blog to Wordpress. It should look pretty similar. bBlog hasn’t been maintained in quite awhile so this was long overdue. Wordpress offers some nice functionality, too. It’s much more blog software than I need, but at least it’s supported by an active community. Let me know what, if anything, you think about it. I’m sad to say that any links into the blog will be broken because I’m too busy to fool with apache mod_rewrite. Sorry. However, incoming requests for missing pages are being redirected to the archives page, which is about as good as it’s going to get. This is an amatuer operation.

Also, I sold my qube. Bummer.

Ok, this is so very odd. The log of visitors to this site always has such strange entries, such as Lexis-Nexis, the US Army (probably not good), and irs.gov (clearly not good). If you have visited from any of these networks please email me and tell me that your just goofing off over the lunch hour or something. Thank you, management.