Posted on May 22, 2013
English style decimal marks with a European keyboard layout
Suppose you live in Europe where they separate numbers with commas instead of periods.
Written:
Six thousand eight hundred and forty three and two tenths
English/American:
6,843.2
European
6 843,2
Suppose you also have a European keyboard and use a European keyboard layout but the stupid comma in the numpad drives you mad.
Simple fix
Open (or create) ~/.Xmodmap
Add the line “keycode 91 = KP_Delete KP_Decimal” and save
Run the command “xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap”
Test that it worked
Open ~/.xinitrc
Add the line “xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap” and save to make the change permanent.
Reference:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Extra_Keyboard_Keys_in_Xorg
Posted on January 29, 2013
Visual impairments are a part of the physical world. Thank god we live in a virtual one.
We have alt tags for screen readers, well let’s be honest, people only do it for SEO and no screen reader is perfect . But what if your “alt tag” had perfect IPA phonetic transcription…
Tell me more
Here is the current w3 draft:
http://www.w3.org/TR/speech-synthesis/
Demo:
go to this page
http://www2.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php
and copy/paste this element:
<phoneme alphabet=”ipa” ph=”kæt”>dog</phoneme>
The body of the phoneme element can be left empty, but in this case I wrote “dog” just for fun.
Can’t we just make computers better at speaking English?
Sure, and it would be trivial to make a build jQuery plugin that converts ALT attributes to IPA ones. But what about regional dialects and made up words like Flickr or Imgur. What about ambiguous acronyms? Should the company AAA be pronounced “ay ay ay” or “Triple A”? Is it “My S-Q-L” or “My sequel”?
Sounds good, when’s it coming out?
Fair enough, maybe you sacrifice a goat we could get it in IE11. Honestly, I don’t know. Maybe never. The spec hasn’t been touched since 2004 but I hope people start taking it seriously.
Posted on October 3, 2012
Github and code review
I first wrote a post in March 2012 about code review with SVN. Since then, we’ve switched to Github and it’s awesome.
Github isn’t free, buts its very inexpensive and amazing. Inline comments, automatic issue tracking, and you can backup your code to their servers without needing commit access to the main repo. Continue reading “Github and code review” »
Posted on September 29, 2012
IPv6 Subnet Calculator
I wrote a tool to organize subnet addressing for IPv6
A little about IPv6
An IPv6 address is 128-bits and commonly represented as eight colon separated groups with each group consisting of four hexadecimal digits. For the general unicast address format, the first 64-bits are used for routing and the second 64-bits are the interface identifier (RFC 4291). Of the first 64-bits, the first 48 are used for regional routing and the next 16 are used for subnetting. Thus for practical subnet planning, you can assign blocks from /49 to /64. My calculator only lets you select a prefix up to /63 because if you can’t subnet a /64 block, you can only assign it.
How to use this calculator
Step 1)
You can enter the network IP to be subnetted as a full address or in the shortened form with leading zeros removed and consecutive groups of zeros removed.
Either 2001:09fe:000a:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000 or 2001:9fe:a:: is fine.
Step 2)
Enter the number of subnets you want created at each level and press “Add Level.” Example: your university has 10 colleges, each college has 3 buildings, and each building has 8 departments. Add 10, then 3, then 8.
Step 3)
Build it! Then use the + button to show / hide subnets. The position string on the left hand side should help you identify who the network is subnetted to (eg. the subnet in position 4.2.3 is the 3rd department in the second building of the 4th college).
Step 4)
Post questions in the comments and bugs on GitHub.
Posted on September 23, 2012
How to make Chrome use Deluge for magnet links in Fedora
Sep 2014 update: This was written for Fedora 17. Apparently the desktop file has been renamed to deluge.desktop (the sane choice).
The three things you need to know:
1) Unlike Firefox, Chrome uses xdg-open to choose the default program to open a file.
2) You can set the default application for each type by using xdg-mime.
3) The Fedora desktop file for Deluge is fedora-deluge.desktop and not deluge.desktop.
xdg-mime default fedora-deluge.desktop x-scheme-handler/magnet
Posted on September 21, 2012
How to install Compiz on Fedora 17 XFCE Spin
Let’s just be clear, this is not for the faint of heart.
