06 May 2005

Turn HTML off completely in Mail.app

HTML mail is bad enough when it works – it’s intolerable when it’s as broken as in Apple’s Mail.app.

tomayko.com   04:50

08 Aug 2004

Persistent NFS Automounting Under OS X 10.3 (Panther)

… are possible with a little work and a lot of patience.

tomayko.com   18:35

18 Jul 2004

tomayko.com   18:53

13 Jul 2004

Per Site User Stylesheets

A Firefox hack for styling specific sites using user stylesheets.

tomayko.com   22:12

12 Jul 2004

tomayko.com   18:04

24 Jun 2004

tomayko.com   21:10

10 Jun 2004

Gmail as Mailing List Aggregator

A report on my experience using GMail for mailing list activity.

tomayko.com   18:01

23 Nov 2003

tomayko.com   12:36

01 Feb 2010

Book Review: Coders at Work

A quote from Brad Fitzpatrick:

I find that is the best way to start a conversation. If you get on a mailing list and you are like ‘hey I want to add feature X’ the maintainer is probably going to be like: ‘ Oh fuck, I am so busy, go away, I hate feature X’. But if you come to them and you are like ‘I want to add feature X. I was thinking something like the attached patch’ which is totally wrong but you say, ‘But I think its totally wrong. I am thinking the right way might be to do X’ which is some more complex way, generally they will be like ‘Holly crap, they tried and look, they totally did it the wrong way. Maybe that pains the maintainer. They are like ‘ Oh man, I can’t believe they went through all that effort to do it. Its so easy to do the right thing,’ and then they reply.

This is the secret to being productive when contributing to open source. It’s very rare that you should approach a mailing list without a patch of some kind.

dfectuoso.com   01:16

27 Jan 2010

HANDY ONE-LINERS FOR RUBY

Nice list of Ruby one-liners when working at the shell. e.g., emulating nl(1):

# number each line of a file (left justified).
    $  ruby -ne 'printf("%-6s%s", $., $_)' < file.txt
# number each line of a file (right justified).
    $  ruby -ne 'printf("%6s%s", $., $_)' < file.txt
# number each line of a file, only print non-blank lines
    $  ruby -e 'while gets; end; puts $.' < file.txt

Unlike some other things, the -p and -e switches are something I’ve always been glad ruby adopted from perl.

fepus.net   10:08

03 Sep 2009

Things you didn't know you can do with a heredoc

Matt Todd and Mike Perham show off some nifty Ruby heredoc fu. It’s a gist, so fork it and add your own craziness.

gist.github.com   08:24

10 Aug 2009

The Menubar Challenge

I didn’t realize how much shit I had in my menu bar until I went through and did this:

There is a tried and true uncluttering trick for your home and office used by many professional and highly paid “Organizational Consultants”. It involves taking everything you own, save for the bare essentials, and moving it into storage. For a set period of time, retrieve items from the store when needed. Anything not accessed after said set period of time you likely do not really need and should be disposed of.

I have no idea why I ever had Sync (don’t use), TimeMachine (don’t use), Growl (useless), or Bluetooth (useless) enabled.

minimalmac.com   07:50

07 Aug 2009

20 tips for writing for the web

And every one is worth reading yet another “20 tips” post.

fatdux.com   14:25

25 May 2009

An easy way to run many tasks in parallel

Nice. The xargs(1) switch -P N will run up to N separate processes in parallel. Combine with the -n M switch for a quick and dirty process pool.

xaprb.com   08:41

26 Jan 2009

A Well-Tempered Pipeline

A lost art, indeed.

spinellis.gr   18:53

20 Jan 2009

Multiple Sinatra .90 applications in one process

Tanner Burson talks about one of the larger accomplishments of the Sinatra 0.9.0 release. We definitely need more docs on using Sinatra in this fashion.

blog.tannerburson.com   19:43

15 Jan 2009

Painless commit splitting in git

Aristotle Pagaltzis shows a pretty crazy technique for splitting a single git commit into multiple separate commits using an interactive rebase and successive checkouts on the same branch. Interesting approach. I usually pop the commit off into my working directory with git reset HEAD^ and then use multiple iterations of git add --patch + git commit until my working directory is clean again.

plasmasturm.org   15:30

How to Talk to Strangers

“If you’re still terrified by the idea of talking to strangers, challenge yourself to talk to one stranger a day, every day, for 30 days. If you’re walking past someone on the sidewalk, say ‘Hi’, and the person looks at you and keeps walking (done that many times), your job is done for the day. If you walk up to a girl in a club and say ‘Hey!’, and she responds, with a slightly grossed out look ‘I have a boyfriend.’, congratulations, you’re one step closer to improving your love life. The point of this exercise is to get you used to talking to people you don’t know and form the habit of being more social.”

wikihow.com   04:54

27 Oct 2008

Why Programmers Suck at CSS Design

Stefano Mazzocchi: “I have a much simpler and humble goal here: give programmers some tricks and some advice in how to proceed to make their web pages look cleaner, more readable and, hopefully, more professional, elegant and original than before.”

betaversion.org   13:35

20 Oct 2008

Screencast: "I use Vim for everything"

There’s so many great workflow hacks in here.

blip.tv   18:55

13 Oct 2008

The Programming Aphorisms of Strunk and White

“Of course, Strunk and White, as the book is commonly called, has nothing to do with software (it was written in 1935) and everything to do with writing: grammar, composition, and style for users of the English language. But in its 100 short pages this book has more to say about the craft of software than many books you’ll find in the ‘Computing’ section of your local bookstore. All you have to do is replace a few key words throughout the text and presto! Pearls of software development wisdom, delivered in near-perfect English.”

codingthewheel.com   11:30

07 Oct 2008

Graduating from Beer to Whisky: 10 Facts You Need to Know

“Beer is the people’s drink. Whiskey on the other hand is seen as a hard drink. It is a drinker’s drink. The sole preserve of men. It’s serious. It is the opposite end of the spectrum to fruit-based neon-coloured liquids sporting little paper umbrellas.”

foodvu.com   21:11

Don’t overuse instance_eval and instance_exec

Ola Bini: “Using instance_eval changes the rules for the language in a way that is not obvious when reading a block. You need to think an extra step to figure out exactly why a method call that you can lexically see around the block can actually not be called from inside of the block.”

