Software Trenches

UC Berkeley Lectures on Google Video

UC Berkeley posted over 250 hours of course lectures and symposia on Google Video:

The lectures include:

SIMS 141 - Search, Google, and Life by Google's Founder Sergey Brin:

Reading and Writing Mac OS X Clipboard Using Ruby

Here is a neat trick on how to access OS X pasteboard services with Ruby or any other shell script. It is based on pbcopy and pbpaste:

Reverse string in clipboard:

s = IO.popen('pbpaste', 'r+').read
IO.popen('pbcopy', 'w').puts s.reverse

Generate html syntax highlighting using Syntax:

require 'rubygems'
require 'syntax/convertors/html'

convertor = Syntax::Convertors::HTML.for_syntax “ruby”

html = convertor.convert(IO.popen('pbpaste', 'r+').read)

IO.popen('pbcopy', 'r+').puts html

Gotta love Mac OS X!

Inbox Zero Nirvana

After cutting myself some slack for weeks, I woke up this morning and with a little push from my friend, I am back in the Inbox Zero nirvana.

Analyzing Log Files With Dave Taylor

Remember my previous post about Carl? It was about the set of automated scripts we use to monitor our Lighttpd logs.

In the recent issue of Linux Journal, Dave Taylor, the 26-year veteran of UNIX, shows how to analyze your logs old school:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9168

For me it is always amazing to see how you can get two or three simple UNIX utilities and do a complex task in one command. Pure magic.

I loved the scripts so much that I went to our 1Passwd web server and modified them to query the information I need. Here is a few examples:

Gaping Void On My Desk

When I just started my new business I put this picture on my desk.

It is made by Hugh Macleod from gapingvoid: “Most people are doing the best they can. Most people don't know that isn't good enough.”

I find it both sad and inspiring at the same time.

Mac Keyloggers Are Alive And Well

I often hear from the Mac users that Macs don't need to worry about viruses, keyloggers, and their kin and they point to their rock-solid FreeBSD core as proof. While I agree that OS X is far more secure than its popular counter-part, as OS X becomes more popular the malware writers will begin to target Macs. The worst badware of them all is the keylogger: if one ever gets installed on your machine you could have all your passwords cherry picked in no time!

XML craze is fading away

I was reading Subversion 1.4 release notes and noticed an interesting line:

The way in which the Subversion client manages your working copy has undergone radical changes. The .svn/entries file is no longer XML, and the client has become smarter about the way it manages and stores property metadata.

It is great to see the widespread obsession with XML is finally going away — XML was way overused.

Redesigning 1Passwd Disk Image

In my previous post I mentioned that DevonThink's disk image is too complex. There are too many items and it requires extra effort to figure out what to do next.

Looking for the best DMG design

DMG (Disk Image) is the default format for distributing software on Mac OS X. Even if DMG is a standard, the way it is packaged is not. I downloaded a few popular programs and looked at how their disk image is designed.