100kmi

Well, here's a tribute to our car, which is about to hit 100,000 miles on its odometer.  (Apologies go out to all of the flesh-n-blood people that I've forgotten to wish happy birthday to lately)

Here are a handful of lesser-discussed features and details that the engineers and designers deserve credit for:

* Rear windows that go down all the way.  (most other cars I've been in won't retract more than 75% down)
* Red instrument panel lights to help preserve your night vision.  (newer versions of the car use blue)
* The most responsive tiptronic transmission I've seen in any car I've driven with tiptronic transmission. (most have a full second or so of lag before deciding to honor your request to shift, and abruptly shift automatically for you.)
* The automatic transmission mode promptly downshifts for you when it detects you riding the brakes going downhill.
* The automatic transmission shows you what gear the car is in on the instrument panel.  (most cars I've seen just show "D" until you switch to tiptronic mode)
* The tiptronic transmission toggles the "right" way to upshift / downshift (by pulling back / pushing forwards)
* Low center console doesn't obstruct the space between you and your passenger
* Tie-down hooks in the hatch area, since the thing can pull 0.85gs laterally.
* Braking performance of a sports car.  In every accident I've seen involving a Mazda3, they've always been rear-ended by someone behind them who couldn't stop as swiftly.  So whenever I have to jam on the brakes as traffic comes to a sudden halt, I spend more time worrying about what's happening in my rear-view mirror than what's in front of me.
* Never thought I would be a sunroof person, but I do really appreciate being able to look up at tall trees and buildings.

OK, so I have one nag:
* When I switch the the temperature control to cold to get some fresh air out of the vents, it automatically turns on the A/C and recirculation.  I just want fresh air that's not heated!

Parsing json in bash

So maybe you're wandering around and a giant blob of json jumps up at you on the street!

 If you're on RHEL6 / CentOS6 you might have json_reformat handy from the yajl package ("yet another json library").

 But say, maybe you're on an older RHEL5 / CentOS5 box, what do you do?  Well it turns out you can probably run it through python to split it out into something grepable.

curl -s http://cbserver:8091/pools | python -mjson.tool

{
    "componentsVersion": {
        "ale": "8cffe61",
        "inets": "5.6",
        "kernel": "2.14.4",
        "mnesia": "4.4.19",
        "ns_server": "1.8.1-937-rel-enterprise",
        "os_mon": "2.2.6",
        "sasl": "2.1.9.4",
        "stdlib": "1.17.4"
    },
    "implementationVersion": "1.8.1-937-rel-enterprise",
    "isAdminCreds": false,
    "pools": [
        {
            "name": "default",
            "streamingUri": "/poolsStreaming/default",
            "uri": "/pools/default"
        }
    ],
    "uuid": "43f16796-d591-409b-a831-889eeac86984"
}