Baby boy gear round-up

Posted by mgriffith on Jan 24th, 2010

With a baby boy on the way (due in early June 2010), I decided to start looking for fun stuff for my lil dude. I thought that maybe I’d have to wait a few years to unleash him on the world, but lo and behold there’s some seriously badass gear for infants and toddlers! [...]


Browser history sniffing with Dojo

Posted by mgriffith on Jan 14th, 2010

Niall Kennedy posted a now-famous article about using some browser trickery to determine what websites a user on your site has visited. I’ve taken that concept and created a module that can be used with the Dojo Toolkit javascript framework.
It provides two methods that you can use in your code, isVisited and isAnyVisited.
One important [...]


Batch convert images to sepia tone with python

Posted by mgriffith on Jan 13th, 2010

The Python Imaging Library (PIL) offers easy photo manipulation from python scripts. There’s some handy sample code on effbot.org that demonstrates how to alter an image’s palette to generate a sepia tone effect. It first desaturates the image, then applies a new palette based on a linear ramp.
I’ve cleanup up that sample code [...]


Recent svn commit statistics

Posted by mgriffith on Jan 13th, 2010

Here’s a little script-fu that can help determine how many lines of code were added vs. deleted for a single Subversion commit.

#!/bin/bash
if [ -z "$1" ]; then
echo "usage: $0 revision"
exit
fi
 
REV=$1
 
# Execute a svn diff on the revision, and search the output for deleted lines
# (begin with a [...]


Developing AIR apps for the desktop using the Flex 3 SDK for FREE

Posted by mgriffith on Jan 8th, 2010

One of the greatest things about Flex and Air is the low barrier to entry for us software geeks. There’s nothing stopping any non-flash software dev from writing some kickass desktop apps. There’s no reason you have to buy anything to start writing, testing, and distributing Adobe Air apps. You don’t need [...]


VIM Tip of the Day: leave python comments indented, don’t put cursor at beginning of the line

Posted by mgriffith on May 15th, 2009

If you’re ever been annoyed by VIM throwing your cursor to the left margin when you type “#” in a python file, there’s a simple remedy. It’s the fault of “smartindent” in VIM, which in reality isn’t all that smart. If you want to leave smartindent on but fix the weird hash behavior, [...]


Notes from PyCon 2009

Posted by mgriffith on Mar 29th, 2009

Just wrapping up a fantastic few days at PyCon Chicago 2009. I went with a group of about 10 guys from AGI, and we managed to have a little bit of fun in between some great mind-enriching talks.
Here are some notes I jotted down while at the conference. It’s a bit overwhelming, but [...]


Google, I love you, but you’re starting to freak me out.

Posted by mgriffith on Mar 12th, 2009

I Just got an email from Google, describing a new feature of AdSense dubbed “interest-based advertising.”
I don’t think it’s any shock that Google has the data to segment users based on their browsing habits. The shocker to me is that they’re making the result of that segmentation available to webmasters everywhere.
The full [...]


2009 MTB Race Schedule

Posted by mgriffith on Mar 3rd, 2009

OMBC has published a tentative schedule of mountain bike races for 2009. The madness begins this month! I won’t be able to make the first race, as it conflicts with PyCon, but I’m hoping to tear up Vulture’s Knob soon thereafter. I’m getting antsy to get out there and see what all the [...]


Hey Ubuntu, just to let you know, I’m about to bend you to my will

Posted by mgriffith on Feb 23rd, 2009

After fighting with Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 for months to get WIFI working, I finally found a Dell driver [0] that worked on my HP laptop through ndiswrapper [1].
A few hours later with success claimed, I decided to upgrade to Ubuntu Intrepid 8.10, assuming I had conquered all possible obstacles and that anything in the future [...]


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