Seth Mason

Emacs and Remember The Milk all jumbled up

2010-08-19T00:00:00-07:00

I’m a huge fan of Remember The Milk and GNU Emacs. So much so, that I’ve given them both money over the years. And now I’ve (kind of) combined them. I just pushed slack-rtm to GitHub.

I’ve kind of avoided Emacs Lisp, the 1984 Subaru of Lisp. While I’ve done some minor hacking of my .emacs in the two years I’ve been using Emacs, I have not really done any serious programming in it. But with this, I’m hoping to remedy that a bit. It’s been fine so far, even though the learning curve has been steep. I don’t think I’ll be writing a JavaScript interpreter anytime soon.

Right now, it’s pretty simple. It just creates a buffer and shoves your tasks into it. I’ve only tested it on GNU Emacs 23.1.50.1. Ultimately, I’d like it to sync between an orgmode file and RTM, kind of like what Sacha Chua did with org-toodledo.

So, have at it. Feel free to fork it and send me pull requests. I’m hoping to release early (DONE!) and often.

Sheena Is A C++ Hacker

2010-07-01T00:00:00-07:00

Not really. And my name’s not Sheena. But I did make a contribution to the awesome console based newsreader Newsbeuter. If you want to see my patch, it’s available on Github. I fixed a problem with the way that it authenticated against Google Reader API.

As for Newsbeuter, if you like doing everything from the commandline, this is the newsreader for you. Lots of features like keyboard shortcuts that can be reconfigured easily and query feeds so you can create your own pipe.

Check it out

Google Apps Script For Fun and Profit

2010-05-28T00:00:00-07:00

OK, so I have to admit that I have a mancrush on Google Apps Script. It’s a nice little tool that allows you to do a whole variety of things on a bunch of Google Products. For instance:

With scripts, you can:
* Create your own custom spreadsheet functions
* Automate repetitive tasks (e.g. process responses to Google Docs forms)
* Link multiple Google products together (e.g. send emails or schedule
* Calendar events from a list of addresses in a Spreadsheet)
* Customize existing Google products (e.g. add custom buttons or menus to run * your own scripts)

Not only is the tool itself very nice (a slick in-browser editor with syntax highlighting and context sensitive prompts), the tutorials are as well. In a little under 15 minutes while reading the tutorial I was able to write a script that emails you the next 10 days events from any calendar. It uses JavaScript so if you are familiar with that, then you could probably even do it quicker than me and my old brain.

A pet peeve that I have is that the daily email I get from Google Calendar doesn’t include my contact’s birthdays. Even if it did, it’d only be for that day which would be too late for me to drop a card in the mail. And even if did that, it wouldn’t send the email to my wife. Thus, the following script was born.

// how many days in advance
var INTERVAL = 10;

// the calendar to grab
var CALENDAR = "Contacts' birthdays and events";

// who to send it to
var EMAIL_TO = "email1@somewhere.com,email2@somewhere.com";

//  the subject to use
var SUBJECT = "Birthdays for Seth next " + INTERVAL + " days "

function onOpen() {
  var submenu = [{ name:"Send Birthday List",
                   functionName:"sendBirthdayList"
                 }];
  SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSpreadsheet().addMenu('Birthdays', submenu);  
}

function sendBirthdayList() {
  // Get the event template string from the spreadsheet
  var emailTemplate = SpreadsheetApp
        .getActiveSheet().getRange("b2").getValue();
  var eventTemplate = SpreadsheetApp
        .getActiveSheet().getRange("b3").getValue();
  // Get the next INTERVAL days
  var start = new Date();
  var end = new Date(start.getTime() + 1000*60*60*24*10);
 
  var cal = CalendarApp.openByName(CALENDAR);
  var events = cal.getEvents(start, end);
    
  // Add each event to the email
  var eventLines = "";
  
  for (var e in events) {
    var event = events[e];
    eventLines += eventTemplate
      .replace("<TITLE>", event.getTitle())
      .replace("<DAY>", event.getEndTime().toLocaleDateString())
      .replace("'s birthday","");
            
  }
  var email = emailTemplate.replace("<EVENTS>", eventLines);
  MailApp.sendEmail(EMAIL_TO,
                    SUBJECT + now.toLocaleDateString(), email);
}

Lo! Better living through technology.

