Apr 28 0 comments
F/OSS, Geek Stuff, General

My Non-Open Source (Proprietary) Guilty Pleasures

Being an “Open Source” guy there is a certain stigma that goes along with that title, one being that everything you use has to be Open Source. Where I take great pride in the knowledge there isn’t really any aspect of my digital life I couldn’t do without an Open Source solution, I personally don’t necessarily make Open Source a “requirement”. I always look for the best solution and tool for a particular task, for me freedom and access to the code weighs heavily in that decision but is not the only parameters in picking a solution.

In the interest of full discloser, and because there are people who enjoy pointing out when they “catch me” not using Open Source (as if I don’t know), I present to you a list of my Non-Open Source guilty pleasures that I use frequently (with some justification for using them)

Note: with the exceptions of OSX and the Microsoft products all solutions below do offer free versions of their products though I typically pay for the upgraded products.

Desktop

  • Evernote (http://www.evernote.com) – There are several alternatives to Evernote, including Open Sources ones such as Tomboy but they all seem to lack either features or cross platform compatibility. Evernote does have a OSX and Windows client but no client for Linux which has always been a huge draw back. Evernote does have a pretty good web interface, which continues to improve and this helps a lot when I am on my Linux desktops. Evernote also have a lot of open APIs and there has been some activity to writing alternative Evernote clients that will run on Linux desktops including one I’ve checked out called Nevernote (http://nevernote.sourceforge.net/)
  • Navicat (http://www.navicat.com/) – I simple like this tool. The user interface and feature set is wonderful. There are tons of Open Source GUI clients to connect to MySQL database and even though 99% on my database activity is connecting to a MySQL backend every now and then I need to connect to MSSQL, Oracle, or PostgreSQL and my Navicat Premium allows me to do this in one client. It also has a wonderful feature of establishing my MySQL connections over SSH which I love when I need to work on my Windows boxes. It’s baked in so I don’t have to establish my own separate SSH tunnel. They also have clients for Windows, OSX, and Linux
  • Dropbox (http://db.tt/AyOLUYV) – I have to be honest, I’ve used Dropbox for several years but it is always on my hit list to move to an alternative Open Source solution. There seems to be a new one that drops every month. When I get comfortable with the staying power and feature set that Dropbox offer, I will probably drop Dropbox.
  • OSX (http://www.apple.com/macosx/) – This is really a decision of convince than anything else. There are typically a greater number “vendor support” desktop application that are not support on Linux desktops such as the previously mentioned Evernote. However OSX is BSD at heart and lets me retain a lot of the Open Source tools I am accustomed to on my Linux desktop including a very power command line and scripting ability. My OSX desktop also affords me the unique benefit of running virtualization software such as Virtualbox (http://www.virtualbox.org/) and allow me to run Windows, several Linux distributions, and OSX all on one physical machine. This is really nice especially when needing to do testing.

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Apr 28 0 comments
General

Jimi continues to dominate my #Last.fm library

Shocms_music_profile__users_at_last

http://www.last.fm/user/Shocm

 

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Apr 01 0 comments
Development, General

Powerful Validation from Respect

All developers have had to, and one time or another, write a validation class. Over the years, I’ve personally tweaked my own validation class and it has become a pretty standard part of all my coding project; However that may all change now.

Respect is not the first PHP validation class to hit the tubes of the Net but it does appear to be one of the better implemented and flexible ones out there.

More powerful Validation from Respect – http://pulsene.ws/1atzk

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Tags: ,
Feb 21 1 comments
Development, OSX

Getting Git to work in Textmate, Resolving “sh: git: command not found” error

I’ve been doing a lot of work with Git lately and its great. I downloaded and installed the Git Bundle for Textmate but it didn’t  seem to work, always returning the error message “sh: git: command not found”. Since I did most of my Git work from the command line I just ignored it but for some reason tonight I decided I needed to fix.

Since I knew Git worked on my system, it must have been something with the way Textmate was configured. I couldn’t figure out how to confiugre Textmate to point to my Git install so I guess I cheated and I created a symbolic link on my system to point to my Git install. It seems to have corrected my issue with Textmate.

The command I ran was pretty simple

sudo ln -s /usr/local/git/bin/git /usr/bin/git

That’s it, Textmate is now happy with my Git install.

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Tags: ,
Jan 17 1 comments
Geek Stuff, OSX

SSH AutoComplete on OSX

I am a very heavy user of SSH, like everyday all day type of user. I know a couple cool SSH tricks like port forwarding and mapping remote drives. One thing that always bugged me was the lack of auto complete when I was on my OSX machine. You see with SSH, you can define a bunch of individual host and configurations unique to those host in a file called .ssh/config. It’s a great tool to have and when you do have some host define, on a Linux machine, you can type in the command ssh, then the first couple if letters of the host and hit tab. It will act as any tab completion does for commands and fill in as much of the hostname as it can before it requires some other unique identifier. However, this cool autocomplete feature didn’t happen naturally of my OSX box.

