Geeky things

I always forget how to take a screen shot – partially because I take one once every six months.

Alt+Shift+4 brings up the crosshairs

Alt+Shift+3 is a full screen image

The image is stored to the desktop.

[…]

As a developer, Internet Explorer is the bane of my existence. I’m hoping that this IETester product will help with testing. It still in alpha, but it claims to be a free WebBrowser that allows you to have the rendering and javascript engines of IE8, IE7 IE 6 and IE5.5 on Windows 7, Vista and XP, as well as the installed IE in the same process.

Check it out here…[…]

As some of you may know I've been working at Starz for a while now, and for the last 6 months or so we've been getting the website ready for the launch of Spartacus Blood and Sand. Pretty exciting!

Check out the trailer below:

To generate a secure public/private key pair to log in securely, and without a password (if you want) from the command line (on your box, not logged into ftp, and replacing "username" and "yourdomain" with yours)

type:

ssh-keygen -d

hit enter three times and type:

scp ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub username@ftp.yourdomain.com:.ssh/authorized_keys2

enter password and type:

ssh username@ftp.yourdomain.com

You're logged in!

I've been getting back into some Ruby on Rails stuff and had never used MySql from the command line.

Here's enough commands to be dangerous:

mysql -u root -p show databases;

use db_name_development;

show tables;

describe users; # where users is a table name

To tar and compress the folder:

 tar -czvf mydomainarchive.tgz mydomain.com/ 

To untar and decompress the folder:

 tar xvfz mydomainarchive.tgz 

To backup the mysql database:

 mysqldump -h localhost -u username -p database_name > dump_file 

To restore the mysql database:

 mysql -u username -p database < dump_file 

I think the fact that the DOS prompt is not resizable is a limitation.

For a 19" Dell LCD, the best settings that i’ve found are:

• 
  Screen Buffer Size: Width: 155


• 
  Height: 9999


• 
  Window Size: Width: 155


• 
  Height: 66

These seem to work well.

I just ran into a situation where I had a Ruby on Rails plugin (Substruct) that I am using for a site release a new version.

One big disadvantage of plugins vs. gems in the rails world is versioning because you can modify plugin code.

Anyhow, I needed to know what changes were made across the entire plugin directory structure, so that i could easily merge the changes I’ve made to the code changes that were released with the update. Enter Kdiff, an Free, Open Source, Platform agnostic tool for comparing files and directories.

http://kdiff3.sourceforge.net/

Recently i had to search within a couple of hundred JAR files to locate which Java package needed to be included in my build path. Fortunately this isn’t too difficult with the help of Cygwin and a little command line script.

 export search="search string"; for file in 'find . -name "*.jar"'; do echo $file; jar -tvf $file|grep $search; 

done