Pinned tabs in Chrome are a great way to manage sites you have open all the time. For example, I have Rhapsody and Pivotal Tracker pinned in Chrome right now.

Pinned tabs are conveniently sized to just show the site favicon and placed over on the left side of the tab bar. Whenever Chrome is restarted, the pinned tabs are automatically opened again.

Note: You can pin a tab by right clicking it and selecting Pin Tab.

The problem

The problem with pinned tabs is that links opened from external apps (Mail, Adium, etc) are always opened in a new tab. Normally this is fine, but if I get an email from Pivotal Tracker (which I have pinned) and click the link to view the story, it opens a new tab rather than using my pinned tab. I’m terrible about closing tabs when I’m done with them, so I end up having 10 tabs with Pivotal Tracker opened by the end of the day.

The solution

Reuse Tab is a Chrome extension I wrote that looks at the host of any tab opened from an external source and compares it to the hosts of your pinned tabs. If a match is found, it opens the link in the pinned tab instead of creating a new tab¹. This way the pinned tab is reused and you don’t have to deal with multiple tabs opened to the same site.

Resources

• Check out the extension in the Chrome Web Store.
• Check out the source (all 15 lines of it!) if you’re into that sort of thing.

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Backbone.LayoutManager.configure({
  fetch: function(path) {
    return ich[path.slice(1)];
  }
});

Then you can define your template:

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<script id="myView" type="text/html">
  <div>Hello.</div>
</script>

and use it as the layout for your view:

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MyView = Backbone.View.extend({
  layout: "#myView",
  // ...
});

I am slicing off the # from the selector to keep the selectors compatible with other template engines. If you don’t care about that, you can save yourself a character like this:

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Backbone.LayoutManager.configure({
  fetch: function(path) {
    return ich[path];
  }
});

and update your view:

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MyView = Backbone.View.extend({
  layout: "myView",
  // ...
});

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serve("api" / "users" prefix {
  case AsLong(id) :: "posts" :: _ Get Req(_, "xls", _) =>
    // do your thing. 
})

This would match /api/users/1/posts.xls.

Octopress has been getting really popular lately, so it seemed like the obvious choice. It was painless to setup and the default theme is really nice. The code snippet support out of the box is incredible. That was always my biggest complaint with Tumblr. I blog strictly to share code and Tumblr is clearly not made for that.

I’m very happy with Octopress and feel like the ease of writing new posts will help me blog more often. Plus, writing blog posts in Vim just feels right! Thanks for reading.

Note: If you subscribe to the RSS feed, please update it to my new FeedBurner account.

I wanted an easy way to set reminders for myself throughout the day. For example, if I put the kettle on the stove, come back to my office and crank Gungor, I’m not going to hear the kettle whistling when the water is boiled. Instead, when I get back to my office I want to open a new tab in Terminal and type:

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$ remindme +5min "Check the kettle."

Ideally, this will show me a Growl notification and play a sound to remind me to go check on the kettle.

Using node-growl, datejs and play.js the final script is as simple as this:

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#!/usr/bin/env coffee

nm = "#{__dirname}/node_modules"

require "#{nm}/datejs"

growl = require "#{nm}/growl"
play = require "#{nm}/play"

usage = ->
  console.log '''
    usage: remindme time msg

      time - the time to show the reminder
      msg  - the message to show when the reminder goes off
    '''

main = ->
  [time, msg] = process.argv[2..3]
  if not time? or not msg?
    usage()
    process.exit 1
  showReminder = ->
    play.sound "#{__dirname}/audio/alarm.wav"
    growl msg,
      title: 'Reminder'
      sticky: true
  remindAt = Date.parse(time)
  delta = remindAt - Date.now()
  console.log "reminding you at #{remindAt.toString()}."
  console.log "that is in #{delta}ms, if you were wondering."
  setTimeout showReminder, delta

main()

Now I can leverage the power of datejs on the console, which gives me a lot of flexibility when setting alarms. Again, I’m impressed at the number of quality libs available for node.js and the speed of which an idea can go from concept to working script.

I plan to package this script up as an npm module and make the source available on Github soon.

• the embedded template name must start with an underscore (ie: _sample.html)
• do not include the .html extension on the name in the tag
• make sure you have a top level tag in the embedded template that contains all the content For example, this is how to embed a template using designer friendly templates:

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<div class="lift:embed?what=/templates-hidden/dashboards/_admin"></div>

Then the actual contents of the _admin.html template should look like this:

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<div>
  <p>This is an admin template.</p>
  <div>
    ... other content/snippets here ...
  </div>
<div>

If you don’t put a top container around your embedded content, only the first node will get embedded.

What url should I use to verify my receipt?

• Use the sandbox url https://sandbox.itunes.apple.com/verifyReceipt while testing your application in the sandbox and while your application is in review.
• Use the production url http://buy.itunes.apple.com/verifyReceipt once your application is live in the App Store.

Once your application is approved, you should switch your services over to use the production environment.