Right now, I have the template for the email stored in two cells in a spreadsheet and other configuration info at the top of the script. Those could probably go in cell data too, just so it’d be easier to share this script. But it should give you an idea of lovely it is touse Google Apps Script.

Using the triggers that are built-in (Triggers < Current script triggers…), I have it scheduled to email us every 3 days at midnight. So, hopefully, I won’t be missing any birthdays.

97 Things Every Programmer Should Know

2010-04-05T00:00:00-07:00

I recently picked up O’Reilly’s book 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts as it was an eBook Deal of the Day. Overall, I thought it a great book for a programmer just starting out in the field. It had quite a few things that I wish I’d known earlier. Probably because I took an unconventional route to programming.

One thing I found interesting was that many of the essays made reference to the suggestion from The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master to learn one new langauage every year. The suggestion by itself wasn’t interesting. I think many people have heard it. The thing that intrigued me about it was that "The Pragmatic Programmer" is published by Addison-Wesley. I don’t think I’ve seen such overt references to other publishers’ books in a programming book before.

Kudos to you O’Reilly.

A Better Bugzilla2

2010-02-18T00:00:00-08:00

For a variety of reasons, I’m still using version 2 of Bugzilla at work even though it’s considered “dead” by Bugzilla. And the interface looks like it’s been dead awhile.

But, thanks to Greasemonkey, I’m not stuck with the interface. Inspired by Jesse Ruderman’s TidyBug, I made my own Greasemonkey script which I’m calling TidyBz2.

Here’s the before shot:

Here’s the after shot:

It hides the huge header, makes the title of the issue much more prominent and fixes some other formatting nits I disliked. Information that I think is more important is moved up to the top as well. But there are also perks you can’t see. You can use the keyboard to do pretty much anything you need to: comment, resolve, browse the URL, search, navigate between comments a la gmail, etc. Once you have it installed, just press ? to see all the keyboard shortcuts.

It’s up on GitHub so feel free to fork it and make any modifications you’d like to see.

PragPub

2010-02-04T00:00:00-08:00

This is probably way late but The Pragmatic Bookshelf, publishers of fine programming books, have launched a free monthly magazine called PragPub that covers a variety of topics. For instance, this month has a nice overview of how to use Sass. Past topics have included articles about Clojure, automating screencasts and managing life projects.

Granted, they are ultimately pushing their books (which I think are excellent) but they are releasing the magazine in PDF, epub and mobi. How cool is that?

PragPub

Visit your local library via Amazon.com

2010-01-30T00:00:00-08:00

I love reading. It’s how I get most my knowledge (or lack thereof). And I also really like bookmarklets. They make browsing the web much easier.

And I found this great bookmarklet that let’s you find a book that you are viewing on Amazon.com at your local library. It’s called xISBN Bookmarklet. I just call it ‘library lookup v2.’ It was inspired by Jon Udell’s LibraryLookup which I used to use so I just updated the version.

It’s really easy to set up and use. Set up is covered on its page under "Try xISBN Bookmarkets." One thing you’ll need in advance is to know the base URL of your library’s catalog. Mine is http://catalog.colapl.org for example.

Using it is even eaiser. You just look at a page on Amazon or Barnes and Noble and click the bookmarklet. Or if there’s a ISBN on a page, you can just select it and click the bookmarklet. It’ll take you to a page like this.

Depending on your library, you could place a hold on it and then pick it up. Remember, support your local library!

And I'm back

2010-01-25T00:00:00-08:00

OK, so it’s been over a year since my last post (of which I completed all except two). But here I am now with a wonderful new design, thanks to Sprout Creative and a new outlook on blogging.

