A Little Inspiration

If you haven’t noticed, I normally start out each blog entry with a little anecdote. I try to let you know what made me write this. Its one of my favorite parts about writing these blog posts, because it can typically be outlined like:

1. I run into a problem.
2. I come up with an idea to solve the problem.
3. I implement my idea and post the results.

Thats a lot of I’s… well, thats because it was me. Take a step back, remove those I’s, and there lies the framework, one of the true core of my motivational system. Find problems and solve them. This certainly isn’t something new for most people, but…

Sometime in the last year I “woke up.” I don’t know what I was doing before… I was certainly functioning just fine, but I wasn’t thinking like I am now. I’m much more “aware” now, and I feel like I have a lot of catching up to do. Mostly in philosophy, socially, and individually. So, when this happened I started following some sources and (partly because all of the technical blog posts that I want are too length to finish tonight) I’m going to start a new category “inspiration.” I’ll be posting links to material/media online that will hopefully inspire you to be more productive, be a better person, be more aware, and hopefully put a smile on your face.

I realize that for this to have any impact on you as an individual that you must have already “awoken” yourself. Congratulations, and keep up the great work.

Cheers.
- Joe P

My Favorite

Tony Robbin’s TED Talk, Why We Do What We Do – I’ll admit that even to this day I still haven’t completely grasped the significance of everything in this talk. But, this is clearly one of the most inspirational video’s I’ve ever seen.

And More

Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams – This gained quite a bit of popularity. Its still something amazing to see.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Audiobook (Free) by Stephen Covey – I just started listening to this (January 2009) and its pretty great. My High School Vice Principal gave every graduate in my class this book on graduation… I was not motivated enough then, but I am now.

The Junior Developer – My Number One Hurdle: Fear – This is one of a number of articles that impressed me from “The Junior Developer.”

How I Turned Down $300,000 from Microsoft to go Full-Time on GitHub – Tom Preston-Werner – Quote: When I’m old and dying, I plan to look back on my life and say “wow, that was an adventure,” not “wow, I sure felt safe.”

Spend Less Time Reading Blogs and Do Active Learning – I fell a little too deep into this habit. Reading everything there is to know on the subject, and thinking that I knew what I was talking about without ever having done any real work on the subject. Active learning is the most fundamental principle that drives this blog and why I challenged myself with this new years resolution.

Control Your Attention – Quote: Control of attention is the ultimate individual power. People who can do that are not prisoners of the stimuli around them. They can choose from the patterns in the world and lengthen their time horizons. This individual power leads to others. It leads to self-control, the ability to formulate strategies in order to resist impulses.

Updates to line.rb – Open to more suggestions

I was chatting with a friend the other day and he had some really good ideas concerning last week’s line.rb script. He wants to make an improved version. I look forward to seeing what he will come up with because he shared some great ideas. Well, I couldn’t help but implement them immediately in my version. His ideas also spurred a little creativity from me and I came up with a few new features as well. The usage is now looks like:

  # Check Cmd Line Args and Print Usage if needed
  if ARGV.size <= 1
    puts "usage: line [options] filename numbers"
    puts
    puts " options:"
    puts "   --silent or -s   Just print the line, without [#]"
    puts
    puts " number formats:"
    puts "   1-3              Prints lines 1 through 3"
    puts "   5                Prints line 5"
    puts "   -1               Prints the last line, (negative)"
    puts
    puts " extra formats:"
    puts "   ~5               Prints 2 (default) lines before and after 5"
    puts "   4~10             Prints 4 lines before and after 10"
    puts "   *7 or 8*         Prints all lines before or after the number"
    puts "   5/1              Prints 5 lines, then skips 1 line..."
    puts "   2:5/1            Starts at line 2, prints and skips..."
    puts
    exit 1

So there is some cool new syntax:

• ~# – prints 2 lines before and after the given line number

• #~# – prints the given number of lines before and after the given line number

• *# – prints all of the lines before the given line number

• #* – prints all of the lines after the given line number

• #/# – is a print and skip option

• #:#/# – allows you to provide an offset

Lets say you want to print every even line in a text file. With this script that is not a problem. The solution is: starting on the 2nd line, print 1 line, then skip 1 line. (line file 2:1/1):

I think these new formats are pretty neat. You can always access the latest version of the script on Github or in my ~/bin. I’m willing to change the syntax and introduce new concepts. Send suggestions my way by dropping a comment! Cheers.

