NICKOL.AS

• 2011-05-31

  Better ⌘Q Behavior in Google Chrome

  With Q and W being right next to each other on the QWERTY keyboard, it’s much too easy to hit ⌘Q when you really meant to just close the window with ⌘W. Most applications deal with this gracefully by asking you if you really want to quit, but Google Chrome is not among them.

  Accidentally hit ⌘Q and you’re stuck re-opening Chrome and picking “Re-open All Recently Closed Tabs” under the history menu. It works, and you don’t lose anything, but it can take quite some time to re-load all of this when you have 20 tabs open (as I often do).

  If you’re a Mac user, you’re in luck! The (unfortunately Mac-only) fix is to type ‘about:flags’ in the address bar to open Chrome’s hidden configuration page. About half-way down the page, there’s an item called “Confirm to Quit”. Enable that, and you’re good to go. Chrome will now be a good citizen and ask if you really meant to quit.

  Update: This has graduated from ‘about:flags’ to a real option in Chrome 12, but instead of being in the prefs, it’s oddly placed in the ‘Chrome’ menu. Just select ‘Chrome’ > ‘Warn Before Quitting’ and you’re good to go!

• 2011-05-25

  Git Tags by Date

  So you need to get a list of the tags in your git repository sorted by date, eh? git tag defaults to dumping them out sorted alphabetically, and because of the way git handles tag data, this is the only practical default.

  Git defaults to creating lightweight tags which are essentially static branches, so they have no metadata whatsoever except for a ref. If you haven’t been creating annotated or signed tags (via git tag -a, -m, -s, or -u), you’re actually SOL. You can’t list all of your tags by date, end of story.

  If you have been creating annotated or signed tags, just run the following (all on one line):

  git for-each-ref --sort='*authordate' --format='%(tag)' refs/tags

  And there you have it. Want to actually show some of the attached metadata or sort by author? Easy enough. Just check out the man page for git-for-each-ref and you’ll have all the info you need to slice and dice your commits and tags however you’d like.

  Update: Shad Reynolds (@shadr) points out on Twitter that the following:

  git for-each-ref --sort='*authordate' --format='%(refname:short)' refs/tags

  seems to show more tags than the version I posted. I did a bit of testing, and it appears that %(tag) only shows annotated tag names, whereas %(refname:short) will show lightweight tag names as well. It’s a bit misleading, though. Since lightweight tags don’t have the metadata needed to sort by date, they’ll just show up at the top of your tag list sorted alphabetically, with all of your annotated tags below sorted by date.

• 2011-02-08

  Remap Caps Lock key to Escape in OS X »

  If you’re a Vim user, you’d probably find it useful to map the Caps Lock key to ESC. OS X’s built-in keyboard prefs won’t let you do that, but this tool will. Beware, though, that installing it requires a restart.

• 2010-12-13

  VPN and Apple’s Airport Extreme

  Video baby monitors and 2.4 GHz wireless networking do not play well together. This is the fact that led to my purchase of a refurbished Apple Airport Extreme from Best Buy a few weeks ago. I still have a few devices that are 802.11g-only, so going simultaneous dual-band was the only way I could get reliable performance for my computers and keep all my legacy kit at least marginally online.

  It was about a week after installing the Airport Extreme and living in no-interference bliss that I realized my VPN connection to my hosting provider wasn’t working. We host newenough.com MotorcycleGear.com with Softlayer, and thanks to their wonderful private network infrastucture, I’m able to firewall off all ports except 80 and 443 from the public Internet. To SSH to any of our boxes, I need to connect through Softlayer’s VPN gateway into the private network.

  I couldn’t. The VPN would authenticate just fine, but I wasn’t receiving any traffic. If I changed my VPN settings to “Send all traffic over VPN connection”, I could connect to NE’s servers, but since Softlayer’s private network is completely disconnected from the public Internet, I had no network access other than to my servers.

  But this was only when I was at home. Everything worked fine when I was at the office, and everything had worked fine from home before installing the Airport Extreme. I had my culprit.

  I sent several emails back and forth with Softlayer’s support department asking about oddities of working with their VPN and Apple networking gear, but I’m not sure anyone in their first-line tech support even understood the specifics of the problem. I also spent 30 minutes on the phone with Applecare, but they had no answers either.

  Once I got a response from Reed F. in Softlayer’s second level support department, though, the solution became obvious. Reed’s excellent response:

  If I am not mistaken, most Apple gear tends to use a 10.x.x.x addressing schema, if this is the case, then it will conflict with the routes that are provided from the VPN device.

  (As an aside, Softlayer’s support department constantly amazes me. They’re patient with the most mundane requests, always fast to respond, and driven to solve even issues like this where the problem is obviously not on their end. I can’t recommend them highly enough if you’re looking to lease a server.)

  Apple’s wonky default 10.0.1.x IP address scheme was conflicting with the 10.x.x.x scheme used by Softlayer’s VPN. Softlayer chose that scheme, I’m sure, because most consumer network gear distributes 192.168.x.x IP addresses by default.

  A quick switch of the Airport Extreme to using 192.168.1.x IP addresses and all was working as expected. If you’re having trouble getting a VPN to work from behind an Airport Extreme (or Airport Express), that’s definitely the first thing to try.

  Comments about this post? Send ‘em along on Twitter.

• 2010-12-09

  Nobody Cares How It Works

  Two years ago, I was happily posting links and pictures on Tumblr at waxcathartic.org. After running across a link to Peter Rojas’s blog (peter.roj.as), I decided that I, too, needed my very own American Samoan domain name. The $50 per year that vanity cost me made me want to take myself and my blogging more seriously, I suppose, and so I decided that I needed a fresh design and custom blog software.

  I mean, what good is it being a software developer if your own site doesn’t even run on something you created? Right?

  Two Nearly three years of silence and several false starts would beg to disagree.

  Here’s the thing: nobody cares what software runs your blog. Especially when you give them the answer to a question they’ve been researching for a few hours.

  When you know how to hack code, it’s easy to wrap yourself up in a tiny case of “Not Invented Here” when it comes to your blog. Something about the way programmers approach the world means that we always think we could build it better.

  Blogging is not about starting, though. It’s easy to start. 3 unfinished blogging ‘platforms’ in my project directory and 10 unfinished drafts in Tumbler prove that. Blogging is about finishing. Finishing actual bits of wordcraft and putting them out there.

  You likely can build something that fits you better, but do you really need to? The longer you spend building and maintaining your blog software, the less time you can spend actually, you know, blogging.

  So, my resolution for the next year is to quit worrying if my design is perfect, if my software is custom, or if my article is sufficiently eloquent, and build the discipline to finish something once a week.

  Have something to add? Hit me up on Twitter.

• 2010-04-28

  Global OS X Keyboard Shortcuts for Pandora One

  After much debating, I dropped the $36 to upgrade to Pandora One. I’ve got a big music library, but when I’m writing code I want to take breaks at natural spots, not just because an album has ended. Pandora One ups the audio quality significantly, but it also gives you access to Pandora’s Adobe AIR client program. While it’s a significant upgrade from in-browser Pandora, it still doesn’t give you global keyboard shortcuts.

  It will listen to keyboard commands when it’s got focus, however, and luckily Applescript gives us a way to do that:

  I’ve got that script bound to the Play/Pause key on my keyboard using the excellent USB Overdrive, but if you don’t have a need for Overdrive, you could use something like Keyboard Maestro as well. It’s a bit slow on the first keypress as USB Overdrive has no way to use a pre-compiled Applescript, but it works well enough for my requirements.

  I primarily listen to Pandora, so the script first checks to see if the Pandora app is running, and if so, gives Pandora focus and sends a spacebar keystroke to toggle play/pause. If Pandora’s not running, it checks for iTunes and sends the command to iTunes, so I’m not losing the normal functionality of the key. This has the nice side-effect of not launching iTunes accidentally by pressing the Play/Pause key.

  You can do the same thing with the next track key if you’d like. Pandora uses the right arrow key to skip, so we have to use the key code command instead of keystroke here:

  There’s lots more good information on sending keystrokes to apps on this page at Doug’s iTunes Scripts, and I got the code to check if an app is running from a random post on Joyent’s CodeSnippets.

  Hit me up on Twitter with any questions or comments!

• 2010-04-22

  The new Facebook features and how they affect your privacy... »

  A solid not-overly-alarmist take on what the latest Facebook privacy reductions mean. Of note, the updates contain a couple of FB privacy settings tweaks that help mitigate this stuff.

• 2008-10-22

  The Magic of top

  After receiving several replies to a random gripe I aired via Twitter, I’ve realized I’m not the only one frustrated by the differences between Linux-flavored and BSD-flavored top. Like a lot of people, I do my dev work on a Mac but deploy to a Linux production environment, so I’m constantly switching between Linux and BSD top (OS X is based on BSD, not Linux.)

  What is ‘top’, anyway?

  If you’ve used Windows Task Manager or OS X’s Activity Monitor, you’re already familiar with what top does. top is basically the *nix command line version of those two programs. It’s your one-stop-shop for any information you need on how loaded your system is and what specific processes are eating all that RAM or CPU time, but a little knowledge on how to use it goes a long way.

  Linux-style ‘top’

  Despite using OS X on a day-to-day basis, I’m far more familiar with Linux’s top command. It’s got a lot more functionality than BSD’s top. Here’s the basics:

  Right After You Launch

  The first things I do after launching top on Linux are press ‘z’ to turn on color and then ‘x’ to turn on sort-field highlighting. There’s no command line flags to do this for you, but I’ll explain a bit later how to save this as your default configuration.

  Sorting

  There’s several ways to sort your process list in Linux’s top. Most of the time you’ll want to sort by Memory Percent Usage or CPU Percent Usage, and thankfully Linux provides us handy shortcuts for this (yes, they’re all uppercase - just type them in the main top screen):

  • M - Percent memory usage
  • P - Percent CPU usage
  • N - PID
  • T - Execution time

  If you want to sort by a field other than those four, there are two ways to do it. First, you can use ‘<’ or ‘>‘ to cycle through the sort columns. (This really isn’t useful unless you’ve typed ‘x’ first to turn on sort-field highlighting, though - how would you know what you were sorting by?) You can also type ‘O’ or ‘F’ to pick your sort column from a list.

  Finally, if for some odd reason you need to know what programs on your system are using the least CPU or memory, you can type ‘R’ to reverse the sort order on the current field.

  Interacting with Tasks

  There’s plenty of other stuff you can do in Linux’s top, but the only other function I find useful on a regular basis is killing/renicing runaway tasks. To kill a task, type ‘k’ and enter the task’s PID. top will ask you what type of signal to send, the default being ‘SIGTERM’ (probably what you want, but if a process just won’t die, ‘KILL’ can be useful here as well). You can also renice a process by typing ‘r’. A negative number will give the process more priority, and a positive number less.

  Default Configuration

  If you get tired of typing ‘z’, ‘x’, ‘P’ as soon as you launch to get your color and favorite sort order, then the ‘W’ command is your friend. Once you get your top just like you like it, type ‘W’ and top will write out a configuration file to ~/.toprc and your top will launch with that set of parameters every time.

  BSD-style ‘top’

  Thanks to my reliance on OS X’s Activity Monitor, my BSD top-fu is weak, but writing is an exercise in learning.

  Sorting

  There’s no quickie shortcuts to sorting BSD’s top, but thankfully there is interactive sorting available. To use it, type ‘o’ and top will ask you for a sort field. You can also type ‘O’ and top will ask you for a secondary sort field. Here’s an abbreviated list of sort keys - check the man page for more:

  • command - Command name
  • cpu - CPU usage
  • rsize - Resident memory size
  • time - Execution time
  • vsize - Total memory size

  You can also specify sort order on the command line using the ‘-o’ and ‘-O’ flags just like you would use them interactively. Eg.: top -o cpu -O rsize

  Interacting with Tasks

  BSD’s top also gives us a way to send signals to a given process. Type ‘S’ and top will ask you what signal to send, defaulting to ‘TERM’ (which is probably what you want - again, use ‘KILL’ for stubborn tasks). After setting your signal, top will ask you for the PID to send the signal to. One thing to remember is that, if you use a signal other than the default, top will default to that signal the next time you invoke the ‘S’ command.

  Wrapping Up

  There’s quite a bit more tweaking possible with top than what I’ve explained here. The best source of info, like all *nix commands, is the man page for top on each operating system.

• 2008-02-23

  Move Over, Oil, There’s Money in Texas Wind - New York Times »

  Odd to see a by-line in the NYT for a city less than 30 minutes from where I grew up.  That whole area is awash in wind generation, and it shows no sign of stopping soon.

• 2008-02-20

  

  This is indeed an ongoing problem. (via xkcd.com)