Posts Tagged ‘css’

2012w20

Sunday, May 20th, 2012

There was no summary post last week, because I was in the middle of being sick as frak. I’m better now :)

During these last two weeks I’ve had a couple of eye-openers thanks mostly to other peoples blog posts:

Although a rant it does give food for thought. Why should the database be in the centre of the system anyway?

I give the orders around here, oh wow have I gotten OOP wrong all these years… :(

I never understood how useful bash someFileContainingCommands could be until week when I had to rename a couple of files in a couple of directories and didn’t have my usual set of tools (qmv would have made this so easy), so what I ended up doing was:

ls -1 > rename.sh
vim rename.sh 
# work your :%s/// magic 
bash rename.sh 
rm rename.sh

for each of the directories. No extra step of adding a shebang, no modifying the executable bit. Just enter vim, do some regular expression search replace and execute.

SRP as applied to CSS.

There has also been a great many things written about programmers, specifically who should or shouldn’t become one:

Jeff Atwood wrote a really nice post, and while I don’t agree with everything he says he is making some good points. I do however firmly believe that there are a great many mundane tasks today, being performed manually, needlessly I might add, since with the right thinking and just a little knowledge, the tasks could be automated. Case in Point.

Anyway, Jeff’s post spawned a great many thoughtful reactions. All in all I think it was a good thing to publish that post. Lots and lots of great replies and comments.

I do personally believe that more and more of our world is being governed by digital technology, and a better everyday understanding of how programs are constructed and what the basic concepts are, could never hurt. Hell it might even make it easier to formulate in better words what is going wrong when you call tech support. (“It crashed” vs “It crashed after I instructed it to iterate over these filenames”)

If you do end up wanting to give it a shot, how should you go about it? Adjust your expectations and prepare for inevitability :)

And in any case, whatever your profession ends up being, and although I only agree with #1 and #2, you really should build something. Doing it first doesn’t matter if you do it better.

I’ll end this topic with a single word: SHUN!

I also found some cool/interesting/potentially useful stuff:

Pykka seems rather interesting, I’ve often wanted something like Erlang, but with just a tiny bit easier way to launch it and interoperate with the system. I guess now I can :D

git-playback for when you wish to visualize the changes in files over time.

Focus.py the productivity guarding firewall ;)

Compleat: Bash completion for human beings.

Last but not least, the miscellaneous category:

The Dictator’s practical internet guide to power retention.

Plenty of rather interesting ideas about gamification to increase user contribution in this thread.

I don’t know how I feel about OSHackers.org. And what’s worse is I can’t put my finger on why I don’t know what I feel about it.

Timeline of the far future, this sounds like something I’ve read on xkcd.

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2012w01

Sunday, January 8th, 2012

column

The other day I wanted some prettier (tabularized) output and of course someone has already wanted this and of course there are tools for that :)

bash_completion

This is so frakking cool! I’ve built this little shellscript “vault.sh” which is a simple wrapper script for mounting and unmounting encfs mounts.

It takes two parameters: operation and target, where operation can be one of “lock” and “unlock”, and target—at present—resolves to “thunderbird” (signifying my .thunderbird directory).

Since I intend to expand this with more encrypted directories as I see fit, I don’t want to hard-code that.

What I did want, however, was to be able to auto complete operation and target. So I looked around, and found this post, and although I couldn’t derive enough knowledge from it to solve my particular problem, having multiple levels of completion, the author was gracious enough to provide references to where s/he had found the knowledge (here, here and here). That second link was what did it for me.

My /etc/bash_completion.d/vault.sh now looks like this:

_vault()
{
    local cur prev opts
    COMPREPLY=()
    cur="${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]}"
    prev="${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD-1]}"
    first="lock unlock"
    second="thunderbird"

    if [[ ${cur} == * && ${COMP_CWORD} -eq 2 ]] ; then
        COMPREPLY=( $(compgen -W "${second}" -- ${cur}) )
        return 0
    fi

    if [[ ${cur} == * && ${COMP_CWORD} -eq 1 ]] ; then
        COMPREPLY=( $(compgen -W "${first}" -- ${cur}) )
        return 0
    fi
}
complete -F _vault vault.sh

And all the magic is happening in the two if-statements. Essentially: if current word (presently half typed and tabbed) is whatever, and this is the second argument to the command, respond with suggestions taken from the variable $second.