Playing With Some More jQuery Plugins

I decided to play with some more jQuery plugins. I’m building up some experience, learning a lot, and having a ton of fun doing it. So, what did I decide to do this time? I added a sidebar to ~/bin. When you click on the logo in the top right an instructions panel will slide out on the right hand side of the screen. There is also a little magic going on with the logo.

This sidebar has some neat animation so it was fun to put into the page. It is a modified version of the jQuery pageSlide plugin. To my pleasant surprise the plugin already had the capability to run callback functions before and after the transition is run. I added a property allowing for static html so I wouldn’t need to depend on an Ajax call. Also, the default behavior of the plugin is that clicking anywhere on the document, except in the sidebar, will cause the page to slide back to normal. This is okay except that I wanted a button for usability purposes to close the sidebar and also links in the sidebar (normal anchor tags) to work. That took a little creativity but I eventually got it:

      // Make it so if the user clicks in the pageslide, it won't close
      // Exception for given closers that may be in the pageslide
      $("#pageslide-slide-wrap").click(function(e){
        if ( $('a, ' + settings.closers).index( $(e.target) ) == -1 ) {
          return false;
        }
      });

Protecting the Innocent

I also wanted to play around with some jQuery lightboxes. The one that always comes to mind is facebox. For once I didn’t have to make any major changes to the source of this plugin, instead I made a few small tweaks to the CSS.

My goal here was to provide IE6 users with a simple little “Please Upgrade Your Browser” message. I went to work, learned a lot, and came up with the following: (to view this yourself go to ~/bin and paste “javascript:if_i_were_ie6()” in your URL bar, without the quotes!):

Sure that looked great, and it had a nice message, but it ended up looking disgraceful in IE6 itself! Rather then scrap the work I left it there, to prove the point to whatever few IE6 visitors I get. The facebox works perfectly in IE8 (I haven’t tried IE7) and so I can make use of what I’ve learned elsewhere I just hope that IE6 will go away soon. I said my goodbye already.

Adding Looping to a Content Slider

A few days ago I came across the wonderfully magnificent easySlider jQuery plugin. It makes sliding content vertically or horizontal drop dead simple using totally natural markup and CSS. I immediately worked it into the design of ~/bin (this animation was in my original design on paper) and it worked flawlessly. However, like the plugin’s title implies, it was and is meant to be simple and therefore lacks some features in order to gain ease of use.

I took some time to become more fluent in jQuery, and add some enhancements by modifying the plugin. One of those enhancements was looping, and is the topic of this article. I had no prior experience working with these types of galleries and implementing looping seemed like a fun idea. So here was the result of my tinkering:

How Do You Implement Looping?

Give yourself a minute to get creative. Develop some ideas and strategies on how you would take the following markup for the slides, and make it loop.

<div id="slider">
  <ul>
    <li>content here...</li>
    <li>content here...</li>
    <li>content here...</li>
  </ul>
</div>

I came up with two strategies that use a similar technique to implement the loops. The above loop is an implementation of one of these strategies, but I wanted to compare and contrast my two versions here, and hopefully get some reader feedback on different techniques!

Hidden Moves Strategy

This strategy actually involves physically moving unseen slides around in the DOM. By moving the slides in such a way that there is always the proper “next slide” and looping can continue forever in either direction without errors.

Instantaneous Jumps between Clones Strategy

This strategy actually involves cloning the first slide and adding it to the end of the list. This now makes the first and last slides exactly the same. When we need to handling transitions to and from these slides we can instantly jump between them, and the user is none the wiser.

Comparing the Pros and Cons of Each

Hidden Moves:

• Requires no extra space (in theory).

• Simple to implement moves. 1 line executed as a callback on “next” and before the transition if “prev”

• Expensive. Requires moving slides on every transition. This is actual DOM manipulation. Sure in nearly all cases this is negligible but it could be a pain for large, complex slides.

• Wouldn’t work on looping a single slide. Kinda useless though right?

• Does it work? By taking a slide off of the front won’t everything shift? Yes, this could get tricky, I honestly haven’t tried it.

Instant Jumps:

• Requires extra space to duplicate the first slide.

• Simple to clone a slide. 1 line of jQuery.

• 1 time cost to clone, never again is there a DOM Manipulation cost.

• Has the ability to loop on a single slide.

