

Perl saved my vacation - mudge
http://blog.moertel.com/articles/2009/04/25/perl-saved-my-vacation

======
chops
I had a similar experience several years ago, though not vacation related. I
was testing a script I was writing, and had a critical typo, which ended up
wiping out (rm -fr) all my website code (it wasn't a business thing yet, so I
wasn't taking backups in any reliable manner).

After my heart skipping a beat realizing I didn't have any decently recent
backups, I unmounted the partition, whipped out perl and scanned the device
for instances of "<?" and grabbing the following 5000 bytes, dumping the
results to a collection of incrementally named files.

I had to manually go through the files, clean them up, and remember what their
filename was based on the code, but that wasn't as bad as it sounds. The
hardest part was the conflicting versions, since there were lots and lots of
remnants from old replaced files there. But about 8 hours later, I had
everything recovered.

Backups went on a cronjob after that.

------
almost
Totally off topic. But 500 photos in a day!! I just don't understand why
people's reaction to going to beautiful places is to spend the day looking
down the view finder of a camera.

~~~
tmoertel
(Note: I'm the author of the linked-to article.)

Why would I take 500 photos? Because I'm fascinated by plants and gardening.
For my vacation, I spent a few days visiting some of the world's premier
gardens, both to enjoy myself and to learn as much as I could. As you might
expect, gardens like that display hundreds of new (to me) plant varieties and
treatments and, for each I wanted to study, I took several photographs to
capture its interesting characteristics.

While it might sound strange, having my camera helped me see better. It
reminded me to slow down and examine the different parts of each plant, to
look carefully for the traits that separated one plant from its peers, and to
consider how I could show my friends each plant in a way that would let them
see what I thought was interesting about it.

I have found that sometimes the best way to see is to get behind a camera.

Cheers. --Tom

P.S. One additional benefit of taking a camera to a horticultural garden is
that you can photograph plant tags to record botanical information about the
cultivars on display. With a good zoom lens, you can even capture the tags on
plants that are in restricted or otherwise unreachable areas. Very useful.

~~~
almost
Good answer :) Not for me maybe but I think I understand your point of view a
little better

