May 2012
3 posts
“Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time.”
– Steven Wright
“Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it; those who do not study...”
– Harry Altman
“Software developers tend to be software addicts who think their job is to write...”
– Jeff Atwood
April 2012
2 posts
“If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your...”
– http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pound_the_table
“Computer science is the study of how to do things — anything — faster and...”
– Carlos Bueno
March 2012
2 posts
Remove the Auto-Hiding Dock Delay in Mac OS X
Remove the Delay for Auto-Hide & Auto-Show of Dock
defaults write com.apple.Dock autohide-delay -float 0 && killall Dock
Return to Default Dock Hide/Show Delay
defaults delete com.apple.Dock autohide-delay && killall Dock
Source: OS X Daily
“I don’t believe in Computer Science. To me science is the study of the...”
– Richard Feynman
February 2012
3 posts
“Put simply, a value is something you are willing to pay for. A strategy is...”
– Ragan Wald, The Difference Between Values and Strategies
“Design is a set of decisions about a product. It’s not an interface or an...”
– Rebekah Cox, product designer at Quora
“UNIX is lots of little programs connected by shell scripts, Java is big programs...”
– Stuart Sierra
November 2011
2 posts
“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution”
– Clay Shirky
“A career is a pursuit; a willingness to mature; patience to become exceptional -...”
– “A Career in Web Operations”, Theo Schlossnagle
October 2011
1 post
September 2011
2 posts
“The greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people breaking the rules...”
– Banksy (via absentia)
“Stupidity is like nuclear fuel: it can be used for good or evil.
But in either...”
– Dilbert
August 2011
4 posts
1 tag
Fixing duplicated entries in "Open With" menu on...
When I right-clicked on a HTML file in Finder and chose “Open With”, there were 3 entries for Opera. This command (found on Apple support forums) fixed it:
/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user
This should rebuild your launch services database,...
1 tag
Fixing iPython craziness on OSX
iPython on OSX had colorized output and TAB-completion worked, so I assumed readline was working, but as soon as I tried to use command history it became a mess. Difficult to describe, but messy :-)
After Googling a bit, found the culprit: when I started iPython, it printed “Leopard libedit detected.”. Turns out that for iPython to work perfectly, libedit won’t do. The fix is...
“[…] those who write the rules are those who profit from the status quo. If we...”
– Tim DeChristopher
July 2011
2 posts
“Perl was made by a linguist; unfortunately, linguists are of the mindset that...”
– Jon Purdy on a StackOverflow comment
“It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be...”
– John Adams
June 2011
1 post
“[…] the essence of computer science is an ability to understand many...”
– Donald Knuth
May 2011
1 post
“Technology is stuff that doesn’t work yet.”
– Bran Ferren
April 2011
2 posts
“The chances of a demo going wrong are directly proportional to the importance of...”
– Martin Fowler’s “Law of Demos”
“Premature architecture design is like premature optimization: you will be wrong...”
– Miguel de Icaza in Save Your Cleverness
March 2011
4 posts
“Keep your thoughts positive because your thoughts become your words. Keep your...”
– Ghandi (via slychedelic)
“The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time”
– Bertrand Russel
“The biggest threat we [authors] face isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity”
– Margaret Atwood
January 2011
1 post
Parkinson's Law
Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
So true
September 2010
2 posts
“If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you are the product being...”
– “blue beetle” on Metafilter
“You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to...”
– Woody Allen
July 2010
1 post
3 tags
Python default encoding
For some unholy reason, to change Python’s default encoding you have to edit site.py because when it’s ran (on interpreter startup) it deletes sys.setdefaultencoding() (WHY !?) Obviously, this is not portable, because every user of the script would have to do the same.
The fix, is to add the following snippet to the script:
import sys
reload(sys) # "undeletes"...
June 2010
1 post
PowerPoint typography tips
Three is the magic number for PowerPoint presentation slides.
3 font sizes:
36pt for titles
24pt for body text
14pt for footnotes
3 font styles:
Titles (eg.: Georgia-normal)
Body text (eg.: Arial-normal)
Emphasis (eg.: Arial-italics)
3 colors for text:
Normal text (eg.: black, white)
Emphasis (eg.: blue, green)
Deemphasized (grey)
From 8 ideas for Better Slides
May 2010
1 post
“The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself....”
