Control your Wii à la Minority Report A nice hack to make it possible to control your Wii with your fingers à la Minority Report [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0181689/]. I'm wouldn't be at all surprised if someone at nintendo cribs this idea and starts marketing gloves with reflective fingertips and the
shell Extracting a single file from a tar backup Like an idiot I accidentally overwrote a file for this blog when uploading some other stuff; accidents happen. Anyway, I have backups (you do have backups right?) and I needed to grab a single file out of the latest tar. Fortunately this is really straight forward and rather than unpacking
bash Using 'select' for multiple choices in shell scripts I found this neat construct in the gnu bash reference [http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bashref.html#IDX40]. Select is a great way to be able to present a list of options to a user in a shell script. Take the example given in the reference: select fname
Code Python: Transposing Lists With map and zip I'm re-writing a piece of code to print into columns within a terminal and I wanted to join the nth items of each list together. Zip allows you to do just that >>> my_list=[[1,2,3],[4,5,6],[7,8,9,10]] >
Bazaar Case Insensitive File-systems and Bazaar There's an issue with Bazaar [http://bazaar-vcs.org] caused by case-insensitive file systems (technically case preserving [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_preservation]). When you add a file/directory called "foo" when "Foo" is already versioned, Bazaar will do exactly as it's
performance CSS Sprite Generator Tool Ed [http://www.ejeliot.com] and I have been busy putting the final touches on our CSS Sprite creation tool which is now available over at http://spritegen.website-performance.org For the uninitiated, a CSS Sprite is a single image file which contains several graphics. Using CSS background positions it&
bash Showing last two directories of pwd in BASH prompt I'm working on a project where we are using Bazaar downstream of CVS and we have several common Bazaar branches for keeping up to date with CVS. The problem with this is that you can be in the first directory of the branch who's name is
Amazon Amazon launches DRM free MP3 service in the US Amazon.com are now offering DRM free MP3 Downloads, you can buy a single track or whole albums and prices range from $0.99 per track and from $5.99 per album. This is really great to see and I really hope Apple feels the pressure from the competition. Via
Coffee Soho Coffee Having spent a fair while working in and around Soho, London, I thought it was time to share my thoughts on the coffee shops that I've been to in and around the office as well as the places you can buy beans from. Let's face it
bash BASH Tip: Alternative to expr for arithmetic I discovered recently a neat way to do arithmetic in BASH without the need to use the expr command. There's a build-in that uses the syntax $((…)) or $[ … ]. This is also faster as it avoids the need to invoke a separate command. See: http://snap.nlc.dcccd.edu for
OSX BASH: Open FileMerge from CLI Here's a quick tip. If you want to open FileMerge (Apples graphical diff utility available in developer tools) from the CLI you can use the command opendiff e.g: opendiff file1 file2 This save lots of hassle when you are trying to resolve versioning conflicts, as I always
Bazaar Contributing to projects on Launchpad.net with Bazaar Launchpad.net [https://launchpad.net/+about] is a site for hosting software projects and in a lot of ways it is similar to google code [http://code.google.com] and sourceforge.net [http://sourceforge.net]. Launchpad allows you to plan and manage bug tracking for your project, as well as
humour Is NetNewsWire trying to tell me something? Do you ever get the feeling your computer is trying to communicate with you. Seems NetNewsWire [http://www.newsgator.com/Individuals/NetNewsWire/] admires the geek at the controls. Huh? Don't get it? Read more about 1337 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet].
presentations Bazaar Lightning Talk Here's the slides from a recent Lightning talk I gave at our London offices on the Bazaar version control system. A full transcript is available here: http://www.slideshare.net/muffinresearch/bazaar-vcs
OSX Sneaky hfs_fsck post reboot Just thought I'd mention this, unlike linux and windows if your mac crashes you aren't told that the filesystem integrity needs to be checked when you reboot. Now this is probably a good thing up to a point, as macs do a good job of hiding
Browsers Before you go and install Safari 3.0 on your mac You'll be interested to know Safari 3.0 beta replaces the webkit framework thus borking safari 2.0 + everything else that relies on webkit. If it's too late for you check this out: http://www.tuaw.com/2007/06/11/more-on-rolling-back-from-safari-3-beta/
DVCS Dealing with Text Conflicts in Bazaar Version Control This post is a follow-on from a previous post that formed a basic introduction to Bazaar version control [https://muffinresearch.co.uk/bazaar-version-control/]. If you'd like to find out more about Bazaar then you can also read about it on the official Bazaar website [http://bazaar-vcs.org] There
Multimap Multimap opens up it's API to developers I'm really pleased to hear that finally Multimap [http://www.multimap.com] has opened up it's API [http://www.multimap.com/openapi/] for use by developers "to innovate, experiment and try things out". Multimap has some fantastic data and probably the best maps in
Events Shawn Lawton Henry on WCAG 2.0 in London, 5th June The RNIB web access team are putting on a free event at the Westminster University, New Cavendish street campus on Tuesday 5th June at 7pm, where Shawn Lawton Henry of the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative will speak about WCAG 2.0. I saw Shawn speak as part of an accessibility
OSX Mark all mail as read in mail.app Being a habitual user of NetNewsWire I find it quite annoying that mail.app doesn't have a mark all as read button. However there is a context menu that you can use mark all mail in the selected mailbox as read. Trouble with that is that it'
virtualisation Parallels tip: Pause VMs to conserve resources In more recent versions of Parallels they've added a "Pause" action in addition to "suspend". If you like to run a whole bunch of VMs at once, pause will near instantaneously put on hold the execution of the VM thus reducing the CPU usage
ubuntu Parallels tip: Upgrading to Ubuntu Feisty from Edgy Upgrading your parallels image to try out feisty really couldn't be easier. Simply clone the disk image you already have of Edgy and rename it so know what it is. I followed the second set of instructions found at ubuntugeeks.com [http://www.ubuntugeek.com/upgrade-ubuntu-610-edgy-eft-to-ubuntu-704-feisty-fawn-2.html] First
Charles Proxy Online and offline development with the YUI and Charles Now that all yui library files are publicly hosted on yui.yahooapis.com it makes sense in any project you are working on to link the files from these locations. Given the widespread usage of the yui, if a user has already got any of these files in their cache
DVCS Bazaar Version Control With the development of TweetyPy [https://launchpad.net/tweetypy/] I've moved to using Bazaar [http://bazaar-vcs.org/] for version control. Bazaar is written in Python so it will work as expected cross-platform. Bazaar is different from a typical version control because it doesn't rely on having
OSX Quicktip for mac: turning capslock into control I am hoping to get my hands on a happy hackers keyboard for mac [http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/26/happy-hacking-keyboard-lite-2-for-mac-touts-apple-key-demotes-c/] in the not too distant future. In preparation I have modified caps lock to act as the control key as this is the position on the Happy hackers
