repl.ca

I’ve finally gotten around to fixing up cpsn to work against Sony’s latest website version. CPSN is a cli app that lets you check if your PlayStation Friends are online, and what games they’re playing so you can, for example, see if anybody is playing Call of Duty without leaving the comfort of your shell. Install it with gem install –user cpsn Check the included README for details on configuration. Git: https://github.com/jbowes/cpsn **Note: **Using CPSN probably violates any number of Terms of Service, etc. »

I’ve moved my blog here, to blog.repl.ca. If the move ends up spamming any blog syndicators / aggregators, I apologize. »

Many smartphones or tablets support USB host mode (or On The Go mode) with an adapter. Unfortunately, a lot of those devices don’t supply power to their client USB devices; you can’t just plug a host mode adapter into an HP TouchPad, for example, then plug a keyboard into the host mode adapter, and expect everything to work. I put up a video on youtube explaining how to build and use a USB Y cable to inject power to the client devices. »

We needed to do CLF style HTTP access logging for Thumbslug, which is implemented in Java + Netty. I couldn’t find any code to do this with a quick google search, so I wrote my own. If you need such a thing, try here or here (backup). »

I’ve seen a few posts on the web about testing your network speeds with netcat, but they all seem to not work with recent versions of netcat. On one machine, run: nc -v -l 2222 > /dev/null (Make sure you’re not blocking connections to 2222!) On a second machine, run: dd if=/dev/zero bs=1024K count=512 | nc -v $IP_OF_FIRST_MACHINE 2222 dd will give you your speed: 536870912 bytes (537 MB) copied, 4.87526 s, 117 MB/s Yay, gigabit! »

In case you find yourself in need of a way to turn an svn revision into a git patch that can be applied with ‘git am’, keeping the commit message and authorship information, here’s a script I used recently: #!/usr/bin/python # # svnrev2git.py - Convert an SVN revsion to a Git patch. # # Author: James Bowes <jbowes@repl.ca> # # Usage: # $> cd my-svn-repo # $> python svnrev2git.py [AUTHORS_FILE] [REV_RANGE | REVSION [REVISION..]] # # AUTHORS_FILE - a CSV of svn username, full name, email # REV_RANGE - an svn revision range, like 100-700 # REVISION - a single svn revision # # You may specify either a revision range, or a series of individual # svn revisions # # Output: # A series of git style patch files, one per svn revision, which can then be # applied with 'git am' # # Why use this instead of 'git svn'? »

Making your own velcro cable ties is a great idea. $2 in materials made as many cable ties as Wal- Mart was selling for $13. Thrifty! I’d suggest sewing the velcro together vs stapling, especially if you have cats that are far too curious about staples. »

Growing up on the east coast of Canada, this is how I imagined Toronto to be, like, 24⁄7. I’ve been here for nine months or so, and have yet to be invited to any trendy VICE parties. Just so you know, VICE, I am very willing to grow out some stubble and wear vintage clothing or an ironic t-shirt for the event. Toronto is great though, even without the free Red Stripe. »

Here’s a quick little script I wrote up (adapted from this perlmonks post) to show git repository activity as an ascii graph, like so: The X axis represents a day, with the current day being on the far right. The Y axis is no. of lines added + no. of lines deleted during that day. EDIT (2009/02/03): Wordpress.com won’t let me attach a .pl file, so here’s the contents: #!/usr/bin/perl # # git-graph.pl - Generate an ascii graph of git repository activity # # Copyright (C) 2008 James Bowes <jbowes@dangerouslyinc.com> # # Graphing routine Adapted from http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=336907 sub get_activity { my $day = shift; my $git_cmd = 'git diff --shortstat "@{' . »

I found it hard to find good instructions for installing ruby gems as a non- root user without installing the gem package locally as well. Here’s what I figured out; hopefully this will save someone else some time in the future: Make a directory for gem installation: $> mkdir ~/.gems Set up your .gemrc for gem install-time configuration: $> cat << EOF > ~/.gemrc gemhome: $HOME/gems gempath: - $HOME/gems - /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8 EOF Set up some environment variables for run-time: $> cat << EOF >> ~/.bashrc export GEM_HOME=$HOME/gems export GEM_PATH=$HOME/gems:/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/ export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/gems/bin EOF Source your bashrc and you’re all set. »