• Tricky code to handle when to jump. Nothing difficult, just messy.

• Does it work? Yes, Its what I’m using above..

Thats it for my analysis. Do you have any suggestions?

Quickly Output Lines in a File

The other day I wanted a shell command to have somebody print out the 671st line of /etc/services on their computer. So I gave it some thought, then some more thought, scratched my head, and figured out that I couldn’t really think of a shell command that does that. A google search came up with a few `sed` and `awk` examples but I honestly found those to be a bit awkward for something that should be super simple. So I wrote my own script.

After writing the script to print out a single line, I soon found it made a lot of sense to include ranges. Taking advantage of Ruby I can even print lines from the end with negative numbers. So I spent a few minutes to clean up the script and make it a little more reusable, add some formatting, and cleaner. Here was the result:

line is now the latest addition to my ~/bin.

Also, in case you wanted to use this in a shell script or via piping, there is a `–silent` or `-s` switch that you can use that removes all of the special formatting, and prints only the specified lines. Much nice for scripts. (See the highlighted line in the image below). Enjoy!

So what exactly is line 671 of /etc/services? On my mac it is:

~/bin – Tilde Bin

So I wanted to do a little something over break. I had no idea what I would do, until I came across this article taking a look at the blueprint css framework. I had heard plenty of talk about this css framework, and other grid frameworks, and decided to give it a shot.

So I had something new I wanted to work with, what was the site actually going to be? I gave it a few minutes thought and ended up with an idea that satisfied my semi-recent Internet philosophy:

When I have something worth spreading I should write it on my blog or turn it into a webpage. This way when people ask me about it, or if I need to present the information to someone, I can just point them to that single source. This saves me from having to type and retype the same information over and over for different people. A single “master” source with the most up to date information is always optimal.

With that in mind, I decided to whip up a simple site to showcase the scripts that are in my “tilde bin” folder. Scripts that I wrote and use frequently that others might find useful. Sure I’ll still blog about them, but for those who want to download them its so much faster to point them to ~/bin instead of having them scour my blog.

And thus ~/bin was born.

Sidenotes

I was quite satisfied with the result. It took only 24 hours from Conception to Creation. I made use of Blueprint and jQuery (AJAX and animation) to create a pretty fresh website. Sure its pretty basic but I felt comfortable the entire way through, and I loved every minute of it. I’m hoping that when Ruby on Rails 3 is released, if I have some spare time, I’ll convert it and include a small admin dashboard.

As of two years ago I’ve decided to get pretty serious with my New Years Resolutions. This year (like last year) I have a few ideas I’m tossing around. It will be a few weeks until I settle on one. Typically the resolutions will help me improve my health or lifestyle. One of the ideas I’m tossing around is blogging at least once per week. Compared to the other alternatives this is certainly the most fun. It has a hint of a challenge and its pretty doable. Let me know what you think!

Dynamic Web URLs with ExpanDrive

Often when I work with ExpanDrive the files I am working on correspond to some website that I own. When I’m mounted with ExpanDrive each file is accessible via “my hard drive” in the mounted volume and, more importantly, from a web URL! I found myself repeatedly opening up my browser and manually typing the URL for files that I just uploaded or edited. This was error prone, especially if some of the characters needed encoding. So, I spent some time to write up a Ruby script that can read ExpanDrive’s preferences, build the file’s “web URL,” and open it in your default browser.

Simple to Use

I followed along with ExpanDrive’s previous command line tool named expan and named my script expanurl. Given no arguments it will open the current directory via its web URL, or you can give a list of files and each will be opened at their web URLs. Its usage is pretty straightforward but there is a single catch: the server setting in an ExpanDrive Drive may not be a true one-to-one mapping with the web server’s address.

For example: I provide holly.cs.rit.edu as the server value for one of my personal ExpanDrive drives. However, when I view files on that server (inside the public_html directory) they have a much different looking URL: http://www.cs.rit.edu/~jjp1820/. The result? The script simply keeps its own mapping of ExpanDrive server values to their associated web page prefixes. When you use expanurl on a Drive you have never used it on before the script will prompt you for that mapping, store the value, and never ask again.