Otherwise, if current word is whatever, and this is the first parameter, take suggestions from the variable $first.

Awsum!

awk for great good

Another great use for awk: viewing selected portions of source code. For instance, in Perl, if you just want to view a specific subroutine, without getting distracted by all the other crud, you could do: $ awk '/sub SomeSubName/,/}/' somePerlModule.pm

Links

If PHP were British, perhaps it’s just me, but I find it hilarious.

PayPal just keeps working their charm…

Belarus just… wait what?

Why we need version control

Preserving space, neat!

Fuzzy string matching in Python

If you aren’t embarrassed by v1.0 you didn’t release it early enough

The makers schedule, oldie but goldie

CSS Media Queries are pretty cool

Static site generator using the shell and awk

A netstat companion

Reducing code nesting

Comparing images using perceptual hashes

Microsofts GPS “avoid ghetto” routing algorithm patent…

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2011w52

Sunday, January 1st, 2012

Merry belated christmas greetings everyone! And by the time this post is published I could extend it with Happy belated new years greetings as well ;)

vim + html5 syntax

I’ve been tinkering a lot with html5 during my vacation and vim just didn’t want to play nicely with the new html-tags.

Namely, as it wouldn’t recognise the new semantic structural tags (footer, header, article, section, nav, aside) it wouldn’t indent the source properly and it was a cause for both distraction, and the resulting frustration.

I was not the first to feel this frustration, and a quick search turned up this result which solved both the html and css syntax issues (check the comments for the css solution). Very elegant solution, and now I’ve also learned about vim’s .vim/after/ directory… That was pretty cool.

Learning html5

I’ve actually shied away from doing stuff with html5, as whenever I tried to wrap my head around the new tags and how they should be used, there were just a myriad of different sites interpreting the usage in subtle but differing ways, but I finally found a resource which makes sense to me, so until a definitive interpretation has been hammered out, that’s the one I’m going to stick with.

Also, for sticky footers using css, and html5, check out this page. I had no trouble getting that to work.

Links

This question pretty much sums up why I like the command line so much

This looks interesting for synching (and deleting) without having to worry about doing “the right thing”

Nice list of things one could do with a home server

Doing it for teh lulz, 1903 style

EA, Nintendo and Sony now only covertly support SOPA (through their membership in various interest organizations). Wanting to eat the cake and still have it huh?

Tom’s Hardware not being amused by SOPA

Oh how I so hope that Wikipedia, Google, et al, will go down this path. (I do think there is a difference between companies lobbying, writing laws, and pressuring governments, and companies urging people to put pressure on governments, so yes, I think this is ok)

An interesting theory about why cinemas are having such a rough time

Haven’t had a chance to try this, but creating art using a written grammar does sound pretty neat, especially if you could get a script and /dev/random involved as well ;)

German police tracking people via silent SMS. I am beginning to think that rms is correct in his cellphone “usage”

Too much reading and constant information overload makes us pretty little passive consumers

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2011w34

Sunday, August 28th, 2011

Imagemagick, again

There has been quite a lot of hacking using imagemagick this past week, all of it for FSCONS use.

My first hack was to create an image for use in the MyConf site, to visually mark up passed timeslots as, well… passed.

The idea I had was to set a background on that html element which would have “Session has ended” written diagonally from the lower left corner to the upper right.

Greg convinced me that there must be better ways to mark this up which would at the same time not interfer with the readability of those sessions, and we ended up going another way, but this is how to create images with diagonal text anyway:

$ convert -size 400x200 xc:none -fill red -pointsize 40 -gravity center -draw "rotate 337.5 text 0,0 'Session has ended'" tmp.png

This will create a 400px wide by 200px high image, with a transparent background and red text, rotated to lay diagonally across the image, beginning in the southwest corner of the image and ending in the northeast.

The next day Rikard had an idea about using an FSCONS crowd image as background for another image, and have parts of the crowd “bleed through” the overlaying image.

This is of course something one can do in GIMP, iff you have learned how to. Rikard struggled with that, got help from Jonas, but ultimately the result wasn’t good, and he’d have to do it all over again, at which point Jonas had left for the day and he didn’t remember what had been done.

Which got me thinking “this must be doable in imagemagick, and repeatable (i.e. a shell script)”. Of course it was.