Through the years, I’ve had an idea of what I needed to do to create my own script to handle it. There is the complete command, the trick is grepping the config file and pulling out the right information. I decided to be lazy and just manually created several alias for my ssh server. The alias approach worked, but this grew into a very long list of alias and wasn’t very efficient. So tonight I decided I was going to write the script to meet my needs and about 2 clicks on Google links later, I found someone who had actually already completely done it. Nem W. Schlecht posted his script on a Macworld hints forum a couple years ago. Here is a link to that original thread http://goo.gl/Wd4Z5 but the piece of magic that did the trick is below. As a added bonus, it also creates auto complete from servers it finds in your known_host file. I will repost his post, not just the code, because he has some wise advice on where to place the code

The macports suggestion is a good one, but IMO, includes too much. If you don’t have macports installed, you can add the following to your .bash_profile (I wouldn’t add it to my .bashrc, since that gets read in by cron jobs and remote commands).

There are a couple improvements here. First, this will also read in aliases in your ~/.ssh/config file. Secondly, it will ignore commented out entries in your ~/.ssh/known_hosts file. Finally, this is a function and not a static list. Thus, it is immediately aware of any new additions to either file (although on really slow machines it will be slower than a static list).

_complete_ssh_hosts ()
{
        COMPREPLY=()
        cur="${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]}"
        comp_ssh_hosts=`cat ~/.ssh/known_hosts | \
                        cut -f 1 -d ' ' | \
                        sed -e s/,.*//g | \
                        grep -v ^# | \
                        uniq | \
                        grep -v "\[" ;
                cat ~/.ssh/config | \
                        grep "^Host " | \
                        awk '{print $2}'
                `
        COMPREPLY=( $(compgen -W "${comp_ssh_hosts}" -- $cur))
        return 0
}
complete -F _complete_ssh_hosts ssh

Don’t forget you need to “source” you file to get the new command to load in your terminal or you can close your terminal window and open a new one.

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Tags: ,
Jan 12 0 comments
General

Goodbye OpenOffice, Hello LibreOffice

After years of being an advocate for the for the Open Source approach and philosophy behind OpenOffice, which for years lead the way as a alternative solution to more proprietary office suites, I’ve forced to reevaluate my recommendation of the OpenOffice suite. After Sun was acquired by Oracle, Oracle’s direction for the OpenOffice suite seemed shaky and not really inline with the community. This is where the power of Open Source shines, the OpenOffice was forked and a new project was started by the name of LibreOffice (http://www.libreoffice.org/ / http://www.documentfoundation.org/download/)

There is a good step by step on how to remove OpenOffice and install LibreOffice on your Ubuntu box on the txwikinger Blog http://goo.gl/PF9T6

 

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Dec 23 0 comments
General

Darwin’s Finches, 20th Century Business, and APIs: Evolve Your Business Model

via blog.apigee.com

This is a really good talk about APIs and their place as a real business model. It’s a little long but has a lot of great point and examples for both the very geeky and the very business minded individuals.
I’ve often had discussion around the open API approach vs Open Source approach and if open API’s might not be a good substitution for a business who, for whatever reason, don’t want to go Open Source with their model.
Sam Ramji does a great job of outlining exactly how you should think of yourself in an API world as a business. He touches on how to iterate the growth of an API model and listen to the users of it.
Great talk in general, if this type of stuff interest you please give it a watch. It’s about 45 minutes long. He also made the slides and content available through Creative Commons.

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Dec 14 0 comments
General

Whisky Rocks look cool (pardon the pun) Going to have try them in my Lagavulin

via i.imgur.com

Saw this on Reddit and had to track down where I can buy some. Looks like I might be making a Amazon order. Perfect as a stocking stuffer http://www.amazon.com/Rocks-Whiskey-Stones-Set/dp/B002GZX2DE

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Dec 10 0 comments
General

The wife’s holiday “Skittle Popcorn” making process has begun

It has become somewhat of a holiday tradition around our house that the wife makes her famous "Skittle Popcorn" in which she infuses the wonderful taste of Skittles onto light and fluffy popcorn. It's all sorts of goodness I assure you. This year she is channeling the "mad scientist" in her and will experiment with other candy and popcorn combinations such as Red Hots. Should be interesting. 

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Dec 03 0 comments
General

Two of my favorite things in life, Sony and Batman

Nice article posted on the Sony Electronics Blog  ( http://blog.discover.sonystyle.com/interview-with-comic-book-legend-jim-lee ) that has an interview with Jim Lee from DC Universe Online  which is going to be a cool game that lets you be a hero (and maybe even a villain) in the DC Universe. I am a huge Batman fan so there is no question I will be giving this a look. The trailer moves on the sites are pretty intense http://www.dcuniverseonline.com/

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