STRAY neuron

I’ve always believed crunches to be the single most effective abdominal exercise. However, research from San Diego State University suggest just the opposite. Check out these results…

For strengthening the rectus abdominus (the muscle down the front of the abdomen), ranked most to least effective:

1. Bicycle maneuver
2. Captain’s chair
3. Crunches on exercise ball
4. Vertical leg crunch
5. Torso Track
6. Long arm crunch
7. Reverse crunch
8. Crunch with heel push
9. Ab Roller
10. Hover
11. Traditional crunch
12. Exercise tubing pull
13. Ab Rocker

For strengthening the obliques (on the sides):

1. Captain’s chair
2. Bicycle maneuver
3. Reverse crunch
4. Hover
5. Vertical leg crunch
6. Crunch on exercise ball
7. Torso Track
8. Crunch with heel push
9. Long arm crunch
10. Ab Roller
11. Traditional crunch
12. Exercise tubing pull
13. Ab Rocker

I was watching this YouTube video on my buddy’s projector screen tonight and my kids could not get enough of it….genius…

Here’s a brilliant clip Jonesy turned me onto. No one I’ve shared it since seemed to get it, but I agree with him it’s brilliant.

I discovered a large gap in my bash kung fun today - I had no idea how to loop on lines of data in a file.

It turns out that “while data” pulls off this trick quite nicely:


while read myline
  do $myline
done < inputfile


before I lose this hilarious clip…I need to share it

I haven’t been using “traditional” singletons for a couple of years now (Spring craze and all), so the Initialization On Demand Holder idiom, which allows for lazy instantiation of singletons, has escaped me until now.

private static class LazySomethingHolder {
    public static Something something = new Something();
}

public static Something getInstance() {
    return LazySomethingHolder.something;
}

Here’s the explanation, courtesy of Bill Pugh, Brian Goetz and friends.

Found via TheServerSide.

I was sick of typing in username/password for each login (I’m currently working on XP, deploying to a Linux-only env), so I finally went through the pain of following the steps here and set up PuTTY/Peagant public key authentication.

It was a relatively painless setup process, but here are a couple of things to keep in mind when going through it:

• PuTTY is a pain to update/navigate as you have to remember to load/save during each setting update
• You can “pre-enter” your remote username by setting “username@hostname” as the hostname
• authorized_keys file on the remote box should have a mask of 600
• putty.exe -load “session_name” allows you to create PuTTY shorcuts for each of your connections

My boss is a huge “Big Lebowski” fan, so I had him check out one of all-time favorite YouTube clips - F*cking Short Version of the Movie.

The Stranger: There’s just one thing, Dude.
The Dude: And what’s that?
The Stranger: Do you have to use so many cuss words?
The Dude: What the fuck you talking about?

Register is running a great story about how Bill Joy created vi.

Apparently, vi commands are cryptic because they were optimized for Bill’s 1200 baud connection.

For additional entertainment, you can read Reddit’s discussion of the article here - complete with (always entertaining) emacs/vi mud-slinging.

Would you like to create a lively, “top”-like output from some of the monitoring commands in your toolbelt?

“watch” can be of help here, as it can poll your command every X seconds and render its output to full screen.

Try “watch -n1 date” for a demo.

NAME
watch - execute a program periodically, showing output fullscreen

SYNOPSIS
watch [-dhv] [-n ] [–differences[=cumulative]] [–help]
[–interval=] [–version]

Can you find a friggin’ login link on http://www.tadalist.com/ or http://backpackit.com/?

It’s almost a joke.

Why can’t the self-proclaimed gurus of UIs figure out that their users want to SIGN IN some of the time AND NOT STARE AT FULL-PAGE ADS on home pages?

I was writing a multi-line batch script with multiple call-outs to Ant and I was confused when it kept exiting after the first call-out.

I’m proud to be rusty at batch scripting, so I’m not ashamed to share the (obvious) fix…

To run a batch program from within the current batch program, use the call command followed by the name of the batch program you wish to run. After the second program is finished, it will return to the command which follows the call command.

If you invoke a batch file without using the call command (from within a batch file that is), control passes over to the new batch program and does not return.