A couple of one liners to easily bulk add or remove files in subversion:
svn st | grep ^? | sed 's/? //' | xargs svn add svn st | grep ^! | sed 's/? //' | xargs svn rmsvn st | grep ^! | sed 's/! //' | xargs svn rm
They can even handle files with spaces.
In my opinion, far to many people continue to reinvent the wheel. There is nothing wrong with building a better wheel that is suited for your specific task, but don’t start from scratch just for the sake of starting from scratch. To continue my trend of hemorrhaging proverbs, suck it up and stand on the shoulders of giants. You will still be respected as alpha geek and your boss will be impressed because what really matters is doing it right, doing it well and getting it done. Chances are someone out there has already done what you are trying to do and they might have even done it better then you could yourself. This means that if you have the right tools and resources you don’t need to and should not sacrifice quality. Here are some tools we have used in various projects for a solid foundation to build from or even just use in our concepts and working demos. I have also included tools we use for debugging, development, design and other such tasks. I will continue to update this list as more come to mind: Read the rest of this entry »
Over the past couple of weeks we have been struggling with a rather intelligent spam bot (or person?) that has been hammering one of our clients forms. Currently we are using a non-image based representation of a set of digits you have to type in to successfully post the form. On top of that we have implemented a minimum time limit as well as a dummy form field that is positioned off screen so a user will not see or fill it out. If it is filled, we know it is a bot because in the markup, it is directly below the real input field… It worked for a couple days bit has now been broken =( We have a couple more tricks up our sleeves that we are working on and will report back on our findings. Now the question that comes to mind is, should I post the details of the new captcha if it is successful? Or would that just give the spammers the means to break it?
Here is a really cool CAPTCHA implementation from www.captcha.net and is based around the concept of tracing around a specific image from a set. It is called squigle-pix: http://server251.theory.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/sq-pix . I would like to see a bot break that!! Only problem is, I can’t find an easy to implement version of this; it seems like it just exists as a proof of concept.
Recently we have been playing around with nginx for a couple of projects we have been working on and I think I have fallen in love with a web server. After using apache for so many years, I did not think that this could be possible, but it is!! For what we are using it for, it is superior in almost every aspect: installation, configuration, speed, memory usage, etc. Not to mention the fact that most of our apache deployments are often tainted by the beast that is cPanel/WHM… The reason I am writing this article is to hopefully alleviate the pain of trying to figure out how to setup phpmyadmin or other such applications in a non-document root setup when you are just learning the ins-and-outs of nginx configuration.
Just a quick tip because it is probably the main stumbling block when learning nginx configuration vs apache configuration; the root directive works differently in nginx. In nginx it will append the directory from the matching location block to the request. Taken from the docs: “so that a request for “/i/top.gif” will not look in “/spool/w3/top.gif” [but in /spool/w3/i/top.gif] like might happen in an Apache-like alias configuration where the location match itself is dropped. Use the alias directive to achieve the Apache-like functionality.” But I digress.
Most of the online documentation and tutorials explain how to get php running globally or how to get phpmyadmin to work from document root, but I had to dig deep to get it to work like www.domain.com/phpmyadmin/ . I didn’t want every .php script to be run as php and I did not want phpmyadmin installed at document root. Here is what I found:
location /phpmyadmin { root /usr/local/nginx/html; index index.php; }location ~ ^/phpmyadmin.+.php$ { root /usr/local/nginx/html; fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000; fastcgi_index index.php; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name; include fastcgi_params; }
Not many people know how Base-10 started or where it came from, so I am going to give you a brief history lesson that will shed some light on our origins and how we came to be.
It all started back in 2003 almost 7 years ago… Ramin and I both trained in Kickboxing and attended Champions Martial Arts. Ramin was 19, I was 17 and we were not even good friends at the time, in fact I clearly remember Ramin picking on me. We had been training together for more then 5 years at the time and knew that we were both computer geeks. Ramin was into graphics and 3d rendering and I was into linux system administration; we were both into gaming. This is how we first connected, by fragging and ganking each other in Counter Strike and other such games. One day I was approached by Amin Sabounchi, another member of Champions, asking me if I knew how to make websites because he was interested in getting a new real estate site for his business. I told him what any 17 year old underachiever, wannabe computer hacker would say, “Of course I do!!”. To tell you the truth, I did not know how to make a website, especially a dynamic real estate website.. all I knew was some super basic HTML and the general concepts involved.. I had no programming experience and absolutely no design skills. Armed with nothing but an idea of where to start, I bought a book on Perl (Programming Perl!!) and called up Ramin with a proposition. Read the rest of this entry »
It just so happens that our office is located within walking distance to probably the most fantastic café in Vancouver (imho). The name of the café is a bit of a mouthful, but well worth the effort to remember: The Café for Contemporary Art or just cafca for short. Last night they hosted an after party for the Vancouver Coffee & Tea show and featured a 9 station pour over bar.
I figured I would join the party in blogging about the launch of Google Street View in Canada. Privacy concerns aside, I think it is a very cool service and will come in handy for all sorts of things. Other then personal uses, we will be integrating it into our real estate sites so that users can check out a house as if they are standing in front of it.
One downside of the service is that you have no control of when or what was taken in the photos. As you can see from this shot of our office there is a huge van in the way =(
I came across an interesting product during my afternoon web wanderings; so interesting in fact, I decided to blog about it. Being somewhat of a geek and coming from a programming/system administration background, I naturally try to optimize my surroundings and myself. Some would call this being a perfectionist or a tad OCD, but I think it is just a healthy urge to make oneself better. Lest I go of on a random tangent, the product I came across today is called the Zeo Personal Sleep Coach.
Capitalism’s language also says that our labor is a commodity to be bought and sold in a competitive marketplace. And it equates our personal identities with our economic roles in the market place. Think, for instance, of the intrinsically bizarre way we describe someone to a stranger. We usually say “He (or she) is an x,” where “x” is the persons profession.
– Thomas Homer-Dixon, The Upside of Down
I have often pondered this, but have been unable to articulate it myself. Capitalism has many pros and many cons, but it is a damn shame we have become defined by our professions. Should we not be defined by who we actually are? By our mannerisms, our temperaments, even our idiosyncrasies? Yes, I know, what we do is very much a part of who we are, but these days it is given far to much emphasis. I would rather be known as funny or a great snowboarder then a business owner or programmer.
It turns out you can easily provide a link for your users to post something to their twitter account; say a link to an interesting blog post or some other such thing.
http://twitter.com/home?status=Check+Out+This+Blog+Post:+http://cli.gs/3ZeD5X
