Commutative data types and their operations is a powerful idea.

Somewhere this fortnight I read that I should read "CRDTs: Consistency without concurrency control" <http://hal.inria.fr/inria-00397981/en/>. The basic idea is to have a data structure where for the same set of operations applied in any order will lead to the same state. If I have a number of replicants of this data structure then as long as all the operations are applied to each replicant -- in any order -- then the replicants will have the same end state. With concurrent replicants then all replicants will eventually have the same state. Commutative data types and their operations is a powerful idea.

Downgrading my iPhone to iOS 3

I finally took the steps to downgrade my iPhone 3G from iOS 4 to iOS 3. The lose of responsiveness of basic features in iOS 4 is in no way made up by the new features, especially as few of them work with the 3G hardware. I followed the directions on the Lifehacker page at How to Downgrade Your iPhone 3G[S] from iOS 4 to iOS 3.1.3.

One-liner to find all occurrences of property names within a stream of text

One-liner to find all occurrences of property names within a stream of text:

cat * | perl -ne 'while ( /\G.*?([-a-z\.]+\.enabled)/gi ) { print "$1=x\n"; }' | sort -u > /tmp/enabled

This posting is mostly to remind me that 1) print "..." while /.../ does not work and 2) to use \G to anchor the regular expression to the first and/or last match.