March 2010
1 post
“Information is data endowed with relevance and purpose. Converting data into...”
– Peter Drucker
February 2010
2 posts
“It turns out money really can buy happiness, as long as you spend it on other...”
– Mark Pilgrim
2 tags
HACK: Avoid those pesky pendrive viruses
Pen drives (aka thumb drive, USB keychains, etc.) are currently one of the easier ways to catch viruses in the Windows world.
Most of these viruses take advantage of the autorun and recycling bin Windows features. Autorun, which automatically launches a program when you insert a drive, uses a file named autorun.inf on the drive’s root for its settings and the recycling bin uses a (hidden)...
January 2010
1 post
Some interesting Python snippets
A few interesting Python snippets I came accross on programming.reddit.com:
python -m SimpleHTTPServer
Starts an HTTP server on port 8000 that will serve the files in the current directory. Very useful for quickly transferring a file from one computer to another when you don’t have a SSH or FTP server running.
python -m smtpd -n -c DebuggingServer localhost:1025
Will start an SMTP server...
December 2009
5 posts
“In the grand scheme of things, your precious OO model is not as important as you...”
– SpringSource’s Arjen Poutsma on a blog post
"grep" for jQuery
$.fn.egrep = function(pat) {
var out = [];
var textNodes = function(n) {
if (n.nodeType == Node.TEXT_NODE) {
var t = typeof pat == 'string' ?
n.nodeValue.indexOf(pat) != -1 :
pat.test(n.nodeValue);
if (t) {
out.push(n.parentNode);
}
}
else {
$.each(n.childNodes, function(a, b) {
textNodes(b);
});
}
};
this.each(function() {
textNodes(this);
});
return...
Go
Found on a slashdot sig:
Go is to chess as philosophy is to double-entry accounting
I really ought to learn Go (the game, not the prog. lang.)…
November 2009
3 posts
The Internet's "10 commandments"
Peter delivered the Internet’s 10 commandments on Mount Sinai:
Independence of applications
New applications can be added anytime that’s a core value
Permissionless innovation
Open standards
Accessible and globally inclusive—anyone can use it
User choice—I can choose what applications I use and where I go to with them
Ease of use—I can use it in my language, I can use it in a...
Using JRebel with Lift
1. Configure Maven to use JRebel
On Windows:
set MAVEN_OPTS=-XX:+CMSClassUnloadingEnabled -XX:MaxPermSize=128m -Xmx512m -noverify -javaagent:C:\path\to\jrebel-2.1.1\jrebel.jar
On Linux:
MAVEN_OPTS="-XX:+CMSClassUnloadingEnabled -XX:MaxPermSize=128m -Xmx512m -noverify -javaagent:/path/to/jrebel-2.1.1/jrebel.jar"
2. Run Jetty
mvn jetty:run
3. Start Scala Compiler (in another terminal window)
mvn...
How to get a location's coordinates with Google...
Center the location you want on the map, paste the following Javascript code on the browser’s location bar, and press Enter.
javascript:void(prompt('',gApplication.getMap().getCenter()));
October 2009
5 posts
Setting up Hudson on Ubuntu
First, I installed Hudson:
Add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://hudson-ci.org/debian binary/
Update the APT index:
sudo apt-get update
Install Hudson:
sudo apt-get install hudson
Then, I setup my first project on Hudson. We use Subversion, and some files have non-ASCII filenames; Hudson was choking on the checkout with the infamous
svn: Can't convert string...
About "Intellectual Property"
Awesome comment by someone named “John” on TorrentFreak re. so-called Intellectual Property:
It’s not property and you, sir, are not an intellectual.
The very idea that something infinitely reproducible could be considered to have value is preposterous and flies in the face of call macro economic theory. Infinite supply results in infinitesimal value.
Eventually people will realize...
“Opinions come quickly to experts and morons. Few of us are experts.”
– Dennis Forbes, The Underappreciated Art of Duct Tape Programming