This is probably way late but The Pragmatic Bookshelf, publishers of fine programming books, have launched a free monthly magazine called PragPub that covers a variety of topics. For instance, this month has a nice overview of how to use Sass. Past topics have included articles about Clojure, automating screencasts and managing life projects.

Granted, they are ultimately pushing their books (which I think are excellent) but they are releasing the magazine in PDF, epub and mobi. How cool is that?

PragPub

I love reading. It’s how I get most my knowledge (or lack thereof). And I also really like bookmarklets. They make browsing the web much easier.

And I found this great bookmarklet that let’s you find a book that you are viewing on Amazon.com at your local library. It’s called xISBN Bookmarklet. I just call it ‘library lookup v2.’ It was inspired by Jon Udell’s LibraryLookup which I used to use so I just updated the version.

It’s really easy to set up and use. Set up is covered on it’s page under "Try xISBN Bookmarkets." One thing you’ll need in advance is to know the base URL of your library’s catalog. Mine is http://catalog.colapl.org for example.

Using it is even eaiser. You just look at a page on Amazon or Barnes and Noble and click the bookmarklet. Or if there’s a ISBN on a page, you can just select it and click the bookmarklet. It’ll take you to a page like this.

Depending on your library, you could place a hold on it and then pick it up. Remember, support your local library!

OK, so it’s been over a year since my last post (of which I completed all except two). But here I am now with a wonderful new design, thanks to Sprout Creative and a new outlook on blogging.

I’ve taken a bit of a different approach to blogging this time. Instead of using a content management system like Wordpress or Movable Type, I’m opting for static html. The pages are generated by Jekyll after being written in GNU Emacs. I’m hoping that this tool set makes it easier for me to get posts up. Let me know if you have any questions about the process or if you have any comments about the design.

We’ll see if it sticks. If you don’t hear from me for another year, then you’ll know that this little experiment failed.

I have been mulling these over for the past couple of days but I thought I’d post them to the internets in hopes of injecting some accountability into the whole morass.

• Get knee fixed
• Go on vacation somewhere besides San Francisco/Oakland or Rhode Island with wife and child
• Take better photos
• Bake cake for wife’s birthday
• Lay off the sugar and don’t lay around as much (uhm, after I bake the cake)
• Learn Clojure
• Fix what ails desktop computer
• Clean out top drawer of bureau
• Rebalance 401K
• Turn 40 (yeah, I’m old)

If you are reading this and want a health check, feel free to ping me.

I’ve been using Dojo for a couple of months now and I really like it as it makes writing cross-browser JavaScript a breeze.

I’ve also been using emacs with YASnippet for a bit now too. YASnippet is a plugin for emacs that allows you to define a snippet that’ll get transformed into something much bigger in your file. It saves you a lot of typing as you can define areas in your snippet where you get prompted to enter text and it’ll autofill with your entries. Very handy, let me tell you. There’s a screencast on YouTube showing how powerful it is.

Which brings me to the point of this post. I’ve created a package of snippets aimed at people writing Dojo based JavaScript. It’s hosted up on GitHub if you would like to use it. Currently, it only includes (what I feel to be) the major functions but feel free to contact me if you’d like to add more.

svn log is a great command to see what’s going on in your subversion repository. Unfortunately, at my job we are using a really old version (1.1.4!), a version so old that it doesn’t support the --limit argument. This makes the svn log painful to use as it outputs EVERYTHING.

Luckily, svn log is so awesome that it overcomes this weakness and allows you to use a date based criteria for listing log statements. Unfortunately, the syntax is hard for me to remember. Thus, I wrote this little shell script function that’ll list activity for the given days in the past. You can put it in your .bashrc and run it like svnlog 14. That’ll output logs from the last 14 days.

svnlog() {
    OFFSET=$1
    shift
    svn log -r HEAD:{"`date -d "$OFFSET days ago" +%Y-%m-%d`"} $*
}

Insprired by an article on ibm.com about using twitter from the command line, I wrote up a simple little script to get your friends updates.

Here it is:

$ curl -s -u username:password \
http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.xml |
awk '/<text/ {
  gsub(/<\/*text>/,"");
  text = $0;
}
/screen_name/ {
  gsub(/ *<\/*screen_name>/,"");
  print $0;
  print text;
}'

All it does it is use cURL to grab the timeline from twitter. Then it passes it through awk to extract the name and text from your buddies. Simple and silly, yes?

Continuing along on the keyboard theme, most Google apps have keyboard shortcuts. I’ve started using Google calendar and found the keyboard shortcuts for it as well. Very handy.

Google Calendar keyboard shortcuts

I’m not a big fan of using the mouse. It pains me to reach for it to accomplish something. That’s why I was really excited to find the Mouseless Browsing add-on for Firefox.

From the add-on’s homepage:

Mouseless Browsing (MLB) is a Firefox-Extension which enables you to browse the internet with the keyboard. The basic principle is to add small boxes with unique ids behind every link and/or form element. You just have to type in the id and press enter (there is also an automatice mode available) to trigger the corresponding action i.e. following a link, pressing a button or selecting a textfield.

I could never get w3m working how I liked it so Mouseless Browsing really scratches an itch I have.

Did you know that you can navigate Google search results with your keyboard?

It’s a Google Labs experiment so you’ll have to enable it on any machine you want to try it.

To experience the glory of navigating search results with your keyboard, head on over to Google Experimental Search and click "Join" for the Keyboard Shortcuts experiment. Then it’s simply a matter of pressing "J" to navigate down the search results and "K" to move up your search results on Google. Pressing "O" will then open up the link for you. There are a few others that you might like as well so give this experiment a whirl.

The keyboard shortcuts key will also show up on your search results page so that’ll help you remember them. (Experienced vi users will of course recognize these keyboard shortcuts.)