It is a two-step process, first you’ll need to prepare the overlaying image, by making parts of it transparent, enabling the background image to bleed through. This is done with:

$ convert overlaying-image.png -transparent black new-image.png

In the above example, the color black in “overlaying-image.png” will be made transparent, and the output saved into “new-image.png”.

For my tests, as I only needed a background image, and as anything would suffice, I had imagemagick create one for me:

$ convert -size 525x525 xc:blue bg.png

This will create an 525*525 pixel image with a blue background color.

With this done, all we need do is to merge the two images (“new-image.png” and “background-image.png”) together:

$ composite -gravity center new-image.png background-image.png resulting-image.png

One little gotcha with this command above: I haven’t tried what happens when I use two differently sized images. I am assuming that things will get cropped.

Media Queries

This Thursday I was introduced to Media Queries, a rather cool technique for having CSS determine (well, I suppose it really is the web browser which does all the work, while CSS is just the container for the rules) which styles to apply, depending on certain browser attributes (such as current width of the window, etc.)

Greg has implemented this in MyConf and it is pretty cool when you shrink your browser window down to about 200 pixels or so, and the page transforms before your eyes.

graphvis and neato

On thing which have bothered me about neato for a long time is that I could never find a way to have the nodes not overlap in the generated image.

There is syntax for how to space out nodes inside the graphviz grammar, and it works… sortof, but I actually found a better way to go about it now.

$ neato -Tpng -o resulting-file.png -Goverlap=false graph.dot

WordPress

When I updated the WP Stats plugin this Friday I was “greeted” with the message that I wouldn’t receive any further updates to the stats plugin and that I should get Jetpack instead.

It promised to be great and awesome and connect my blog to the “WP cloud” (whatever that is), but instead of filling me with optimism and making me look forward to that change, all that message managed to do was make me think “ok, I wonder how long before they’re gonna start charging for access to all this Jetpack functionality”.

Automattic is of course free to do so if they feel like it, but I can’t help but feel that it is ass-backwards to have the self-hosted wordpress.org platform, and then try to tie it into that “WP cloud” (whatever that is, again they leave me with more questions than answers)…

The funny thing is that WP Stats was one of the features that I really liked, and which made me hesitant to move somewhere else.

So thanks Automattic… but no thanks. Time to speed up the plans for migrating to fugitive…

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My software stack revisited – Programming

Friday, December 24th, 2010

Programming is one of my primary interests, mainly because it allows me to stimulate my brain with solving problems, but also force it to think in new ways.

Languages

I started programming in PHP, picked up Java and Erlang during classes at ITU, picked up Python on my own during my studies at ITU, and my latest addition would be shell scripting.

Slightly tangent to the topic are the markup languages I have picked up as well, html and css in high-school and LaTeX at ITU. I dabbled around for a while with both creole and markdown, but that didn’t last long.

Editor / IDE

My first and foremost tool of choice given nearly any situation will be (g)vim. The only two exceptions I can think of off the bat is Java (for which I use Eclipse and if I need to write a whole lot of text, with minimal distraction (more on that later).

The pragmatic programmers recommend learning one text-editor, and learn it well. If the name of that editor is vim, emacs, kate, gedit, or whatever, I really don’t care. Just pick up one that fits you, and LEARN IT WELL!

I have extended vim with a couple of plugins, the most prominent being NERD Commenter, matchit, snipMate and sparkup. There are at least two more plugins, but I will write more about those later.

And for Python, I usually install the IPython interactive prompt as it is a fair bit more useful than the standard python-prompt.

Version Control

While studying at ITU I had my eyes opened about the wonderful concept of version control.

I was first exposed to SVN, and while quite capable, I figured it was too much of a hassle to set it up myself, since that would require the presence of a server somewhere to host the SVN repositories.

But then mercurial entered the stage. Git or bazaar would have done the job just as good, but the people orchestrating the fourth term settled on mercurial, and it is so dead simple and still powerful enough for what I need that I haven’t had a reason to look elsewhere.

Issue tracking

For a course at ITU I tried using Mantis, a web-based bug tracker written in PHP, and while it worked well, it was a hassle to manipulate bug reports since it meant I’d have to go online and log in to yet another system.

I have however found a different solution which I am currently trying out: a plugin to mercurial called b with the tagline “distributed bug tracking”. It is a bit too early to tell if it will do, but for the time being it solves the immediate problem of having to go online somewhere to handle bugs.

Next post in line: “Office Suite” software

:wq

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