I’ve taken a bit of a different approach to blogging this time. Instead of using a content management system like Wordpress or Movable Type, I’m opting for static html. The pages are generated by Jekyll after being written in GNU Emacs. I’m hoping that this tool set makes it easier for me to get posts up. Let me know if you have any questions about the process or if you have any comments about the design.

We’ll see if it sticks. If you don’t hear from me for another year, then you’ll know that this little experiment failed.

Resolutions

2009-01-06T00:00:00-08:00

I have been mulling these over for the past couple of days but I thought I’d post them to the internets in hopes of injecting some accountability into the whole morass.

Get knee fixed
Go on vacation somewhere besides San Francisco/Oakland or Rhode Island with wife and child
Take better photos
Bake cake for wife’s birthday
Lay off the sugar and don’t lay around as much (uhm, after I bake the cake)
Learn Clojure
Fix what ails desktop computer
Clean out top drawer of bureau
Rebalance 401K
Turn 40 (yeah, I’m old)

If you are reading this and want a health check, feel free to ping me.

Dojo snippets for emacs

2008-12-14T00:00:00-08:00

I’ve been using Dojo for a couple of months now and I really like it as it makes writing cross-browser JavaScript a breeze.

I’ve also been using emacs with YASnippet for a bit now too. YASnippet is a plugin for emacs that allows you to define a snippet that’ll get transformed into something much bigger in your file. It saves you a lot of typing as you can define areas in your snippet where you get prompted to enter text and it’ll autofill with your entries. Very handy, let me tell you. There’s a screencast on YouTube showing how powerful it is.

Which brings me to the point of this post. I’ve created a package of snippets aimed at people writing Dojo based JavaScript. It’s hosted up on GitHub if you would like to use it. Currently, it only includes (what I feel to be) the major functions but feel free to contact me if you’d like to add more.

svn log made easy

2008-12-01T00:00:00-08:00

svn log is a great command to see what’s going on in your subversion repository. Unfortunately, at my job we are using a really old version (1.1.4!), a version so old that it doesn’t support the --limit argument. This makes the svn log painful to use as it outputs EVERYTHING.

Luckily, svn log is so awesome that it overcomes this weakness and allows you to use a date based criteria for listing log statements. Unfortunately, the syntax is hard for me to remember. Thus, I wrote this little shell script function that’ll list activity for the given days in the past. You can put it in your .bashrc and run it like svnlog 14. That’ll output logs from the last 14 days.

svnlog() {
    OFFSET=$1
    shift
    svn log -r HEAD:{"`date -d "$OFFSET days ago" +%Y-%m-%d`"} $*
}

Commandline Fun

2008-11-05T00:00:00-08:00

Insprired by an article on ibm.com about using twitter from the command line, I wrote up a simple little script to get your friends updates.

Here it is:

$ curl -s -u username:password \
http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.xml |
awk '/<text/ {
  gsub(/<\/*text>/,"");
  text = $0;
}
/screen_name/ {
  gsub(/ *<\/*screen_name>/,"");
  print $0;
  print text;
}'

All it does it is use cURL to grab the timeline from twitter. Then it passes it through awk to extract the name and text from your buddies. Simple and silly, yes?

More Keyboard Fun

2008-10-28T00:00:00-07:00

Continuing along on the keyboard theme, most Google apps have keyboard shortcuts. I’ve started using Google calendar and found the keyboard shortcuts for it as well. Very handy.

Google Calendar keyboard shortcuts

Throw away that mouse

2008-10-10T00:00:00-07:00

I’m not a big fan of using the mouse. It pains me to reach for it to accomplish something. That’s why I was really excited to find the Mouseless Browsing add-on for Firefox.

From the add-on’s homepage:

Mouseless Browsing (MLB) is a Firefox-Extension which enables you to browse the internet with the keyboard. The basic principle is to add small boxes with unique ids behind every link and/or form element. You just have to type in the id and press enter (there is also an automatice mode available) to trigger the corresponding action i.e. following a link, pressing a button or selecting a textfield.

