Tag: programming

Keys

First they came for the § key, and I did not speak out –
Because I could never remember what it was for.

Then they came for #, and I did not speak out –
Because you just press opt+3* (and who uses it other than developers?)

Then they came for Delete, and I did not speak out –
Because you could still use Fn + backspace and in any case I had a full size, wired numeric keyboard.

Then they came for F13-F19, and I did not speak out –
Because they were so far away.

Then they came for the full height arrow keys, and I did not speak out –
Because I had mapped up and down to J/K with the Vimium extension.

Then they came for Pg Up/Down, Home & End, and I did not speak out –
Because my full size keyboard still had them and the icons confused me.

Then they came for Escape, and I did not speak out –
Because I could map it to Caps Lock (where it should have been all along) and I wasn’t planning to buy a Macbook anytime soon anyway.

* British layout

How to ping the MailChimp v3 API

In version 2.0 of MailChimp’s API, there was a helper/ping endpoint, which is useful for automated monitoring (e.g. Nagios checks.)

This no longer exists in v3.0, which is quite a bit different.

Just to share the recommendation their API support team gave me, use the API Root resource instead, and assuming you don’t need all the data it returns, just append ?fields=account_name and it will only send that specific field back.

I’d recommend logging the HTTP response code too and checking it’s 200, e.g. in PHP:

$http_status = curl_getinfo( $ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE );