Tue 09 April 2013
There has been a fair amount of recent coverage about
asm.js since it started appearing in the nightly builds of
Firefox. There are other places to read more about what asm.js - but
essentially you can think of it as a subset of javascript that is functionally
somewhat like ...
Mon 28 February 2011
The Problems
Small and growing charities have many operational and communications
needs that would be well served with custom Django apps. At the same
time there are many budding developers who are looking for real
projects, not contrived tutorials to learn with. There are also a number
of busy experienced ...
Thu 04 November 2010
As a follow on the previous post - I wanted to demonstrate how the
individual lights (with all their own features) can not only be grouped
into a simple synchronized group - but they can be added into a
"sequence" container which will operate a chase. This also shows the
type of ...
Tue 02 November 2010
There is a large hobbiest community out there of people putting together
light shows synchronized to music. These are mostly around xmas string
lights during the holidays.
The lights are controlled via a hardware board that takes signals from a
computer and operates multiple dimmers to control the brightness of ...
Mon 10 May 2010
In a [old, but still relevant
post](http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2007/nov/02/handle-choices-right-way/)
James Bennet argues for a way of handling the choice tuples used by
Django. One of the reasons I haven't always followed that advice was
that it was just a lot of extra ...
Fri 12 March 2010
Have a lab of Macs - need to burn a bunch of CD or DVDs? Harness those
monkeys!
No one part of this solution is all that earth shattering, but it is a
simple clever combination of steps.
So you have a bunch of Macs in a lab - you have Network ...
Fri 12 March 2010
A few of the tools I use have spent some time working up bash
completing. django-admin and virtualenvwrapper to name two. As a Mac
sysadmin I use a number of CLI tools for stuff, and was interested in
working up some bash completion for these.
I picked diskutil for starters ...
Mon 08 March 2010
There are several procedural things at work that still involve a
signature, or hand written note on a piece of paper. This reality has
made it hard to digitize these practices. While much of the process
could be replace with a web app, with plenty of benefits. The reality is ...
Mon 15 February 2010
The [Django Advent](http://djangoadvent.com/) site is proving to be some
great writing. The [recent
piece](http://djangoadvent.com/1.2/everything-i-hate-about-mingus/) by
[Kevin Fricovsky](http://blog.montylounge.com/) hits the nail on the
head in so many ways.
Basically he is highlighting some areas for growth when it ...
Thu 11 February 2010
Not much to say other than I've been using this for a while and want to
pass it on.
This [post](http://www.red-sweater.com/blog/220/random-color-terminal)
has a great tool for randomizing terminal colors.
If you have a lot of terminal windows open - this can make expose ...
Wed 13 January 2010
I have the occasional need to resize a set of images. I used to use
Photoshop batch actions, then I used some droplets, and recently I've
been using a simple python script with PIL (Python Image Library)
We recently got an 8 core Mac Pro, and I wanted to ...
Fri 20 November 2009
Been using hg, and like to use hg diff to help me make better commit
notes - but been spoiled by bitbuckets HTML view of diffs
So here is a quick script that I keep on my path for viewing hg diff,
formated with pygments - I'm sure it would be ...
Thu 29 October 2009
using apache, mysql, mod_wsgi, and virtualenv
Dreamhost provides free hosting to nonprofits, and for now they seem to
have thrown in a virtual private server. This is hard not to take
advantage of, and I'm hoping that the VPS is better performing than the
shared hosting - but my concern ...
Wed 28 October 2009
At work we needed to have a standard local account that would work off
campus, but not on campus. Here was my solution.
First I check for the user and create it if it doesn't exist
#!bash
user_exists=`dscl . -read /Users/remote GeneratedUID | grep -c
GeneratedUID`
if [ $user_exists -ne ...
Thu 22 October 2009
Installing the mysql-python package on Leopard is relatively easy if
you've installed MySQL from the mysql.org distribution - but installing
on Leopard Server is a bit more problematic.
The crux of the issue is that the version of MySQL that comes with
Leopard Server does not include the header ...
Thu 15 October 2009
So found this buried under some dust. I had forgotten that I had ever
set this up, but in adding some stuff to a .bash_profile on an older
server found some code that I've spruced up bit for this post that lets
you locally edit a remote file initiated ...
Mon 14 September 2009
I've always been annoyed that the only way to mark all as read for a
mailbox was with a contextual menu in the sidebar - lets change that.
I use Butler as my quicklaunch keyboard macro tool - but you could use
your favorite one to run the following script while ...
Wed 09 September 2009
OE-Cake is still expired for OS X - lets work around that
So OE-Cake now has a beta for windows - but not OS X.
We still have the binary from their old version that expired some time
ago - we were launching it with ARD with the below trick, but now I ...
Tue 08 September 2009
The iTunes remote is pretty slick - if only it could turn on the stereo
I have a mac mini set up as a HTPC. The music end of this was a bit
neglected as it was originally set up to use a custom onscreen menu
control to switch between several ...
Tue 08 September 2009
In our school environment, we had a couple issues with Google Earth's
default behaviors - here are my workarounds.
First off we have a student web proxy that works based on a whitelist
concept. So we have to allow any web traffic explicitly. With the help
of little snitch and ...
Thu 03 September 2009
There are times I need to create some easy to remember weak initial
passwords for students - here is a quick script
Note that these are not strong passwords as they are the definition of
"dictionary" passwords...
import sys
import os
import random
dfile = '/usr/share/dict/web2'
def main():
for ...
Mon 24 August 2009
Even though we moved our email from OS X server to google apps for
education - we still manage our lists with a local mailman instance
(still on 10.4). However the web based interface for adding new members
can be a bit of a pain as it never seems to ...
Tue 18 August 2009
Sometimes you get in a situation where you are editing a long command on
the command line and you'd kill to be able to use your mouse to select a
word or option in the middle. This tip makes it a pleasure
First for me their was the discovery ...
Thu 13 August 2009
iLife and iWork can throw up an awful lot of update dialogs and welcome
screens for people who first launch them. For users on my network I
wanted to prevent those from coming up
There are a number of defaults that can be set to make these not appear.
The ...
Fri 07 August 2009
Tools are getting so sophisticated now - that they can be a distraction
for the lightweight or part time coder.
You can get lost in the ins and outs of git vs hg, choosing a database
engine (SQL vs Key-Value etc), javascript frameworks, PIP vs Buildout
and integrating with virtualenv.
They ...
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