I could never get w3m working how I liked it so Mouseless Browsing really scratches an itch I have.

Speaking of keyboard navigation....

2008-10-10T00:00:00-07:00

Did you know that you can navigate Google search results with your keyboard?

It’s a Google Labs experiment so you’ll have to enable it on any machine you want to try it.

To experience the glory of navigating search results with your keyboard, head on over to Google Experimental Search and click "Join" for the Keyboard Shortcuts experiment. Then it’s simply a matter of pressing "J" to navigate down the search results and "K" to move up your search results on Google. Pressing "O" will then open up the link for you. There are a few others that you might like as well so give this experiment a whirl.

The keyboard shortcuts key will also show up on your search results page so that’ll help you remember them. (Experienced vi users will of course recognize these keyboard shortcuts.)

jQuery and Friendfeed experimentation

2008-07-24T00:00:00-07:00

So, I created a little page that’ll dump out the last 30 items from my Friendfeed feed.

jQuery and the Friendfeed API make it incredibly easy. It only took me about 15 minutes to get it working. The rest of the time was making it ugly with my crazy design skills.

It’s over on my vanity site if you are curious to check it out.

Google Code Search to the rescue

2008-06-18T00:00:00-07:00

Mmkay, this tip is probably a gazillion years late but Google Code Search is a great resource for a budding developer. Heck, I’m a relatively seasoned developer and I use it.

It allows you to search public source code using a variety of methods. You can search for an exact string or a regex. You can search certain files, certain packages and certain languages.

For instance, today I was curious how to use the Perl API for writing a Pidgin plugin as their documentation is a tad sparce. A quick search looking for Purple::Find::buddy and I found a whole bunch of examples. You can also use it for silly things, like looking for quotes from "Hitchiker’s Guide To The Galaxy."

It’s official, Google now owns me. sigh

Machine specific startup files in BASH

2008-06-10T00:00:00-07:00

Here’s a helpful tip if you use a couple of different machines and need specific things set up on a specific machine.

Just add the following to your .bashrc

## Read Generic RC                                                                            
for rcfile in "$HOME/.shell/"*.rc;
do                        
    if [ -r "$rcfile" ]; 
done

Thus, common things are stored in your .bashrc (like aliases, functions, etc.) and things you want on a specific machine are in their own directory.

Then, just put whatever machine specific files you want/need in ~/.shell and name them with .rc. For instance, I have ~/.shell/smurf.rc that sets up some smurf information.

export FAVORITE_SMURF="Poppa Smurf"
export SMURF_LOVER=$HOME/bin/blue_love

That way, if I ever need something that’s specific to a machine, I just drop it in my .shell directory and away we go.

Cost of try/catch in JavaScript

2008-02-15T00:00:00-08:00

I know that in Java, using a try/catch is fairly expensive vs. a if check. Since JavaScript has the same syntax for the most part, I wrote up a simple benchmarking script to test it out. On my box, it outputs:

if avg: 0.029
try avg: 1.372

Note, that you’ll need the Firebug plugin for Firefox in order to run this.

var tryFunc = function () {
  try {
    document.getElementById("fake").innerHTML = "hi there";
  } catch (e) {
    // eat it!
  }
}

var ifFunc = function() {
  var el = document.getElementById("fake");
  if (el) {
    el.innerHTML = "hi there";
  }
};

function benchmark(name, func) {
  var repeats = 1000;
  var elapsed = 0;
  var startTime =0;
  var endTime = 0;
  for (var i=0; i< repeats; i++) {
    startTime = new Date().getTime();
    func.call();
    endTime = new Date().getTime();
    elapsed += (endTime - startTime);
  }
  console.log(name + " avg: " + (elapsed / repeats ) );
}

benchmark( "if", ifFunc );
benchmark( "try", tryFunc );

HOWTO: Invoke a shell script on a file on save with emacs

2008-01-22T00:00:00-08:00

At my current job, we use a lot of Template Toolkit. Due to some design decisions (that I consider a tad strange), we have to run a shell script on the template files (e.g. files that end with “.tt”) after they are saved in order for them to be displayed on the dev site.