Having abused instance_eval in the past, I can say with absolute clarity that it’s usually The Wrong Thing. It can make DSLish code look really cool in controlled and scoped demos but it greatly increases cognitive complexity, making things hard to read and maintain.

olabini.com   20:08

04 Oct 2008

Subtree merging and you

Very interesting alternative to git submodule, especially in “vendor branch” type scenarios. The other project is merged into yours at a specified prefix and can be updated with a simple git pull.

blog.nuclearsquid.com   18:27

27 May 2008

Git Commits That Need to be Pushed

Justin French: alias push?='git cherry -v origin' — beautiful.

justinfrench.com   16:25

23 Jan 2008

put a proxy in front

“… even if you have a single server, a proxy in front can help performance significantly. Through the simple expedient of buffering, your heavyweight processes don’t waste time serving every request for the entire length of time the client is connected”

joshua.schachter.org   22:09

19 May 2007

sog’s (Unconventional) Highway Etiquette [redmonk.com]

Beautifully done, sir. This should be required reading before anyone is allowed to hit an onramp.

redmonk.com   16:13

16 Apr 2007

highlighting "weird" characters... (in vim) [nabble.com]

Find all non-printable characters in vim (and I assume with any regexp engine) using the following: [^ –~] (that’s a char range between space and tilde). How convenient. I never noticed that the printable range ended at tilde.

nabble.com   05:44

09 Apr 2007

Setting Type on the Web to a Baseline Grid

Yes! I’ve been doing this for a few months now with the corp. assets and I won’t go back. You can really see the text snap into a vertical rhythm when you hit it.

alistapart.com   20:08

15 Mar 2007

Block Helpers and DRY Views in Rails

I’ve been using this technique for some time with great success. Oh, and this site’s design is bordering on perfection.

igvita.com   07:23

05 Feb 2007

Web Developers: 13 Command Line Tricks You Might Not Know

Anyone who doesn’t know every single one of these probably hasn’t been developing for the web very long. Probably a useful crash course for newbies making their way over from FrontPage or ASP.net though.

seomoz.org   14:07

17 Jan 2007

Lynch, Guide to Grammar and Style

Nice little style guide on the web and nicely indexed hyperlinked.

andromeda.rutgers.edu   06:42

27 Dec 2006

How To Get Started On Anything (Using Coffee)

OMFG this explains my whole life.

gradschoolstory.com   15:50

05 Dec 2006

webpagesthatsuck.com   19:14

07 Sep 2006

How to make multiple SSH connections to the same host faster

All you have to do is add a few lines to ~/ssh/config.

revsys.com   06:32

04 Jan 2006

HOWTO: Be more productive

Aaron Swartz looks at the productivity problem, how not to proscratinate, etc. This is just what I needed right now.

aaronsw.com   23:15

17 Oct 2005

The Top Ten Design Mistakes (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)

Ouch. I’m making 50% of these right now :/

useit.com   09:35

12 Aug 2005

debian-administration.org   16:18

03 Jul 2005

Mac OS X Things - Disable Dashboard

I wanted to like it but…

face.centosprime.com   16:43

13 Jun 2005

theappleblog.com   08:43

11 May 2005

Process of Forming a Company

I guess it’s okay to say out loud now that I’ll need all the information like this I can get.. :)

startupventuretoolbox.com   07:00

19 Apr 2005

Mentat Wiki

“… a collaborative environment for exploring ways to become a better thinker.”

ludism.org   17:12

artsparx.com   14:12

06 Apr 2005

kb.mozillazine.org   08:04

23 Nov 2004

Fedora Core 3 Installation Notes

Instructions for getting a FC3 installed and up to snuff.

fedoranews.org   05:10

19 Nov 2004

Emacs Keybindings for Firefox

This is one of the last things I’ve been waiting for before switching from Safari. Now if only the scrollwheel worked a little nicer and I could get a decent proxy-configuration plugin…

kb.mozillazine.org   01:55

25 Oct 2004

How do you whistle with your fingers in your mouth really loudly (or at all)?

note: trying to learn this at work seems to annoy people.

answers.google.com   09:49

19 Oct 2004

Ted's Macintosh Tips and Tricks

Excellent repository of OS X configurations, tips, applications, etc.

sauria.com   16:38

16 Oct 2004

CSS Negotiation and a Sanity Saving Shortcuts

Some tips I haven’t seen before for dealing with IE’s broken CSS support. Using conditional comments for ie specific css, setting manual defaults, etc.

leftjustified.net   14:35

05 Oct 2004

Ten Commands Every Linux Developer Should Know

ctags/etags, strace, fuser, ps, time, nm, strings, od/xxd, file, objdump

linuxjournal.com   06:46

21 Sep 2004

EmacsNewbie

Super useful tips on diving into Emacs.

emacswiki.org   02:55

19 Sep 2004

Help the Googlebot

Tips and techniques for helping Googlebot. If you are a symantic markup perfectionist, you probably already have most of these right.

scribbling.net   07:09