Programming

I use Anki to study foreign language vocabulary. It’s the de facto spaced repetition software for memorization.^[Yes, I’m aware that others exist. I’ve tried many but always have come back to Anki.] When making flashcards for language learnings, I try to use imagery as much as possible. So a card may have a Russian word on one side and just an image on the opposite side. (Since I already know the English word that the image represents, why not try to engage a different part of the brain to help with memorization?)

Hexo, the static blogging system that I use is very extensible and provides numerous hooks into generation pipeline.

Because the blogging system that I use doesn’t apply finely grained object-level caching rules, I end up with objects such as images that cache appropriately but an index.html page that does not. I don’t want client browsers to hang on to the main index.html page for more than an hour or so because it should update much more frequently than that as its content changes.

It’s possible that I could dig around under the hood of hexo and create a version that applies customized caching rules. Instead, I make a second pass over the content, adjusting the Cache-Control and other metadata according to my needs. For this task I use the Amazon Web Services command line interface AWS-CLI.

[N.B. 2016-03-26 Nathan Ifill pointed out that it is possible to use Anki’s built-in conditional replacement feature to do what I’m illustrating. I’ll have to work on another example!]

Anki is a widely-used flashcard application. If you’re learning a foreign language and you’re not using Anki, you should be.

If you are using Anki and are picky about the appearance of the cards, you should know that JavaScript can be used in the card template. This opens up a number of possibilities for dynamic cards. I’m just touching on the technique here.

How to identify Russian letters in a string? The short answer is: [А-Яа-яЁё] but depending on your regex flavor, [\p{Cyrillic}] might work. What in the word does this regex mean? It’s just like [A-Za-z] with a twist. The Ёё at the end adds support for ё (“yo”) which is in the Latin group of characters.

See this question on Stack Overflow.

I recently migrated this and my other blog to Hexo which is a very fast static blogging framework built on node.js. As when I used Octopress, this blog is still hosted from an AWS S3 bucket. However the deployers that I tried with Hexo failed because of dependencies that were incompatible with the OS X version I was running. Not being a node.js expert, and having no time to delve into node.js internals, I wrote a new deployer:

I use the excellent, dependable Pinboard service for managing my bookmarks. A one-time fee gives you lifetime access to the service; and there is an API that has fostered an ecosystem of desktop and mobile apps that interact with the service. Of course, Safari can synchronize bookmarks among devices; but it doesn’t allow tagging. Since tagging is a major part of my workflow, Safari bookmarks don’t work for me.

TIL how to use anchors in Markdown documents. I needed to use this in a long blog post in my Octopress blog and was stymied.

As usual, I found the answer on Stack Overflow.

Beam me [up](#enterprise), Scotty

<a id="enterprise"></a>

It’s a great way to move around in longer content.

2014-03-03: I no longer publish using Octopress; but this should work in most cases where Markdown is used. Bitbucket is a notable exception. For Github wiki, you’ll need something like: