You can reserve a username at casualcollective.com and the first 1000 players are already allowed to test the system. And guess who is among these 1000? Yes, I am

I grew bored with the default look of kopete and installed a few new themes. It’s really simple:

1. Settings->Configure
2. Appearance
3. Chat Window

Now you have reached the screen where you can choose the theme you would like to use with a preview showing how the new theme will look.
Read the rest of this entry »

If you don’t know bugbash you are missing such funny strips like the one for today:

To rewrite https://domain.(com|net|org|de|…) to https://domain.com just use:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !domain.com
RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ https://domain.com/$1 [R]


I started reading “Learning the bash Shell” again because I suck at shell scripting. But before I reached the shell scripting part, I was playing around with bind because I wanted to move a few of the Esc-… key bindings to more ergonomic combinations. While looking for examples I found exactly what I was looking for on a site by Petar Marinov:


# ctrl+left/right arrows:
bind '"\e\x5b\x31\x3b\x35\x44"':backward-word
bind '"\e\x5b\x31\x3b\x35\x43"':forward-word
# alt+backspace:
bind '"\xff"':backward-kill-word
# alt+'.':
bind '"\xae"':yank-last-arg


Ok, and now back to shell scripting

Related entries:

• Bash shell goodies

Some time ago I was writing about my idea of powerful rss filters to control my flood of incoming posts. I wrote a small prototype with very limited functionality. It was good enough for me but I always dreamed about releasing it to the public. But configuration via text configfile is nothing for the general public. OK, back to the subject.

editing a filter to combine all my feeds

Last week Julian told me about pipes.yahoo.com. It is everything I wanted plus a lot of other features. Processing starts with “sources” with output that can be piped into “operators”.

Sources

Right now, there are 5 types of sources available: Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! Local, Fetch, Google Base, Flickr. For my purpose “Fetch” was already sufficient. Given an URL it returns the feed content for further processing.

Operators

• Union: combines two feeds
• Sort: sorts items by a number of different criteria
• Filter: blocks items matching certain rules

Example

Within a few minutes of playing around I build an RSS feed for all my blogs combined into a single feed.

Feature requests

I don’t know I anybody from the pipes team reads this post (if they do: great tool! please keep improving it!). Pipes is already very powerful, but a few things could be even better:

• Union operators with any number of inputs. As you can see from my screen-shot, just combining 6 feeds is already messy
• Debug the debug view. When I was playing around, the debug view was frequently missing items.
• Shrink the boxes. My screen is 1600×1200 and was barely big enough to show my configuration
• Friendly URLs: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/8F_X3gO52xGCN6i7HxeTaQ/run?_render=rss is ugly

by andy47

I’m slowly learning to work with cakephp, but it’s damn hard.
The manual is confusing. I nearly gave up, when I found the blog tutorial in the appendix. Dear authors, this should be chapter 1 or 2! The wiki was removed, but at least some of the content can still be found in the google cache. The Bakery is a mess of articles. some of them cluttered with broken links.[1]

So far I found only two pages with “Rails-quality” documentation: Learning from the CakePHP source code - Part I and Part II.

I someone knows other good documentation for cakephp, please leave a comment.

Update:
I forgot to mention that it isn’t even decided yet, that I will use cakephp for my upcoming project. I’d love to hear more about other Rails-like frameworks in PHP. Right now I’m investigating Symfony, which looks promising.

[1] these broken links should let you download code, but the code is provided in the box below, so it’s only an annoyance.

I bought The Ruby Way a few weeks ago and thought it would be nice to write a short review about it. But I won’t, because there are already many reviews about it. The excecutive summary: it’s good, really good.

Please forgive me if I state the obvious, but I just found out about this great gem called Wirble. Wirble adds tab-completion and syntax-highlighting to irb.

Installation is really simple, just install the gem (gem install wirble) and add this to your .irbrc:

require 'rubygems'
require 'wirble'

Wirble.init
Wirble.colorize

For a console with a dark background everything looks pretty good but I prefer a light background where yellow is not easy to read. Thanks to the really helpful README the solution was easy to find. I had to add a few more lines to my .irbrc to change some settings from yellow and white to something readable in my console.

require 'rubygems'
require 'wirble'

colors = Wirble::Colorize.colors.merge({
  :object_class => :purple,
  :symbol => :purple,
  :symbol_prefix => :purple
})
Wirble::Colorize.colors = colors