RoughingIT

http://www.scribefire.com/

This tool makes it too easy to post blogs while browsing.

If you need to provide a directory to serve just for demo sake, or allow people to briefly be able to download files from your system, and you have python with you (Linux or Mac OS X, Windows will need a separate download). You just need to go the the directory you want to serve, type in the one liner in the command line “python -c 'import SimpleHTTPServer; SimpleHTTPServer.test()'” and proceed to http://localhost:8000/ and your webserver is ready to do your bidding.

Tip thanks to tekNico (or Nicola Larosa), deep in the bowels of the fortunes page where it reads:

Instant web server:
1) cd /directory/to/be/published
2) python -c 'import SimpleHTTPServer; SimpleHTTPServer.test()'
3) point your browser to http://localhost:8000/
4) Profit. :^)
 -- N. Larosa

Crusty Bugger » Nike+ iPod WordPress Widget Installation Tutorial

Woot! Got the wordpress widget installed with a few problems that I managed to fix.

Problem 1: Widget displays in miles, changed to KM

Problem 2: Somehow the DOCTYPE text is displayed before the white box. (See Screenshot). Fixed by downloading the nplus.xsl from the site, commented it out by hand, and change the script to grab the xsl from the filesystem.

Problem 3: Can’t really fix this one as I don’t have the time :P. When the plugin has got problems downloading the data from the nike plus website, we get a NaN (Not a Number) as the result. This can be solved by caching IMHO. I believe that caching the data for an hour or a day won’t stress out the data retrieval that the Nike servers sometimes faced.

Anyway, here’s a pat on the back to Chris Bert for writing such a cool utility. I can’t wait for the version 0.2

Taiwan quake disrupts Internet:

HONG KONG: The strong Taiwan earthquake, measuring a magnitude of 7.1, damaged several undersea data cables in the region on Wednesday, jamming up the Internet, a Hong Kong phone operator said.

Internet was slow this morning, then the tubes get clogged up by lunchtime, causing the internet to come to a grinding halt. Singapore sites are reachable, and the sites that most of us go to (not in Singapore), are ‘dead’. I told my colleague that it could be due to natural causes, seeing how it’s been raining cats and dogs these few days. He called up the ISP and that’s where we got the news.

I don’t really rely on the internet to do work, but when the internet is down, so does the morale :). Anyway, things are fine now. I guess we are now on a slower backbone, but as long as it works, I’m happy.

OMG! I must be living in the dark ages or something, as I didn’t realize that you can tag location on a photo, and Flickr will then map the location for you.

I’m going to ‘need’ a GPS enabled camera, as this looks fun. I wonder if the Garmin Forerunner 305 can store points to be retrieved later, when I need the info. If yes, then I won’t need a GPS enabled camera after all. Oh, that watch should be on my wish list as well

One of the more interesting podcaster around has passed away. It’s so sudden, that I don’t really know what to say other than to dedicate this post to him.

I was looking at the comic section of my RSS reader, and Joy of Tech posted a tribute to DigitalBill. I was like, “Wha? When?”. That’s when I remember that I somewhat missed his podcast. From his voice, I could tell that he is a kind and gentle man.

GoodBye DigitalBill, you’ll be missed.

Links:
The Wizards of Technology
Joy of Tech tribute comic

Ok, I’m all about the “not using the mouse to navigate if necessary” kind of thing. But sometimes, people take things a bit too far.

While having lunch here in Pasadena, three of us were talking about how the Snap.com search engine, for which we work, is oriented toward people who enjoy images and graphical search results, but… what about people who really don’t care about images?

Hmm. “How about ‘visearch?’ Combine a vi editor with a search engine?”

That is some cool hack you got there A search engine where you can ‘dd‘ to delete certain results, ‘j‘, ‘k‘, ‘n‘, ‘N‘, ‘GG‘ movement keys, and ‘i‘nsert comments in the search. Heck ‘:w‘ saves the search, and not to mention, the vim style ‘:set bg=white‘.

Mix all that with a black background and the wholesome goodness of glowing green terminal text, you get the awesomeness that is visearch.

Links: vi search: using commands of vi to search