Mike's Blabberings

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

I never really gave Fiddler all the credit it was due. I guess I should have read the homepage:
Fiddler includes a powerful event-based scripting subsystem, and can be extended using any .NET language.

I had previously only used it as a session inspector — to review requests and responses as they occurred in the wild. [...]

I want to eventually post about some of the great things I’ve learned about Firefox and how to become a power user. I get a lot of value out of plugins and Greasemonkey scripts.
For another day…