Since I started using emacs about two months ago, I’ve learned quite a bit. A new thing on the learning heap is the after-save-hook. Emacs to the rescue yet again.

Here’s a emacs lisp function I wrote to automate the execution of the script when a template file is saved:

(defun ssm-cheetah-after-save-hook ()
  "After saving a tt file, run the language_update file"
  (if buffer-file-name
      (progn
        (setq is-tt-file (numberp (string-match "\.tt$" buffer-file-name)))
        (if is-tt-file
            (progn
              (setq cmd (concat (getenv "B") "/bin/YOURSCRIPTHERE --template="))
              (shell-command (concat cmd buffer-file-name))
              (message "Updated template with %s" buffer-file-name))))))
(add-hook 'after-save-hook 'ssm-cheetah-after-save-hook)

What it does, is first defines a function that checks to see if we have a file name, (which should probably always be true since we are saving now that I look at it). If we do, check to see if the name ends with “.tt.” If it does, pass the name of the file to the shell script and output a message to the user saying the template was updated. Finally, the function is added to the after save hook.

Emacs Tips

2007-12-28T00:00:00-08:00

Since I’ve been programming more Perl than Java lately, I’ve started using emacs as my primary IDE. Been checking out a few sites with tips and tricks to help me along the path of conversion from vi to emacs. Trey Jackson’s blog seems pretty promising.

Hopefully, he can keep up the tip a week format. Allegedly, he has 150 tips so he should be good for 3 or so years.

Lisp Fun

2007-10-30T00:00:00-07:00

Interested in learning Lisp? A new site has launched with screencast episodes about developing an application in Lisp. The site is LispCast and so far there are three videos up. It’s about building a web application that is a clone of Reddit. The subject of the videos so far are writing it, developing tests and refactoring. They each clock in at about twenty minutes and are quite helpful.
It looks like the creator, one Eric Normand, has some pretty big plans for the site. Let’s hope that he is able to do it. I know I’m rooting for him.

Intellij IDEA and Linux: Not Like Peanut Butter and Chocolate

2007-10-22T00:00:00-07:00

I love me some Intellij and I love me some Linux. Unfortunately, they don’t play too well together. Lots of keyboard shortcuts do operating system commands.

For instance, CTRL+ALT+L reformats your code in Intellij but it never gets a chance to that because that keyboard sequence locks the desktop on Ubuntu. Besides changing quite a few keyboard shortcuts in the administration screen, does anyone have any tips or tricks?

Editing Huge Amounts of Files Easily

2007-10-06T00:00:00-07:00

Where I work, we have tons of static html files that are published using our custom built Content Management System. Sometimes, we have to change a single line on every single page. For example, the latest case involved a change involving the size of ads that were on the pages. Rather than use publishing and database resources just to make this relatively simple change, I use the power of the shell. Specifically, I use find, sed and a shell script that I wrote. It’s based on a shell script in the Unix Power Tools book.

First off, we need to find all the files. I usually accomplish this with something simple like

$ find /www -type f -name "*.html" -print

This simply finds that end with .html in the /www directory. You can do more complex things with find like find all files modified in the last 2 days by Frank if you needed to change files like that.

