I wanted to have /usr/local/bin to be listed before /usr/bin in my PATH environment variable.

One way to achieve this would be to add a ~/.profile file with a line like this:

export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH

This would result in /usr/local/bin being listed twice. It wouldn’t hurt but it’s not pretty either.

If you look at /etc/profile, you will see that the initial value of PATH is set by path_helper(8).

The right way to change to order of default paths is to edit /etc/paths. It contains one path per line, in descending order. Mine looks like this:

/usr/local/bin
/usr/bin
/bin
/usr/sbin
/sbin

Starting from November 1st, Amazon offers a free usage tier for new AWS customers. After finishing the horrible signup process, I was left wondering wether the free usage tier was activated for my account.

To find out, just start an EC2 micro instance*. Don’t forget to stop it. After some time, go to the account activity page and click on “expand all services”. You should see something like this:

* This will cost you a few cents if you don’t have a free usage tier.

It made the news that the Internet has been nominated for this year’s Nobe Prize.

The Internet? Seriously? Just think about all the flame wars the Internet caused. I think some people have to check there calendar, it’s not April 1st yet. What were they thinking?

- “Ok, last year we gave it to Obama, because was so popular. That didn’t really make everyone happy. We need someone more popular.”
- “How about the Internet?! Everyone likes the Internet!”

This just ridiculous. Why not nominate swords? After all, you can hammer them into plowshares.

Like almost everybody I know I despise the useless updates by apps like Fourspare and Farmvill that clutter Twitter and Facebook with useless information.

But if you follow me on Twitter, you might have noticed that I myself allowed the Hundred Pushups iPhone app to post updates to my Twitter feed. Why this change of mind?

First, let me explain what the app does. The goal of the Hundred Pushups iPhone app is, who would have guessed, to enable you to do 100 consecutive pushups. It offers a six week training program* and allows you to log your workouts. It’s definitely not the greatest app ever and has lots of room for improvement but  it gets the job done: when I started training with the app on the 25th of January, I could do 37 consecutive pushups. Today, about 6 weeks and 15 workouts later, this number has more than doubled to 77.

That’s all well and good, you might intervene, but why boast with these numbers on Twitter?

Guess how I heard about the 100 pushups app for the first time? A status update on my Twitter feed caught my interest, I googled, found the site, bought the app and started training. I don’t remember who posted that update, but I’m really glad that person decided to do so. While the mere fact that you can do 100 pushups buys you nothing, a strong upper body definitely has its benefits.

At first, I was reluctant to allow the app to post on Twitter, because I didn’t want to annoy my followers with useless updates. But after seeing good progress, I decided that posting my progress to Twitter might be actually of value to somebody.

If my tweets motivate only one of my 197 followers to complete this training program, it is well worth pissing of the other 196.

* 100 pushups in six weeks sounds to good to be true? Well, calling it a six week program is a bit, let’s say, optimistic. It would be more accurate to call it a six level training program. The levels, which are named week 1 to 6, get more and more difficult and at some point, your progress will stagnate. I was able to keep up with the first three weeks, but I’m struggling to complete week 4. Still, a 100% increase in 6 weeks isn’t to bad and I’m confident that I’ll achieve the 100 in the not so far future.

Image adapted from  “I Knew Pushups Would Pay Off Someday” by reid.gilman, licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC