Whalesalad

Earlier this evening I was dealing with a directory of .tif images that all needed to be renamed with the same prefix.

zmv -W '*' 'ARBESKO_*'

This command will take all files in the current directory and give them the prefix of ARBESKO_. So, 452.tif becomes ARBESKO_452.tif which is just what the doctor ordered.

The zmv utility is part of zsh, my preferred shell (as opposed to bash). #

We just got through transitioning into some new offices here at ZehnerGroup. Unfortunately our new location doesn't have the most amazing selection of internet offerings to choose from, so we're using Clearwire 4G at the moment. It's doing pretty well, but the DNS services are lacking. Namebench helps you find the best DNS service for your current network provider. #

Sometimes you run into issues where a DOM event has an event hooked to it, but you can't specifically find in your code where that event was bound. This bookmarklet helps by letting you inspect an element and find attached events. Handy! #

Install the Debian source (and the development tools, especially debhelper), and then build the package. Step by step:

add a deb-src line for sid to your sources.list
apt-get update
apt-get build-dep packagename
apt-get -b source packagename

the resulting debs should be in the current directory. Use dpkg -i <debfile> to install! #

Even though I've moved on to Python, I will always soft spot in my heart for PHP. The one thing that PHP still has going for it is it's ease of deployment. Everyone supports it, and launching it doesn't require any configuration whatsoever. That being said, there are certain instances where using PHP is actually refreshing, so seeing new stuff like this gets me stoked. I like the fact that they don't tout themselves as an MVC framework, but rather a collection of independent modules that end up being an HTTP request/response framework. Cool stuff for real. #

Super handy script you can use to mass-compress PNG's inside of your project. It requires pngcrush to work (this just wraps pngcrush to make crushing an entire directory simple). For those of you with OS X, check out homebrew and then install with brew install pngcrush. #

Great article benchmarking and outlining the differences between python web servers Gunicorn, uWSGI (my current choice), mod_wsgi, etc... #

Super stoked about the new deferreds shenanigans, and the $.ajax() rewrite. #

I've always been interested in Lua because of it's similarities to Javascript and Python, two languages that I cherish dearly. With the advent of "server-side" Javascript (node.js, V8, etc...) the need for things like Lua isn't as strong, but I'd still love to play around with it. This is Zed Shaw's attempt at challenging himself by building a micro Lua web-framework to play nice with his Mongrel2 server. Pretty neat! #

This is very exciting news for the Django framework! Hopefully the migration path over to 1.3 won't be a huge pain in the ass. #