The results of this will be passed off to a file named replace.sh located in my ~/bin directory. Replace.sh is reproduced here:

#!/bin/sh
temp=/tmp/replace$$
echo -n "editing $1: "
if test "$1" = sedscr; then
    echo -n "Not editing sedscript!"
elif test -s $1; then
         sed -f sedscr $1 > $temp
    if test -s "$temp"; then
        if cmp -s "$1" $temp; then
            echo -n "FILE NOT CHANGED: "
        else
            # save original, just in case
            # mv $1 $1.bak
            cp $temp "$1"
        fi
        echo -n "done"
    else
        echo -n "Sed produced an empty file \
- check your sedscript".
    fi
else
    echo -n "ORIGINAL FILE IS EMPTY"
fi
rm -f $temp
echo

So, the command we would run would now look like this:

$ find /www -type f \
      -name "*.html" \
      -exec ~/bin/replace.sh {} \;
<span class="nv">$ </span>find /www -type f <span class="se">\</span>
      -name <span class="s2">&quot;*.html&quot;</span> <span class="se">\</span>
      -exec ~/bin/replace.sh <span class="o">{}</span> <span class="se">\;</span>


This does the same as above but passes each file found by the find command above  to the ~/bin/replace.sh script.
You’ll notice that the replace.sh file calls sed using a file named sedscr.  The next step is creating the sedscr file.
The sedscr files simple contains sed commands.  It must exist in the same directory that you call the find command above from.  Here’s a sample sedscr that just does a simple replace.
s/BigHonkingAd/NiceSmallAd/

You can enter in as many complex sed commands as you want.  It’s sed so the power is there!
This simply replaces all instances of BigHonkingAd with NiceSmallAd in each of your  files found by the find command.  The nice thing about the replace.sh script is that it will not edit the file if the contents of your sedscr don’t produce an altered file.  Also, if you want the replace.sh to make a backup of your original file, just uncomment the mv line.
Using this methodology, I’m able to edit about 5000 files a minute.  It could probably be faster if I used xargs and the output of replace.sh is a little verbose but this solution has worked for me for years and if it ain’t broke, why fix it?

Vim Tip: Select Column

2007-09-27T00:00:00-07:00

How many times have you wanted to replace a column of text with something. With vim it’s easy. Just use CTRL-V to select a column using a visual block.

Once it’s selected, you can do a search and replace, yank, cut and other actions. For example, here’s the keystrokes to change a column.

Put cursor and beginning of text to select
Press CTRL-V to begin select of the column
When you reach the end of your select, type ‘c’
Type the new text. Note that this will only replace the first instance.
Now hit <ESC><ESC>. All the text has been changed!

The same thing works with plain old ‘v’ (select character by character) and SHIFT-V (select by line).

Happy vimming!

Just Cuz'

2007-09-20T00:00:00-07:00

OK, I’ve decided that the next programming langauge I learn is Lisp. I just love all the parenthesis I guess. An excellent Lisp tutorial is Peter Siebel’s book Practical Common Lisp.

Fun stuff.

Command Line Fun

2007-07-15T00:00:00-07:00

If you use the command line in bash, you should check out the CDPATH environment variable. It’ll make your life tons easier.

From the bash man pages, CDPATH is defined as:

The search path for the cd command. This is a colon-separated list of directories in which the shell looks for destination directories specified by the cd command. A sample value is “.:~:/usr”.

In my .bashrc, I’ve got the following defined:
CDPATH='.:..:../..:~/projects'

This allows me to just type cd app when I want to go to ~/projects/app. Another great part of it is that if I am in /var/log and want to go to /var/www I only need to type cd www. The .. in the CDPATH takes care of finding it.

The important part of it is the first one. The single period allows for cd to work normally and find directories in your current directory.

Ten Keyboard Shortcuts for IntelliJ IDEA

2007-06-29T00:00:00-07:00

For my day job I use Java quite a bit. And to edit I use IntelliJ IDEA. I used to use Eclipse but work paid for an IntelliJ IDEA license and I’ve become hooked. The refactorings and clean interface are a boon to my productivity.

Well this post isn’t an IntelliJ IDEA fanboy post so let’s get back on track. Here’s a list of shortcuts that I find most helpful for use with IntelliJ IDEA. Note that these aren’t the obvious ones (like Alt-Space for code completion). These are some hidden ones that you might not know about it.

