The Rambling Chronicles: Notes

Easy thumbnail resizing with Automator

Tom — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 10:07:01 +0000

Simply use a “run shell script” action, set pass input to “as argument” and use sips $@ --resampleWidth 60, setting the width you want.

Found this handy tip here: http://lethain.com/entry/2008/sep/22/using-automator-to-scale-images-horizontally/

A PHP version of Sinatra

Tom — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 13:43:45 +0000

I’ve been looking for something like this for a while: Fitzgerald.

Handles routing, rendering and all the other basics, small size and very easy to use.

Django Syntax highlighting for Coda

Tom — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 14:00:33 +0000

Just makes things a little clearer than without: Get it here

Django Macports

Tom — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 11:51:51 +0000

Irritatingly, the django-admin.py is not set in the path, you need to symlink it somehwere that is seen (I put it in /opt/local/bin)

Flash without and IDE

Tom — Tue, 11 May 2010 13:08:11 +0000

Not as tricky as it sounds, as long as you have the right stuff.

First, the compiler: (Use Flex SDK mxmlc )

Which you can then use to compile:

mxmlc -compiler.debug -default-size 550 1204 -o="" <your_actionscript>.as

You’ll also need a debugger:
Such as De MonsterDebugger which allows you to debug your swf.

Notes:

Flash security policy means that debugging as a local file is a pain, set up a “site” that you can work from (a local server is best)

Interesting Bash colour reference

Tom — Tue, 04 May 2010 12:05:13 +0000

The PS1 variable in .bash_profile contains the formatting for the login bit of a terminal prompt.

My PS1 variable: PS1="\[3[1;32m\]\u\[3[1;30m\]@\[3[0;34m\]\h\[3[1;30m\] \[3[0;30m\]\W \[3[1;30m\]\$\[3[0m\] " (green username@blue server: black location)

PS1 variables:

 \a     an ASCII bell character (07)
 \d     the date  in  "Weekday  Month  Date"  format
        (e.g., "Tue May 26")
 \e     an ASCII escape character (033)
 \h     the hostname up to the first `.'
 \H     the hostname
 \j     the  number of jobs currently managed by the shell
 \l     the basename of the shell's terminal device name
 \n     newline
 \r     carriage return
 \s     the  name  of  the shell, the basename of $0
        (the portion following the final slash)
 \t     the current time in 24-hour HH:MM:SS format
 \T     the current time in 12-hour HH:MM:SS format
 \@     the current time in 12-hour am/pm format
 \u     the username of the current user
 \v     the version of bash (e.g., 2.00)
 \V     the release of bash,  version  +  patchlevel
        (e.g., 2.00.0)
 \w     the current working directory
 \W     the  basename  of the current working direcory
 \!     the history number of this command
 \#     the command number of this command
 \$     if the effective UID is 0, a #, otherwise a $
 \nnn   the character corresponding to the octal number nnn
 \\     a backslash
 \[     begin a sequence of non-printing characters,
        which could be used to embed a terminal control
        sequence into the prompt
 \]     end a sequence of non-printing characters

PS1 Colours:

Black       0;30     Dark Gray     1;30
Blue        0;34     Light Blue    1;34
Green       0;32     Light Green   1;32
Cyan        0;36     Light Cyan    1;36
Red         0;31     Light Red     1;31
Purple      0;35     Light Purple  1;35
Brown       0;33     Yellow        1;33
Light Gray  0;37     White         1;37

MySQL string replace

Tom — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 12:04:23 +0000

Keep forgetting this. Replace a string in all rows:

UPDATE <table> SET <column> = REPLACE(<column>, '', '');

Lucene Indexing

Tom — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 12:20:50 +0000

Using Zend Search Lucene to index is almost impossible when the amount needing to be index exceeds even a small amount.

Some Tools:

LuSql allows you to index a database based on a mysql query ¹
Luke For looking into the indexes you’ve created and checking they contain all the data you want.

Things to remember

If you need to specify what an index field will store you have to do it for each one, in order they are returned in the SQL. E.g.

name, age, dob, location, 
310 210 200 200

It doesn’t seem to like column aliases for some reason – try not to use them if possible
1. Seems to have problems with column aliases though in my scripts ↩

Python DB API

Tom — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:46:53 +0000

Useful things to remember:

Can get python built (no compile, no need for mysql_config file shenanigans) from launchpad

Need to create a DB cnfig object:

config = {'host': 'localhost', 'database': 'database_name', 'user': 'root', 'password': '', 'charset': 'utf8' ,'use_unicode': True, 'get_warnings': True }

Then connect:

db = mysql.connector.connect(**config)

Then you can get the “cursor” object which allows you to do things:

cursor = db.cursor()

Then perform whatever you want with SQL:

cursor.execute('SELECT * FROM table')

Get the results for your query and iterate through them:

for row in cursor.fetchall():
	print row

Get the ID of an insert you have just performed:

cursor.lastrowid

Change of address

Tom — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 21:51:39 +0000

The blog is now at http://notes.theramblingchronicles.co.uk. It was always going to be moved to make way for the original purpose on the domain. On the absolute remote chance that this messed up something for someone, somewhere, I’m sorry.