Textmode - tools I use

Exif Viewer - Online and Free

Fri, 06 May 2011 12:58:00 +0000

I’ve always looked for a nice and convenient way to extract exif data from images.

There you go: Exif viewer - it’s online and free, and extracts all the relevant data from your image files.

The Fisherman and The Investment Banker

Sun, 06 Feb 2011 12:58:00 +0000

The American investment banker was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellow fin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.

The fisherman replied, only a little while.

The American then asked why didn’t he stay out longer and catch more fish?

The Mexican said he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs.

The American then asked, “but what do you do with the rest of your time?”

The Mexican fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siesta with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos, I have a full and busy life.”

The American scoffed, “I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat with the proceeds from the bigger boat you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually NYC where you will run your expanding enterprise.”

The Mexican fisherman asked, “But, how long will this all take?”

To which the American replied, “15-20 years.” “But what then?”

The American laughed and said that’s the best part. “When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions.”

“Millions.. Then what?”

The American said, “Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siesta with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.”

Switched Blog from Mephisto to Nanoc

Sat, 14 Aug 2010 19:00:00 +0000

Today I switched this blog from the old, dynamic Mephisto engine to the static nanoc framework.

Plans are to write a little more again, I’ll also describe what I used for this blog in detail.

Finally: Passenger/mod_rails for Nginx!

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 07:12:00 +0000

I was really glad to finally read the news that Passenger 2.2.0 now supports my favorite webserver nginx too.

I always wanted to get rid of the somehow apache monster, which is an overkill in some scenarios (imho).

Nginx has a very easy configuration and everything I need.

If you want to test passenger with nginx it’s as simple as:

<code>
sudo gem install passenger
sudo passenger-install-nginx-module

# edit the default config:
sudo vi /opt/nginx/conf/nginx.conf

# start nginx
sudo /opt/nginx/sbin/nginx
</code>

There is also a Peepcode Screencast explaining the steps.

I’m happy :)

Mailbox sidebar for Mutt

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 08:01:00 +0000

I always found the default mailbox handling of mutt a little complicated, since it was missing an overview of folders on the main screen.

Mutt-Ng solved this by introducing a sidebar to list all your mailboxes, including a new/old mail count. However this didn’t last very long and the mutt-ng development stopped unfortunately.

I didn’t look at the possibilities regarding this issue for quite a while, since I had a mailbox status list included in my Windowmanager, however, I tried to integrate it into mutt again last week.

Fortunately the sidebar has been extracted and is now available as a patch: Mutt sidebar (folder list) patch

And for all the lazy people, there is also a debian package called mutt-patched which includes the sidebar among other useul additions.

Now I’m using the following, very nice, setup:

Image

Old Blog Comments, imported

by Justin on Wed Mar 04 09:01:00 +0100 2009

As the original author of the sidebar patch, I would like to clarify: The sidebar patch wasn't extracted from mutt-ng, they had included the one that I wrote, and it continued and continues to exist outside of that as well. </div> </div>

Ruby 1.9.1 and Rails fails - at least according to Google..

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 10:03:00 +0000

Google seems to know something about the new Ruby 1.9.1 release regarding Ruby on Rails:

Image

The question is, does Google suggest “fails” as a correction for “rails” because the word is similar - or because the combination is typed in a lot? :)

Piwik - the best website statistics system

Sun, 18 Jan 2009 17:06:00 +0000

I created multiple sites during the last few weeks, and wondered what’s the best website statistics solution to use with them.

My requirements are:

API/XML Export (I’m collecting the statistics in a central application)
Realtime (almost)
all the metrics I usually need (popular pages, referrer sites, entry pages, etc)

As mentioned here before, I used Clicky for a while, and I have to say it’s one of the best systems I know. Unfortunately the free edition is quite limited (regarding my needs): No API, Limited Sites and Tracking. However, I still use it on this and another site.

I then came across GoingUP which is quite nice too and has a free API. But again it was limited to a maximum number of visitors/sites. So I had to move on ..

I’m now using Piwik which is by far the best website statistics system I know.

It aims to be an open source version of Google Analytics:

Image

Piwik is PHP and MySQL based, but that shouldn’t be a problem if you have a usual webserver somewhere.

You can then track multiple (remote) sites by including a short snippet. Piwik also has a very nice API featuring different output formats like XML, JSon, HTML etc and even a very nice Plugin System (if you like to develop in PHP) :)

Give it a try, it has a nice installation Routine and is up in a minute.

Rails and Merb unite

Mon, 29 Dec 2008 08:03:00 +0000

If you did not already read it, there are really cool christmas news on the Ruby on Rails Blog

The Merb Framework - the highly modified framework initially based on/inspired by the rails core and made to improve speed, concurrency and a small footprint - will be merged into “Rails 3.0”.

Let’s look at the Merb feature list to see what this means:

Merb is..

ORM-agnostic (through plugins)
JavaScript library agnostic (through plugins)
template language agnostic (through plugins)
thread safe (+ multiple file uploads)
simple and optimized core without sacrificing functionality
improvements

what I especially like is the modularity of Merb, compared to Rails

This is a rough overview of what Rails 3.0 will look like, having the Merb features:

Optionally a minimum and full featured core
A lot of performance improvements
Framework agnosticism (JS, ORM, template and testing level)
A better, more stable API (eg. for plugins)

When will we get Rails 3.0?

I guess this is very hard to predict :) but the goal is to have at least a Beta version ready for RailsConf 2009 in Las Vegas

I totally concur with the post on the ROR Weblog, Rails 3.0 will kick ass!

Seo extensions for Opera

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 18:51:00 +0000

I was looking for some Seo extensions/plugins for my favourite browser, Opera.

This is what I found:

Seo for Opera

Seo for Opera is basically a port of the Seo for Firefox extension to opera. It enhances Google and Yahoo search results by adding additional information to each returned page.

As far as I saw it is not maintained, and sometimes unstable, but it seems to work well.

For detailed Features see Seo for Firefox.

Seobar

Seobar is a Opera userscript that can be used directly on the site in question. It adds an additional layer with information about the site you are viewing.

The information contains:

Alexa Traffic Rank
Google Page Rank

Yandex CY
DMOZ
Yahoo! Directory
Yandex.Directory
Rambler’s Top100

Google backlinks/pages
Yahoo backlinks/pages
MSN backlinks/pages
Yandex backlinks/pages

It also adds title/description for some results.

Visualization of Feeds - FeedVis

Sat, 13 Dec 2008 21:23:00 +0000

Data visualization is really interesting, and there are a lot of new, web-based tools coming up in the datamine sector.

I came across FeedVis recently.

Image

FeedVis allows to visualize data from feeds, which can be divided into feed- or time-subsets.

The data is presented in a very nice, graphical way. For each word, some additional information is provided:

Summaries
Headlines
Word Frequency in content
Frequency Change (Trend)

Quite cool to play around with, and looking much better than the usual tag clounds :)

FeedVis is available for download

Old Blog Comments, imported

by Jason Priem on Sat Dec 13 22:23:00 +0100 2008

Thanks for the review, Christoph; I'm glad you enjoyed FeedVis. Let me know if you have any suggestions! </div> </div>