Archive for June, 2008

Warp

Monday, June 30th, 2008

ksuther.com | Warp
Warp is a preference pane that allows you to use the mouse to switch between Spaces rather than using the keyboard.
Warp offers the ability to display a live preview of a space when you move the mouse to the edge of the screen, allowing you to see what you have on another space before actually switching to it. Clicking the preview will then warp you to that space. (Enable this feature by checking the option “Click screen edge to Warp” in Warp’s preference pane)

Popularity: 24% [?]

How to spot a sociopath

Sunday, June 29th, 2008

How to spot a sociopath

Extracted from an article by Robert Matthews in the Sunday Telegraph Review, May 4th 1997

While such personality disorders as psychopathy, paranoia and obsession/compulsion all have strictly defined criteria, psychiatrists are still struggling to decide precisely what constitutes a socialised psychopath.

One of the more obvious characteristics of socialised psychopaths is that they give the impression of talking “at” you. Prof Jeremy Coid describes it as like being regarded as a cardboard cut-out. “Even in a sexual relationship with them, you are still just an object for their personal gratification,” he says.

Popularity: 19% [?]

Copying your boot sector / MBR on windows

Saturday, June 28th, 2008

If you want to do the equivalent of a dd on linux for your Master Boot Record (for example, if you have GRUB installed and are going to install windows which will zap the MBR) in windows, the tool MBRWiz is fantastic.

It’s very simple to back up your MBR to a file & restore it later.

Popularity: 29% [?]

How to rip the audio from a youtube movie

Saturday, June 28th, 2008

(on Unix)

  1. Download the flv file with youtube-dl
  2. Extract the audio like so:
    mplayer -dumpaudio nodame_theme.flv -dumpfile nodame_theme.mp3

    (thanks to here)

This method allowed me to rip the World In Action theme to mp3 for my ringtone… of course you could always use vixy.net.

Popularity: 38% [?]

SIDPLAY – the premier C64 music player for the Mac

Wednesday, June 25th, 2008

SIDPLAY – the premier C64 music player for the Mac
SIDPLAY is a Commodore 64 music player. It emulates the sound chip and other internals of the Commodore 64 home computer to play back music that was originally written on it. The sound chip of the C64 is called the “Sound Interface Device” or SID, and therefore this music is known as SID music. The SID chip is basically a three voice synthesizer on a chip. The unusual combination of digital and analogue circuitry is the reason for its distinctive sound.

SIDPLAY strives to offer the best possible SID music experience on any platform. It has been designed with the High Voltage SID Collection (HVSC) in mind. This collection is the biggest and most complete collection of SID music on the Internet. It can be obtained for free from http://hvsc.c64.org/.

Popularity: 28% [?]

Mixes by the crane

Wednesday, June 18th, 2008

Some interesting mixes by the enigmatically named “the crane”.

Popularity: 27% [?]

Business Rules SMTP Proxy

Monday, June 16th, 2008

Recently sending out emails with the wrong attachments or to the wrong people has come to the forefront of my thinking.

What would be really useful in events like this would be an outgoing SMTP proxy that has a set of business rules that will delay outgoing mails based on user-set criteria until they have been have been reviewed, perhaps by a moderator role.

Examples of rules could include:

  • Recipient domain / email address check
  • Word check (for e.g. profanity)
  • Combination of recipient domains / email addresses check (ie – you don’t want to accidentally send the same email to multiple clients)
  • Attachment check: file size / type
  • Checking for inclusion of username / passwords in unencrypted email

ProxSMTP could perhaps be a basis for this – it works with my favourite MTA (Postfix). If only I had time to code it. You could call it a BlueCoat for email.

Popularity: 29% [?]

Perl jobs spam

Monday, June 16th, 2008

James-

You should know ahead of time that this is email is as personal as possible considering how many are receiving it. So if you hate these things, just delete it and rest assured you’ll never receive another one like this. I’m just trying to cast as wide a net as possible to find the best Perl developers out there. Lucky for you that you’re a CPAN devotee…

So please don’t hate me because I’m a recruiter – all I ask is that you accept me because I do so for a great, growing company whose codebase is object-oriented Perl and where CPAN modules are heavily incorporated into our development efforts. And if it helps, I’m also an engineer who has coded in start-ups, turnarounds, and high growth companies – sure it was LISP, Prolog, and C but who’s keeping score?

I work for GridApp Systems and we’re looking to hire several great Perl developers – senior and mid-level – to work for us in New York City in an exceptionally developer friendly environment where code is king. You may be interested or you may know of someone who is. We’ll even relocate from most anywhere and sponsor too.

Look if nothing else, we should stay in touch – you never know what the future holds in Perl, right?

That’s about it. If you can help me, great; if you want me to go away, never to email you again, just let me know. Either way, remember the sage words of Larry Wall who said,

“What is the sound of Perl? Is it not the sound of a wall that people have stopped banging their heads against?”

GridApp believes…

Steve Levy

Looks like this bloke has been hitting multiple mailing lists, CPAN, etc – no thanks.

Popularity: 29% [?]

Fantastic new vector graphics shirt from threadless…

Monday, June 16th, 2008

Playing God:
Playing God - Threadless, Best T-shirts Ever

Popularity: 28% [?]

gcalcli – google calendar for the commandline

Saturday, June 14th, 2008

gcalcli – Google Code
gcalcli is a Python application that allows you to access your Google Calendar from a command line. It’s easy to get your agenda, search for events, and quickly add new events. Additionally gcalcli can be used as a reminder service to execute any application you want.

Popularity: 29% [?]