Ctrl-/: Comment out the selected lines with //.
Ctrl-D: Copy the current line and paste it.
Ctrl-Y: Delete the current line.
Ctrl-BACKSPACE: Delete to word end from cursor.
Ctrl-DEL: Delete to word start from cursor.
Ctrl-W: Select the current word. Press it again and it selects more of the code block.
Shift+F10: Run the configuration
Shift+F9: Debug the configuration
Alt+F7: Find usages of the current word
Ctrl-J: Bring up the Live Template context menu. If you don’t know about Live Templates, you can save major keystrokes by defining them.

For a complete list of keyboard shortcuts for IntelliJ IDEA, there’s a PDF issued by JetBrains floating around.

Linux Cut and Paste

2007-06-20T00:00:00-07:00

Since I’m in the process of switching to Ubuntu I’ve been hunting down tips and tricks. One great resource is the Ubuntu Blog. Today they had a great tip for copying and pasting in GNOME.

Basically, what you do is highlight the text in one application (for example Firefox), switch to another application and then click the middle mouse button where you want the text to show up. Your highlighted text is now exactly where you want it. If you don’t feel like using the mouse, you can use Shift+Insert in the second application to paste the text.

Cygwin And SSH Tip

2007-06-13T00:00:00-07:00

Auto completion for ssh under cygwin was driving me nuts. It wasn’t parsing the ~/.ssh/known_hosts file like it should have and using those values to auto-complete. Investigating, (by using ssh -v) I found out that my known_hosts didn’t exist in ${HOME}/.ssh and ssh was using the one in C:/Documents and Settings/smason/.ssh. Uh, excuse me? My $HOME is /home/smason. I cd ~ and I’m in /home/smason. Bafflement ensued.

Turns out my /etc/passwd was all mucked up. It had my HOME directory set to the one in my Documents and Settings directory. I manually edited my /etc/passwd and now ssh auto completion works.

Wow, the second post in a row dealing with auto completion. I guess I really like auto-completion. Think of the keystrokes I’m saving you!

.bashrc Fun With Subversion

2007-06-12T00:00:00-07:00

Do you use Subversion a lot from the command line in bash? Then this tip is for you.

Add the following to your .bashrc

# svn completion
_svn ()
{
    local cur prev
    COMPREPLY=()
    cur=${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]}
    prev=${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD-1]}
    if [ $COMP_CWORD -eq 1 ] || [ "${prev:0:1}" = "-" ]; then
        COMPREPLY=( $( compgen -W 'add blame cat checkout cleanup commit copy \
        delete diff export help import info list lock log merge mkdir move \
        propdel propedit propget proplist propset resolved revert status \
        switch unlock update' $cur ))
    else
        COMPREPLY=( $( compgen -f $cur ))
    fi
    return 0
}
ccomplete -F _svn -o default -X '@(*/.svn|.svn)' svn

Save your .bashrc, source it (using source .bashrc) and now Subversion commands will complete. For example, enter svn upd press the Tab key and you’ll get svn update.

Think of all the keystrokes you’ll be saving.

Update: I just found Subversion’s own bash completion script which has a ton more options. Mine is easier to maintain. :)

Got Ugly SQL?

2007-06-09T00:00:00-07:00

Sometimes you have a bunch of SQL statements that are very long, very verbose and very unreadable. Would you spend minutes of your time to format the SQL in strings so that it’s readable? Would you paste the ugly SQL in your source code letting some future maintainer try and decipher it? Well, I’m about to save you a metric ton of time as well as your reputation with maintainers of your code. Use SQL Formatter and it’ll do all the grunt work for you.

It’s bloody easy to use. Just Accept the usage agreement, paste in your offending SQL statement and choose the formatting and output you want. Bingo! Nicely formatted SQL. You can even choose to format it as a string in the language of your choice so you can just copy and paste it into your source.

If you don’t feel comfortable using an online tool, there’s a desktop version that’s postcardware.

Give it a whirl!