Why isn’t Compiz in the Fedora 17 repos?
Compiz is a replacement window manager for the GNOME window manager called Metacity. When GNOME 3 came out last year, they replaced Metacity with Mutter. Apparently there are library incompatibilities that prevent Compiz from replacing Mutter. I didn’t look into the details because we don’t care about GNOME issues, we’re XFCE users!
I’ll also note that Red Hat is currently reviewing the situation and might bring Compiz back. Who knows. I for one think it’s silly to drop a package just because it doesn’t work with one desktop environment out of many.
Continue reading “How to install Compiz on Fedora 17 XFCE Spin” »
Posted on April 18, 2012
iPad and iPhone Web Frameworks
Sencha Touch
This is the gold standard of iPad web frameworks. It’s amazing (and free!), check out the kitchen sink demo.
Continue reading “iPad and iPhone Web Frameworks” »
Posted on April 10, 2012
Draughts, my first android game
Made with Unity3D, coded in C#
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.colinrrobinson.draughts
Posted on April 7, 2012
How to free up space in rootfs on Arch Linux
Is your rootfs partition at 100% and causing you problems?
I’ve been hovering around 95%-100% for a few weeks now. Being at 95% is fine, but 100% can cause all kinds of problems. I was testing a form on my local web server and couldn’t do file uploads because “the disk was full.” I was writing code and my editor couldn’t save the file because “the disk was full.” Its frustrating because you have hundreds of free gigs where you’re saving the file, but because rootfs is full, you can’t!
I’ll start by showing you the output of df
$ df Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on rootfs 10209220 9625988 71164 100% / /dev 4055116 0 4055116 0% /dev run 4058036 252 4057784 1% /run /dev/sda3 10209220 9625988 71164 100% / shm 4058036 796 4057240 1% /dev/shm tmpfs 4058036 3160 4054876 1% /tmp /dev/sda1 99590 34166 60205 37% /boot /dev/sda4 449789792 23726068 403549860 6% /home
Not good, but its my own fault. I only allocated about 10g to /dev/sda3 when I setup the OS. I should I have predicted that I would need more.
The real solutions is to boot to a livecd and resize /dev/sda3. This can take a long time, break your grub install, and cause other headache inducing effects.
Here are some tricks I’ve picked up to get your rootfs down from the dreaded 100% to something you can actually work with.
Continue reading “How to free up space in rootfs on Arch Linux” »
Posted on March 19, 2012
Code Review
Where I work, we have a lot of new developers and people still learning the languages. When learning a language, being able to get feedback on your code is an invaluable learning asset. It lets the more experienced programmers help teach the newer ones.
Most code review software is designed for pre-commit comments. A reviewer looks at the code before it gets added to the version control system and then approves or denies the changes. This is obviously vital for large projects involving multiple developers, but what about small shops where people work mostly independently and on different projects? What if you don’t have the resources or the need for an extensive review process and would rather casually browse your colleges code to add constructive criticisms or notify them of best practices which they might be unaware of?
To me the ideal tool will interface with subversion and allow reversion specific and line specific post-commit comments. I want to be able to browse our source code whenever I feel like it, write a comment about a specific line, and then have the author notified of the comment.
The PeerReviewPlugin for Trac looked like a winner, until I read this review
PeerReview Screenshot
In my company, we looked briefly at the “peerreview” plugin on TracHacks, and were very disappointed with it.
It seems obvious to us that a code-review plugin would naturally default to assuming that an entire Subversion commit should be code-reviewed. Unfortunately, the peerreview plugin forces you to manually identify the lines of code that you want to review. It doesn’t even give you hints in which lines might have changed with a particular commit, which means that if you don’t enter the line that changed carefully, you could end up re-reviewing the same lines of code over and over.
It still looks promising, and I don’t expect to find an out-of-the-box solution that is perfect for my specific situation. Right now ReviewBoard is looking up and I could always modify the PeerReview plugin to suit my needs (hooray, opensource). Please, leave a comment about how you and your company do code review. What code review systems have you worked with? What other solutions might I have passed over?