tobyandlauren.id.au

• tags
• coding

Mercurial: hg --config option

Incredibly short and simple, but I just couldn’t find anything about the proper usage of the hg --config option for Mercurial and now that I’ve worked it out I might save someone else forty-five seconds of life by posting it here.

Let’s say, like me, you’re stuck behind an authenticated HTTP proxy and have the host and username set up in your ~/.hgrc file, but don’t want to store your password in that file, your hg clone line should be:

hg clone --config http_proxy.passwd=[_password_] http://[_respository-URL_]/ [_working-copy-name_]

In other words, it’s section.name=value, to use the same terms as man hgrc.

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• tags
• mac

Pixelmator: Photoshop replacement?

Being a (recent) convert to the land of independent Mac development, I’ve managed to find replacements for all my workflow tools, software which is smaller, and just so much better. With just Photoshop left to go, I went searching and found Pixelmator.

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• tags
• philosophy

Have Crime Shows Reduced Murder Rates?

Just something I was musing about today. We’re all familiar with the scene where the villain captures the hero, then proceeds to spend a good half-hour or so gloating about his success so that by the time he gets around to actually killing his captive, the hero has gnawed through whatever’s tying her down and effected a quick escape.

I was wondering, do prospective murderers nowadays watch such shows and think that’s the proper way to act, so hold off killing hostages for a decent gloat session first? Something to think about.

• tags
• enviro

Stop the madness of wasteful paper consumption

I pledge to avoid wasting paper in order to help share access to a limited resource.

I want to help to reduce the dramatically increasing paper consumption in the rich world which is connected, though irresponsible production, to threats to biodiversity, human rights abuses, land rights struggles, pollution and climate change.

By reducing my paper use I will give developing countries fairer access to paper and its benefits for cultural development, literacy and education.

I believe that my quality of life will not suffer if I use less paper. By doing so I will save money and create less waste.

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• tags
• coding
• django
• habari
• python

Any mug can have a blog

Modern frameworks have become so advanced and easy to use. I just rewrote this blog in Django, to include the features that I want – which is not many – and it took me most of one morning, which was actually less time than it took to get Habari running on my server. Thanks to Django, any mug can have a custom-made blog inside of a few hours.

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• tags
• security

notified- and verify- requests

It looks like a company called Blue Coat sells a product called ProxySG which is designed to help keep web applications secure by passing all requests through a proxy. It would seem, though, that URL requests along the lines of /verify-SNL_Splash?aHR0cDovL3d3dy50aGlzaXNob21lLmNvbS5hdS8= are internal requests made by the proxy appliance, and are allowed through the system unfiltered (and may even cause the appliance to make changes to the proxy settings).

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• tags
• iphone

iPhone FM transmitter keep-alive

On the recommendation of a colleague, a friend and I picked up super-cheap iPhone FM transmitters from a dodgy stall in our local shopping centre. It only cost a fraction of a poofteenth of what you’d pay for a real FM transmitter, and this colleague had not had any troubles with it.

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• tags
• habari
• postgres
• server

Habari as a WordPress + PostgresQL alternative

I am migrating to a new server (free hosting just don’t cut it any more!) and always seem to have had some sort of WordPress blog lying around for reasons unknown. Still, I thought it wouldn’t be too hard to set up WordPress with PostgresQL, my database of choice. Except, of course, it is, because it’s not officially supported. So I went searching for an alternative, and this Habari bizzo popped up as an excellent blog + PostgresQL option.

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• tags
• deaf

Recording TV subtitles

TiVO does it. Perfectly. Australian teletext channel 801 records on TiVO as a separate ’subtitle track’ which can be turned on and off at will during playback. Problem is, it still costs so much!

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• tags
• php

is_binary() in PHP 5

private function is_binary($string, $testLength = 256) { $testString = substr($string, 0, $testLength); $testString = str_replace(array(chr(10), chr(13)), '', $testString); return !ctype_print($testString); }

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