Siri, Punctuated

I have been a little tired of dictating text messages to Siri and having them come across bland - having no punctuation to speak of.  I would ask "How are you?", and she would transcribe "How are you."  On a hunch I tried speaking the appropriate punctuation and she picked it right up.

I tried:

Me: "Where are you.  Where are you question mark.  Where are you exclamation point."
Siri: "Where are you.  Where are you?  Where are you!"

Just for fun, I also did these:

Me: "Are you quote happy unquote question mark."
Siri: 'Are you "happy"?'

Me: "I picked up the kids semicolon they are very whiny."
Siri: "I picked up the kids; they are very whiny."

Me: "Are you colon happy comma unhappy comma or sad question mark."
Siri: "Are you: happy, unhappy, or sad?"

Anyway - pretty cool stuff.

This is on iOS 7 - not sure if it works elsewhere.

Maven assemblies with file permissions (modes)

I have this maven project which packages up some shell scripts and batch files in a plugin.  On the client side, they get extracted into a local directory where they can be used for various functions.  Long story short, I was a bit irritated that on windows the batch files are treated as executables, but on Mac OS X and Linux, they were simply text files, and had to be launched with:

sh etlunit

Granted this is not a big deal, but I was annoyed anyway.  So, I Googled and found a directive to the maven assembly plugin which supports setting the file mode.

<fileSets>
<fileSet>
<directory>src/bin/</directory>
<outputDirectory>bin</outputDirectory>
<fileMode>0755</fileMode>
</fileSet>

  </fileSets>

I tried that, and for some reason now my bin directory (created by the plugin) was inaccessible - it's mode had changed inadvertently - to 0000.  On a hunch I added the directory mode as well:

<fileSets>
<fileSet>
<directory>src/bin/</directory>
<outputDirectory>bin</outputDirectory>
<fileMode>0755</fileMode>
<directoryMode>0755</directoryMode>
</fileSet>

  </fileSets>

And now I feel much better about the universe.  I can add the scripts to the path or use:

./etlunit

It's little victories like these that make the Open Source Software world so much fun . . .