Tips: extra contextual shell information for multiple environments

On my desktop, I often work on multiple projects at the same time and I am a fan of command line and terminals.

These projects have different environments (e.g. java 1.5 and maven 2.2.1 on one, java 1.6 and maven 2.0.9 on the other one).

In order to have information about the projects quickly available, I display some version information in the terminal title.

[ANNOUNCE] Groovy cmd module

Introducing Groovy Cmd, a very basic Groovy module allowing to create line oriented command interpreters in Groovy. Based on jline. MIT Licensed.

update: renamed from grails_cmd into groovy_cmd..

Flash least green desktop application ?

After a while, Flash consistently takes 80-100% CPU on my desktop. Whether it is youtube, grooveshark or any other media player, I end up having to kill the browser and restart it. This with chrome and firefox (on Linux). I keep reading similar comments on the web, apparently also for people not using Linux.

I wonder what impact does this have on the world. How many trees per day would we save by not using a broken media player ?

Split testing

Found this little django framework to implement split testing. Nice. Do you do split testing ?

Some links. A 1h video from Google (too long, I want the slides), a nice s5 presentation.


Updates:

• 2009-10-15: AB testing used by The Huffington Post.
  

Is the market getting better ?

I compiled jobserve UK stats out of my gmail IMAP box, thanks to mathplotlib. Note the graph depicts j2ee related jobs in Europe between July 2007 and now. These are not new jobs, but the amount of jobs advertised by Jobserve UK per day.

Here are the scripts.

Bank terminal GPRS failure

be.banksys.smash.UnexpectedErrorSmashException: Timeout occured.

I don't think this was expected to be printed out as is on the credit card receipt !

Happened to me yesterday while paying for a lunch in town. Someone from BBS might want to look at that ;) Feel free to contact me for more info, if needed.

Backup failures on small servers

In light of a catastrophic data loss @ T-Mobile, I went to verify backup setups I am responsible of and found out that one of them wasn't working as expected. Damn it. That's what happens when you have very little resources for a custom solution.

Online (free) issue trackers

I've been trying and using various issue trackers in the past months, in particular task2gather and pivotal tracker. This for very small projects (1-3 developers).

Synchronize firefox and chrome profiles passwords

I have been using chromium more and more on Linux. But all my passwords are saved in Firefox profile. So I wrote 2 tools to help me deal with my use of both chromium and firefox. One to dump firefox passwords, one to merge the dump into chromium's profile. Seems to work in my very limited test...

[ANNOUNCE] nosyd 0.0.5

Changes since last announced version:

0.0.5 (2009-10-09)
==================

- Nosyd should now run on Mac OS X
- Mac OS X / Growl notifier support (http://growl.info/)
- new Django builder
- new CLI options (--stop)
- be smarter at identifying the monitored project files
- some performance improvements (cache some of the monitored files resolution to lower CPU usage)
- auto-rebuild project when .nosy file is changed

0.0.4 (2009-10-06)
==================

- setuptools support. Project split into multiple files

More info here. Code still on github.

(Thanks to Sergio for testing on Mac OX X)

Python Oslo Group

Today we hold our first meeting of the new Oslo Python/Django discussion group. Feel free to join! We will try to meet once a month.

Skype ramblings

For years Skype has been a second class citizen on my desktop of choice, Linux.

Consider using application level checksums

From this 1999 document titled When The CRC and TCP Checksum Disagree, analysing abnormous rates of errors in network transfers.

Our conclusion is that vital applications should strongly consider augmenting the TCP checksum with an application sum.

Even if you're not concerned with security, it maybe wise to implement an MD5 check (or like) at the application level for your multi-gigs file transfer before you start processing them.

Source: slashdot.