Muffin Research Labs

mozilla

Mozilla Festival 2014

Once again MozFest provided a great environment for hackers, thinkers and doers of all ages to get together and plan, talk about and make all kinds of things. Working for Mozilla I find Mozfest is somewhere that really makes you think about Mozilla's broader mission. It's

Muffin Research Labs

Adding a DuckDuckGo search box to your blog

I wanted to add a search to this blog. First I looked at adding a google site search. However, it's a script-based approach and it adds a ton of generated markup to the page. I then found that DuckDuckGo have a search widget [https://duckduckgo.com/search_box]

Equilibrium

On hearing the very sad news [http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2014/06/09/in-memoriam-2/] that Eric Meyer's daughter had passed, it was impossible to not be moved. I found myself taking a moment to reflect on a life cut tragically short. It's a much needed

ubuntu

How do I know if my ubuntu server needs a restart?

A file at /var/run/reboot-required is created that's used at login to tell you a restart is needed in the MOTD. You can check for the presence of this file to know if the updates you just did require a restart To do something with this information

github

How do you deal with dependent branches on github?

In general, it's good practice to make branches that are independent from other changes and in general kept to a diff of ~500 lines in order to keep pull requests (PRs) easy to review. One issue though is how to deal with the scenario where you need to

grunt

Running just a single test in grunt-casper

If you'd like to run a single test with grunt-casper you can do so by making use of grunt.option [http://gruntjs.com/api/grunt.option] in your grunt-casper [https://github.com/iamchrismiller/grunt-casper] configuration. One way to do this is to use it in the src property

SSL

Fixing sec_error_unknown_issuer

After recently updating my SSL cert I found I was getting a sec_error_unknown_issuer error with FF Android. As it turned out I'd missed a step in the configuration which is to include the intermediate certificate along with the main .crt file. To do this you

bash

OSX: Toggle hidden files in Finder

Here's a little shell script I knocked up for toggling hidden files in finder. Running from the Finder toolbar To have this to hand from within finder you can create an application in Automater. Just select run shell script and paste the contents of this script. Save it

sinon

Using sinon.js with bower (why is sinon.foo undefined?)

Unfortunately if you're using sinon.js [http://sinonjs.org/] via bower [http://bower.io/] for testing in the browser. If you just bower install sinon you'll end up with all the components from the repo, not a built file which is what the release file is.

mozilla

Full Page Screenshots in Firefox

I was on the verge of installing a plugin to be able to take a full-page screenshot on Firefox. But then I realised there's no need! Simply open the developer toolbar (shift + F2) and type: screenshot --fullpage That's it!

video

OSX: No Connected Camera

This is really just a note to self. But when you're trying to use an app that uses your built-in video camera on osx, sometimes you see the message "No Connected camera". I just had that and rather than reboot I did a bit of googling

android

Samsung Galaxy S3: Where are the developer options?

I have recently upgraded a development device to Android 4.3 and given the revised Settings menu spent a few minutes looking for the developer options to no avail. Fortunately I found this link How to enable hidden developer options on your samsung galaxy S4 [http://gs4.wonderhowto.com/how-to/

mavericks

Creating a Mavericks OSX VM on an OSX Host

In case you want to try out some things on OSX without doing it for real then being able to create a VM of OSX can be appealing. Apple allow you to do this if you're runnning Apple hardware. The biggest challenge is finding a way to access

firefoxos

Firefox OS: adb 'error: unknown host service'

When using adb -s to run commands on Firefox OS devices; e.g. for flashing/pushing files etc, some of our test devices (Inari) use the serial number used as the device identifier. E.g something like this: 11:22:33:44:55:66 This is a problem as the

OSX

OSX: Fixing Python + Virtualbox after upgrading to Mavericks

{<1>} I've just done the upgrade to Mavericks on my work machine. All went pretty well but there were a couple of hitches. Both Python and Virtualbox had some issues. Fixing Python Fortunately my dev env are all safely tucked away inside an Ubuntu VM however

Google

Can't install user.js in Google Chrome

In recent Chrome versions (22 in my case on Ubuntu) it's not possible to install user.js (Greasemonkey) scripts by just dragging them onto a window. Instead the script is downloaded and you see the following message: "Extensions, apps and user scripts can only be added from

vim

Insert a tab character in vim when expand tabs is on

I have vim set-up to use spaces in place of tabs. Sometimes you need to use an actual tab e.g. editing a Makefile. Now whilst it's possible to change settings so that tabs are used for specific files, a quick tip to remember is to simply type

pbuilder

Fixing pbuilder dependency 404 errors

If you're building packages with pbuilder sometimes you might hit something like the following errors which cause the build to fail because the dependencies can't be found. Err http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates/main devscripts i386 2.11.6ubuntu1.2 404 Not Found [IP: 91.

screen

GNU screen: open tab in current working directory

A nice trick for having screen open a new tab in the same directory as the one you're currently in. To use it add it to your .screenrc # Open new window in current dir. bind c stuff "screen -X chdir $PWD;screen^M" bind ^c stuff

nandroid

Recover Files from Nandroid Backup

I recently flashed my Htc Desire with CyanogenMod 7.1 and I have to say it's great to be free of htc sense. Given the rigmarole around the official Gingerbread update [http://crave.cnet.co.uk/mobiles/htc-desire-gingerbread-update-available-if-youre-feeling-brave-50004594/] for the Desire I don't think my next

ubuntu

Linux: Spotify Screensaver D-Bus Script update

Following on from my previous post [https://muffinresearch.co.uk/archives/2010/11/03/spotify-screensaver-toggle-with-dbus/] about a script to Pause and Play tracks on spotify based on the status of the screensaver as reported by D-Bus on a Linux Desktop, here's an update: With the latest versions of

Events

Fronteers Conference 2011 - Day 2

Here's an overview of day two of the Fronteers Conference. For day one see: Fronteers Conference 2011 - Day One [https://muffinresearch.co.uk/archives/2011/10/13/fronteers-conference-2011-day-one/] Web Components and Model Driven Views - Alex Russell [http://infrequently.org/] Alex Russell's presentation was a

Events

Fronteers Conference 2011 - Day One

Recently I attended Fronteers 2011 [http://fronteers.nl/congres/2011] held in Amsterdam. The entire conference was very well organised and the content across the two days was nicely balanced between more general thought provoking presentations, practical things that you could take away and use today and talks on where

ubuntu

Ubuntu: add-apt-repository: command not found

When you're using a minimal Ubuntu install if you find the 'add-apt-repository' command is missing (it's useful for adding PPAs and other repositories), then simply run: sudo apt-get install python-software-properties

Python

Linux: Spotify Track Notifier with added D-Bus love

I've recently updated the spotify notifier example I'd previously posted as an example along with my spotify screensaver script [https://muffinresearch.co.uk/archives/2010/11/03/spotify-screensaver-toggle-with-dbus/]. First, I made an update to have it listen to the PropertiesChanged signal. Annoyingly for some unknown reason