Muffin Research Labs » Snippets

Ubuntu: Turn off changing workspace with mouse wheel

Stuart Colville — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 09:21:30 +0000

I found the changing with the workspace with the mouse wheel really annoying. To disable it go to System => Preferences => CompizConfig (available if the compizconfig-settings-manager package is installed) and uncheck “Viewport Switcher” which is under the “Desktop” heading.

Ubuntu: Mounting a TrueCrypt volume at startup or from the CLI

Stuart Colville — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 16:07:48 +0000

All you need is a mount point e.g: mkdir /media/ and then use the following: truecrypt /path/to/truecrypt/diskimage /media/. This is handy when you want to mount a truecrypt image at start-up or just do it quickly from a shell. It’s far more direct than using the GUI.

Mac OSX: Visor Development on Github

Stuart Colville — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 17:24:35 +0000

I’ve been using Visor (the drop-down Quake style terminal) for a little while and recently discovered the development of the project has moved to github from it’s original home at blacktree. The latest versions of the app fix a lot of the annoying niggles with the last blacktree versions. Well worth updating to the latest and greatest if you haven’t already http://github.com/darwin/visor/tree/master.

Install lxml on OSX

Stuart Colville — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 23:10:30 +0000

Thanks to this post on lxml from Ian Bicking I’ve found the following command is all that’s required to install lxml on Mac OSX:

STATIC_DEPS=true easy_install 'lxml>=2.2beta4' STATIC_DEPS=true sudo easy_install 'lxml>=2.2beta4'

The first run without “sudo” pulls down the necessary libxml and libxslt and then the second run provides the permissions to install the egg.

EuroDjangoCon Prague

Stuart Colville — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 14:55:09 +0000

Rob Lofthouse is putting on a European DjangoCon event in the beautiful city of Prague:

EuroDjangoCon is a Django conference that aims to bring together the community and provide a wide range of sessions, panels, lightning talks and showcases of Django usage within various businesses. We aim to educate, provoke thought and bring people together to turn ideas into working code.

For more info and to register see http://euro.djangocon.org/

OSX Mysql app: Sequel Pro

Stuart Colville — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 11:39:56 +0000

Generally these days I’m tending to access mysql from the CLI but when writing a data importer script I needed to be able to see what tables I was accessing from two different dbs. Initially I was looking for an ERD tool but I stumbled across the successor to CocoaMysql, Sequel Pro. It’s both well executed and free which makes it my kind of app!

Inline Code Finder

Stuart Colville — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 15:15:15 +0000

Robert Nyman has released a new and improved version of his inline js finder which now also locates inline styling as well as JavaScript. Inline code finder is a great way of identifying the kind of code that should always be avoided. More details can be found at Robert’s site. Plugins are available as standalone Firefox and Firebug extensions.

Python 3.0 Released

Stuart Colville — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 23:10:03 +0000

So Python 3.0 is out - here’s the list of what’s new. There’s a lot in there and it specifically say it’s incomplete (here’s the changelog for comparison.).

What I’m most concerned about is the thought of having to maintain several versions of code to work with python 2.4/2.5/2.6 and python 3.0. Still onwards and upwards.

Inspiring a Sense of Ownership

Stuart Colville — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 23:26:54 +0000

Former colleague Mike West talks about how inspiring a team’s sense of ownership around a project is the key to great things happening: http://mikewest.org/2008/11/the-inspiration-of-ownership. Quality stuff.

VMware Server: Convert Fixed Disk-images to Growable

Stuart Colville — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 20:00:27 +0000

Quick tip if you ever want to convert from a fixed disk image to an expandable one then the following command should do it:

sudo vmware-vdiskmanager -r source.vmdk -t 0 expandable.vmdk

Just replace “source” and “expandable” with your disk image file names. For more on what vmware-vdiskmanager can do for you type vmware-vdiskmanager -h