nautilus open terminal here

Similar in functionality to the Windows XP PowerToy "Open Command Window Here", is the nautilus terminal open addon.

This addon will let you right click anywhere in gnome and choose "Open Terminal Here" to launch a shell at that exact location. This lets you use the nautilus file manager to browse deep in a directory tree and launch a terminal, saving you lots of tedious typing.



Nautilus Open Terminal Here

svn-clean

handy script to clean all unversioned files from a source tree. Thankfully it also ignores svn:ignore settings.

svn-clean

Controlling windows services via pythong

I am going to be setting up a bunch of buildbot master processes to run on a windows host. To make restarting them easy I am going to script the service restart using python, perhaps with a web frontend.

Initial googling revealed this page describing a python script which can restart windows services.

Python Recipe for controlling windows services

colordiff to colorize svn diff output

I came across this awesome program the other day called colordiff.

You can pipe diff output to this program to get nice in-terminal diff coloring.

Nice article on colordiff with pictures describing its output.

To install in ubuntu 10.04

sudo apt-get install colordiff

When I use it with subversion I do the following

svn diff | colordiff

apt-file to search for the package providing a file in ubuntu

I found the tool apt-file on the ubuntu forums today.

sudo apt-get install apt-file
sudo apt-file update

Then you can use
apt-file search "GL/gl.h"

or something similar, and you will get a list of all the packages that provide that particular file. This is very useful.

Open command window here was your idea

This is pretty cool. By holding down shift and right clicking anywhere in a folder on Windows 7, you get a popup dialog that says "Open Command Window Here".

This was one of my favorite powertoy addons for XP. Really excited to have it in windows 7.


Link to source

Track day!

I'm very excited. This weekend I am heading up to Jennings GP, a 14 turn track on the florida/georgia border.

Check it out:

Jennings GP

Useful hack for running scheduled tasks at a higher frequency than daily in windows xp

http://www.randomtree.org/eric/techblog/archives/2004/09/the_windows_task_scheduler_is_not_a_secondclass_citizen.html

uni2ascii

If you are ever having issues with g++ compiling code cut and pasted from a website, specifically stuff like "stray \200 on line" or other similar errors, then uni2ascii is for you.

Just take the problem file, and do the following

cat problem.cpp | uni2ascii -B > problem_clean.cpp

The uni2ascii program will do it's very best to convert unicode to ascii where possible.

The new file should compile okay. Remember the -B, if you forget it, you will have lots of random unicode escapes in your output.