Archives
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StackOverflow DevDays Seattle 2009
I spent last Wednesday at Benaroya Hall, attending the Seattle edition of StackOverflow's traveling DevDays conference. It was well worth $99.
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Review: Pragmatic Version Control Using Git
As part of my personal conversion to Git, I read Swicegood's Git book. It's a decent introduction to Git and you learn how to do all the basic tasks as well as some more advanced topics. The examples are clear and well-paced.
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Third-Party Cookies
Over the last few weeks, I built a PHP application that overlays Approve 71 banners on profile pictures. The actual application is hosted in an iframe and lives on a server in a different domain, eq.dm, than the main server at approvereferendum71.org.
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Gitting Along
In the last few weeks, I've switched over to Git for most of my version-control needs, at home and at work, after putting it on the long finger for months.
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Launching 32-bit applications from batchfiles on Win64
I've been running the 64-bit version of Windows 7 RC since June. It's been quite painless on the whole.
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Recovering photos from a corrupted card
I had about 60 apparently corrupted photos on a CompactFlash card the other evening. It might have been due to Lightroom going berserk, but it was more likely from my pulling the card reader out of the computer without ejecting it first.
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XKCD's Tech Support Cheat Sheet
To my tech supportees:
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Moving Photos in Lightroom
When using Lightroom before, I was never able to figure out how to move photos from one folder to another. You'd think that you could just click on a photo and drag it. I just spent twenty minutes figuring out what I've been doing wrong. After you've selected multiple photos, click on the photo thumbnail and not the surrounding gray frame, and then you can drag the photos to the target folder.
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64-bit Windows 7
I mentioned three weeks ago that I had just repaved my work dev box and installed the 64-bit version of the Windows 7 RC. Nine or ten years after I first ported parts of IIS to Win64, I am finally running my main desktop on 64-bit Windows. With one exception, it's been painless. Programs have just worked, devices have just worked. There are relatively few native x64 applications, but for the most part it doesn't matter. The cases where it does matter—e.g., shell extensions such as TortoiseSVN—are available as 64-bit binaries.
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When Video Cards Go Bad
I complained a week ago about my display driver going berserk. I blamed Windows Update, since it happened within hours of a pile of updates being installed. I upgraded to the latest beta NVidia drivers on Monday and it helped for a while, but by Wednesday, it was almost as bad again as it had been last Friday. It was infuriating and I was both entertaining and alarming my neighbors with my cursing.
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Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered
This morning, the video adapters on my Vista dev box were resetting 2–3 times per minute.
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Win64 Vim 7.2.182
I updated the Win64 binaries of Vim at vim-win3264 from Vim 7.2.000 to 7.2.182.
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CrossLoop for Mac
I mentioned CrossLoop before, as a tool for remotely helping someone out. It uses VNC to share desktops.
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Safari 4 Revisited
I tried Safari 4 on my MacBook back in February when it first came out in beta. It crashed immediately, every time, so I uninstalled it.
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Windows 7 x64 running in Mac VirtualBox 2.2.2
I ported Vim to Win64 but I don't have a convenient Win64 system to test it on.
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Max audio extractor
I blogged before that I had used Exact Audio Copy to rip most of my CD collection to the lossless FLAC format. I haven't ripped any more CDs since then, as the old Windows laptop that I was using had severe problems.
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Mobile Device Browser File
In the late 90s when I worked on the classic Active Server Pages dev team, I tried to convince one of the Program Managers that we should make regular updates to browscap.ini, the file that described browser capabilities. He wanted no part of it.
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Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.04
I spent much of today playing around with the brand-new Jaunty/9.04 release of the Ubuntu Netbook Remix on my Eee 1000H netbook. Previously I had run the Hardy/8.04 version of Ubuntu Eee on this system. I had never bothered to update to Intrepid/8.10, but now that UNR is fully supported by Canonical, I thought it was time to try it out.
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Sprints
Scrum and Agile revolve around sprints. At my previous employer, I spent two years working in one-week sprints. At my current job, I've spent another two years working in four-week sprints.
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CSS in Email
I spent part of a day last week fighting with CSS for an email template. CSS support is poor in both desktop and web clients, and much worse than in current browsers.
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InstantShot!
Many of the screenshots that show up on my blog were captured with ImageWell, a little Mac app with resizing, uploading, and rudimentary image editing functionality. It used to be freeware. Now it costs $20 after the trial period runs out.
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Python String Formatting
Python has long had a string interpolation operator, %.
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De-partitioning a Mac disk
I wrote yesterday about NTFS-3G because I was backing my MacBook to an external NTFS drive. I was backing up because I wanted to de-partition my Mac.
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NTFS-3G: the universal filesystem
After I started running Linux and then Mac OS X, in addition to Windows, I started on a quest to find the universal filesystem. I had multiboot systems and external drives where I wanted to to be able to read and write disks under multiple operating systems.
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Iframes: thinking outside the box
New post to the Cozi Tech Blog: Iframes: thinking outside the box.
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Contrasting Colors for Text and Background
About three weeks ago, I answered a question on StackOverflow about generating the most readable color of text on a colored background.
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Augmenting Python's strftime
The Cozi Tech Blog needed some love, so I wrote a post on augmenting Python's strftime.
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Ack - Better than Grep
On a StackOverflow question about favorite Vim plugins, I learned about Ack, a replacement for grep that's smarter about searching source trees.
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Exuberant Ctags and JavaScript
Exuberant Ctags is an essential complement to Vim: it generates an index of symbol names (tags) for a set of source files. In Vim, just place the cursor on a function name and type C-] to go to its definition.
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Flattening List Comprehensions in Python
Python has list comprehensions, syntactic sugar for building lists from an expression.
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reStructuredText syntax highlighting
Vim has had syntax highlighting since version 5.0 in 1998. It quickly became indispensable. It's hard to go back to looking at monochromatic source code after you've become accustomed to syntax highlighting.
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Hash Table Attacks
At lunch today, I told Eric about Hash Attacks: for many hash functions, it's possible to construct a large set of keys that collide. This can be used to cause a Denial of Service as hashtable operations can be induced to take O(n) time instead of O(1).
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Command-line Tools for the Clipboard
I mentioned in my post on reStructuredText that I use a little command-line tool, pbcopy, to pipe the output into the clipboard. I finally found a similar tool for Linux, xsel.
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Review: Programming Sudoku
I was Toastmaster of the Day at this evening's meeting of Freely Speaking Toastmasters. My theme was software development and I wanted to give the non-developer audience a taste for what it's like to write a program. I talked about writing a simple Sudoku game.
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The Bowling Game
There's a flamefest going on at the moment between Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin and Joel Spolsky over the value of Test-Driven Design and the SOLID principles. I find TDD valuable and I'm reading Martin's Clean Code at present.
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Northwest Python Day 2009
[Eric holding forth on BuildBot]