Keeping It Real Safe And Real Easy

2007-06-02T00:00:00-07:00

OK, I’ve fallen in love with putting my home directory in Subversion. The benefits are enormous. They include (but are not limited to):

ease of setting up environment on new system
backup
ability to go “back in time” using Subversion tags

Mind you I don’t put everything in there, just the important stuff like my shell configuration files and my vim configuration files. Other important files (like pictures and music I spent ages ripping) are backed up in other ways.

Here’s what I currently have saved in svn:

$ svn ls http://my.svn.server/svn/home-dir/trunk/
.Xdefaults
.antrc
.bash_profile
.bashrc
.dircolors
.inputrc
.irbrc
bin/
vim_local/

So now when I’m on a system, I’ll have the same look and feel and same functionality as the utilities I use will be available in my ~/bin directory.

For those astute readers, you’ll notice that I don’t have a .vimrc file in there. That’s because I’m using an excellent tip from Amir Salihefendic
about taming your vim config. Basically on each system I have a specialized but simple .vimrc that sources the vim_local for what it needs.

I’ve found this setup works great on the many different systems I use throughout a given week (e.g. Windows, Mac and Linux). And I’m safe in the knowledge that my configuration files won’t disappear should my machines suddenly implode.

Debugging Is Sexy Good Times

2007-05-24T00:00:00-07:00

I love me some JSON. The problem with it is that it’s not too human readable when you need to see what it’s returning. Sure you could litter your code with alerts or console.debug (if you are using Firebug and Firefox to figure out what values are you getting back.

But if you’ve got the Firefox/Firebug setup (and why don’t you if you don’t?) then you can just use the Firebug console to display the JSON data. Say for instance you have the following data returned from your service (but imagine it’s a bazillion lines long):

{"SomeObject":{"Attrib1":"foo",
               "Attrib2":"bar",
               "SubObject": {"SubAttrib1":"bar"}
              }
}

Just wrap that in an eval function, plug it into the console and you get back a nice little tree of your data in the DOM view.

Now isn’t that sexy?

Writing Tests For Fun And Profit

2007-05-22T00:00:00-07:00

Learning a new programming language historically starts off with the classic “Hello World” example. I’ve probably written a variation on that a bazillion times. From there you take more steps into advanced parts of the language. If you are smart, you save your example programs to refer back to them later. But there’s a better way. And that better way is to write test cases that exercise the capabilities of the language you are trying to learn. This also works for new libraries within a language you are trying to learn.

The advantages of writing test cases are plentiful. It gets you writing actual code which helps you remember, they can be usually be run easily, they serve as an extra source of documentation about what you are trying to do (e.g. “How do I use gsub again? Oh yeah, it’s in that string test I wrote?”) and finally writing tests is fun.

An Example
After ignoring it for way too long, I recently started trying out the Yahoo! User Interface Library. It’s a JavaScript library with scads of useful utilities for buidling web applications. So, I pulled up the documentation and started writing a tests based on what’s documented. Since it’s JavaScript, I used JsUnit since I’m used to JUnit on the Java side of things. And voila we have our first test:

<html>
    <head>
    <title>Test Yahoo</title>
    <script type="text/javascript" 
        src="jsUnitCore.js"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript" 
        src="yahoo.js"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript">
    <!--
        function testIsArray() {
            assertTrue(YAHOO.lang.isArray([1,2]));
        }
    //-->
    </script>
</head>
<body>
    A test document.
</body>
</html>

(I know it’s very simple but I just wanted to get a feel for the first method in the global library and type it so my brain remembered it.)

So, now I drop the test file into my test runner and here we have the results:

Can’t you just feel your brain expanding with the possibilities?

Welcome

2007-05-22T00:00:00-07:00

Hello and welcome to sethmason.com. This site is basically an experiment to set up a site that’s a resume of sorts. It will feature articles about technology that reflect my depth of knowledge.

The site itself is set up using TextPattern. Normally, I would eat my own dog food and use a Java based content management system but I wanted to give PHP and Textile a test. So far, I’m impressed.

For more information about myself, check out my about page. And feel free to leave a comment.