Here it is in action. I have removed all stored mappings so I can demonstrate what it would be like using expanurl for the first time. Here I use it on my BogoJoker ExpanDrive drive:

Notice that in the prompt it tells you:

• the server that the ExpanDrive volume is linked to and the one you will be providing a web url prefix for
• an example of a web url prefix (useful)
• where the mappings are stored in case you need to edit them later

The script is available on GitHub, so feel free to contribute and improve. Here is a link to the always current version, and here is a snapshot of the current version at the time of writing:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
# Author: Joseph Pecoraro
# Date: Saturday December 13, 2008
# Description: When I'm using ExpanDrive and I'm
# remotely logged into a server, I can use this
# script to "open filename" and it will open using
# the server's associated URL.

# For URL Escaping and Stored Mappings
require 'uri'
require 'yaml'

# Exit with a msg
def err(msg)
  puts msg
  exit 1
end

# Simple Class to handle the mappings
class UrlMap

  MAP_PATH = File.expand_path('~/.expanurl')

  def initialize
    @hash = load
  end

  def load
    if File.exists?(MAP_PATH)
      YAML::load_file( File.expand_path(MAP_PATH) )
    else
      Hash.new
    end
  end

  def add_mapping(server, mapto)
    @hash[server] = mapto
    File.open(MAP_PATH, 'w') do |file|
      file.write(@hash.to_yaml)
    end
  end

  def is_mapping?(server)
    @hash.has_key?(server)
  end

  def get_mapping(server)
    @hash[server]
  end

  def path
    MAP_PATH
  end

end

# Local Variables
mapping = UrlMap.new
url_prefix = nil
server = nil
volume = nil

# Check the if the current directory is an
# ExpanDrive Volume and a public_html folder
pwd = `pwd`
match = pwd.match(/^\/Volumes\/([^\/]+)/)
if match.nil?
  err("Not inside an ExpanDrive Volume")
elsif !pwd.match(/\/public_html\/?/)
  err("Not inside a public_html directory.")
else
  volume = match[1]
  defaults = `defaults read com.magnetk.ExpanDrive Drives`
  defaults.gsub!(/\n/, '')
  props = defaults.match(/\{[^\}]+driveName\s+=\s+#{volume}[^\}]+server\s+=\s+"([^"]+)"[^\}]+\}/)
  if props
    server = props[1]
  else
    err("This Volume (#{volume}) is not an ExpanDrive Volume")
  end
end

# Check if a mapping exists
# Otherwise create and store one
if mapping.is_mapping?(server)
  url_prefix = mapping.get_mapping(server)
else

  # Prompt
  puts
  puts "This is the first time you've used expanurl for #{volume}"
  puts "Please Provide us with a mapping for #{server}"
  puts "Mappings are stored in #{mapping.path}"
  puts "Example: http://bogojoker.com/"
  print ">> "

  # Store user input and proceed
  url_prefix = gets.chomp
  url_prefix += '/' unless url_prefix.match(/\/$/)
  mapping.add_mapping(server, url_prefix)

  # Terminal Output
  puts
  puts "Server: #{server}"
  puts "Maps to: #{url_prefix}"
  puts

end

# Build the URL
subpath = pwd.match(/public_html\/?(.*)/)[1]
subpath += '/' unless subpath.length.zero? || subpath.match(/\/$/)
url_prefix += subpath

# If No Files, open the directory
# Otherwise,   open each provided file
if ARGV.size == 0
  `open #{url_prefix}`
else
  ARGV.each do |filename|
    `open #{url_prefix}#{URI.escape(filename)}`
  end
end

How it Works

The Ruby Script grabs the current working directory using `pwd` and checks to make sure you’re in an ExpanDrive volume. ExpanDrive volume’s are dynamically generated by parsing the ExpanDrive preferences thanks to their foresight to make them accessible via the `defaults` command. So if you’re in an ExpanDrive volume and inside a public_html directory expanurl will then use its mapping to open a uri encoded web url in your default browser with the `open` command.

The mappings are stored in a hidden YAML file in your home directory (~/.expanurl). This style of storing preferences is just like dozens of other command line applications and scripts. YAML is just a lightweight textual data format popular with Ruby, similar to JSON and XML. Its so simple that you could edit the file yourself if you wanted/needed to. For instance here is what is in mine, just two simple key/value pairs:

The Future

Its just that simple. Being a Ruby Script you can call this from GUI applications, anything with built-in shell access, etc. It should play friendly with your usual Unix tools. I will likely make this script more and more robust if others find it useful, so I’d be happy to hear some feedback.

Cheers.