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error: expected '=', ',', ';', 'asm' or '__attribute__' before 'CGRect'

there is an easy solution. Change the extension of the implementation file from .c to .m.

I found a workaround on an Adobe thread. Apparently dd_belatedpng sets the position to relative on the HTML tag. This is what was causing the issues. The workaround is to (ugg) modify the dd_belatedpng source and add the following conditional (on line 138 of the non-minified 0.0.8a release):

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if (el.nodeName != 'HTML') {
    el.style.position = 'relative';
}

That ensures the HTML tag doesn’t get its position set to relative. It’s a hack, but so is IE6, so I’ll still sleep at night.

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error: stdarg.h: No such file or directory

The solution was to reinstall Xcode and check the Mac OSX 10.4 SDK (which isn’t selected by default).

We are unable to upload this Certificate file because it is invalid. Please check the file and try again.

I was able to get around this error by uploading the CSR in Safari. Exact same CSR … just a different browser and it worked.

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import base64

from Crypto.Cipher import Blowfish


cipher = lambda: Blowfish.new('abc123')
encrypt = lambda c, s: base64.b64encode(c.encrypt(s))
decrypt = lambda c, e: c.decrypt(base64.b64decode(e))

c = cipher()
enc = encrypt(c, 'this is a secret')
dec = decrypt(c, enc)

Source: http://www.codekoala.com/blog/2009/aes-encryption-python-using-pycrypto/

Write a script and put it on your $PATH

First, you need to write a script that will force opendiff to wait before returning during a merge. Name the script opendiff-w.

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# opendiff-w
opendiff "$@" | cat

Then you need to make it executable.

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$ chmod u+x opendiff-w

Finally, put the script on your $PATH. I put mine in a folder called ~/development/scripts/path, and added this to my ~/.profile:

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export PATH=$PATH:~development/scripts/path

Source the file and make sure you can execute the file you just created.

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$ source ~/.profile
$ opendiff-w
opendiff[1234:56f] too few arguments

Tell Mercurial to use opendiff-w for merges

Edit your ~/.hgrc file and add the following:

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[merge-patterns]
** = filemerge

[merge-tools]
filemerge.executable = /Users/user.name/path/to/opendiff-w
filemerge.args = $local $other -ancestor $base -merge $output

Make sure your executable path includes the opendiff-w at the end. For example, mine is:

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filemerge.executable = /Users/user.name/development/scripts/path/opendiff-w

You are good to go. Next time you do a hg merge, Mercurial will use FileMerge to let you manually fix the conflict.

Install the fmscripts wrapper.

Download the scripts, unpack them, and install them.

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$ cd ~/Downloads
$ curl -OL http://www.defraine.net/~brunod/fmdiff/fmscripts-20100225.tar.gz
$ tar xzvf fmscripts-20100225.tar.gz
$ cd fmscripts-20100225
$ sudo make install

Tell Mercurial to use FileMerge

Edit your ~/.hgrc file and add the following:

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[extensions]
extdiff=

[extdiff]
cmd.opendiff = fmdiff

Use FileMerge to view a diff

If you have a dirty working copy, you can now view the diff between it and the tip by using the following command:

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$ hg opendiff

Of course, you can still use all the normal diff options. For example, to view the differences between two revisions, do this:

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$ hg opendiff -r100 -r101

Or for a single file:

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$ hg opendiff -r100 -r101 views.py

Or to see the difference between a revision and your working copy for a single file:

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$ hg opendiff -r101 views.py

Yay, Mercurial.

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def model_to_modelform(cls, fs):
    from django import forms
    class DynaForm(forms.ModelForm):
        class Meta:
            model = cls
            fields = fs
    return DynaForm

Now use it.

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# perhaps use it in a view
form = model_to_modelform(User, ('username', 'email',))
dynamic_form = form(instance=request.user)

Sources:

http://www.agmweb.ca/blog/andy/2249/

Download and unpack the latest version of pygraphviz.

Update the library_path and include_path in setup.py.

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library_path='/usr/local/lib/graphviz/'
include_path='/usr/local/include/graphviz/'

Install as usual:

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$ sudo python setup.py install

Test the install.

Important: Before you enter the python interpreter, make sure you leave the pygraphviz directory.

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$ cd ~
$ python
>>> import pygraphviz
>>>

Sources:

http://bradmontgomery.blogspot.com/2010/07/pygraphviz-on-os-x-sl-with-virtualenv.html

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>>> n = 10
>>> [0] * n
[0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0]

This trick is also nifty for plotting data, where you need all points on the y-axis without a value to be a given number (usually 0).

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>>> n = 5
>>> x = range(5)
>>> x
[0, 1, 2, 3, 4]
>>> zip(x, [0] * n)
[(0, 0), (1, 0), (2, 0), (3, 0), (4, 0)]
>>> dict(zip(x, [0] * n))
{0: 0, 1: 0, 2: 0, 3: 0, 4: 0}

Source: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=564590