Flashes of Panic

I never said that

“Marketer sends clueless email to blog author” is such a tired cliché I’m almost embarrassed to write this, but apparently the marketers still haven’t found their clues.

Here are two clues:

• If you’re going to say, “When you say X, you’re not kidding!” make sure I actually said X.
• Don’t say “Your site may have single handedly saved our sanity!” when I’ve only posted nine times in a year.

I’m not going to mention their name because their site looks like the site of a small, struggling start-up. But future marketers, you’re on notice.

Posted by pjm at 7:28 PM | Comments (0)

sed: illegal option -- r

I’m porting a very complicated Subversion repository to git using this helpful migration guide, but because I’m operating on a Mac I hit a minor roadblock. Specifically, I was trying to run this sed wizardry the migration guide uses for generating git branches from the Subversion branches, and I got this error:

sed: illegal option — r

The initial web search told me that the issue was that the BSD-style sed that comes standard in Mac OS X (Snow Leopard, in my case) doesn’t provide the same options as Gnu sed. One suggestion was using ports or Homebrew to install gsed instead, but for complicated reasons neither is a valid option for me. (Thumbnail: I uninstalled port to try Homebrew, but my Homebrew installation is broken.)

Then I found this offhand SuperUser comment which solved my problem:

Use -E instead of -r on OS X.

Now you know, aren’t you glad?

Posted by pjm at 3:16 PM | Comments (0)