Tag: bash

June 30, 2023

Creating a Mastodon bot in Python

Bleps always cheer me up, so I decided to create a Mastodon bot that posted one blep a day. (A blep is a picture of an animal with a tiny bit of its tongue sticking out, and Mastodon is a decentralized alternative to Twitter.)

Creating a Mastodon bot in Python was surprisingly easy, thanks to the Mastodon.py library. I’ve documented all the steps here, along with links to tutorials for each library or builtin feature that I used.

Have you created any Mastodon or Twitter bots? Let me know in the comments!
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June 9, 2016

What’s in a name? or rather, in the SSA Names data

One of the amazing things about being a DBA/developer in 2016 is the sheer amount of freely available, downloadable data to play with. One fun publicly available data sets is the American Social Security Administration names data. It contains all names for which SSNs were issued for each year, with the number of occurrences (although names with <5 occurrences are not included to protect individual privacy).

May 9, 2016

Tip of the day: Always put this in your .bashrc

if you like to scp:

# If not running interactively, don't do anything
[[ $- == *i* ]] || return

Otherwise scp will fail without error – it’s a known bug.

December 3, 2014

My .bashrc

A RAC DBA needs to keep at least two sets of environment variables handy: one for the Grid/ASM home, and one for the database home. Here's how I set up my .bashrc to make that easy.