Jay McGavren’s Journal

I also said I’d present on rubyscript2exe, which is likely to turn into a NSIS tutorial as well.

Here’s a quick copy-paste from a build session…
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KDevelop allows collaborative editing on a document… If the file is altered on disk and you haven’t made local updates, it’ll reload as soon as the other person saves.

I think I’m gonna use this for an always-on todo list at work, which I’ve wanted for eons.. I’ve pointed KDevelop at a plain text file on a Samba share, then loaded the same file in the editor on my Windows box. Every time I save in Windows, the change is reflected on the KDevelop screen a second later.

Now when I want to know what I should to next (or need a reminder after spacing out), I should be able to just flick my eyes to my left, instead of waiting for an e-mail client to load. (And yes, I could accomplish something similar with paper and pen, but I want something searchable, automatically archived, and universally accessible.)

A similar setup with Google Docs seems to work as well. The view only refreshes automatically if you have edit permissions on the document, though. If you don’t (or don’t want to log in all the time), the Firefox “Reload Every” plugin should do the trick.

Got a phone call from my Mom this morning to let me know the photo of my niece wasn’t visible - to everyone besides me. Guess I had a little too much faith in Flock; I thought it would save the image and then upload it to Wordpress, but it just linked it from my GMail account (to which I have access but no one else does). It’s also crapping Technorati tags all over my entries instead of using Wordpress categories. I may be reverting to Firefox soon.

So I experimented with Nozbe for a while and then discovered that its main benefit was the next actions list, which could just as readily be replicated with a next tag in Gmail.

So I’ve got everything I can do as a next action on the Next tag there, and my Nozbe account sits unused. Guess I don’t need to spend that $5 a month.

I really didn’t understand why blog-to-book would be so hard… Blurb’s Booksmart blog slurper was cumbersome at best and incompetent at worst, and the only other competitor in the field closed up shop a couple years ago.

Well, Qoop has rolled out BlogPrinting.com, and so far it Just Works. I know their site looks like it was made to harvest passwords, but enter your info and you’ll be treated to a nicely-formatted PDF preview of your blog in book form, complete with embedded images, in about 3 minutes. My <pre> tags (meaning all my code snippets) all got wrapped into a messy blob, but most folks don’t use those. Posts marked private are included (a good thing for me), but you could probably filter them by setting up a special login for the site to use.

Price is quite reasonable, too: $22 for a 379-page 6×9 book in black and white. (For gods’ sake, don’t leave it on color (the default), it was $120 for the same book.) I’ll follow up when I actually get the book, but so far this is really nice.

WordPress, Movable Type, and TypePad are all supported for now. Not sure if my LiveJournal friends can use the Movable Type option, but if not, drop me a line and I’ll walk you through exporting to WordPress.

…this is so %$#@ing 133t.

Morticious Thrind’s CLI Wordpress Theme

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My latest way to make Windows play nice with Linux is to paste in files via the terminal. I do:

$ cat > file.txt
[pasted content]
^D
$

That Control-D ends the file and puts me back at a prompt, with [pasted content] saved safely in file.txt.

Well, I just realized the same thing will work with xargs. I had some noisy terminal output that contained some file names I needed to delete. I copied it out, pasted it to my favorite text editor, played around with it until only file names were left, and then did this:

$ cat | xargs rm
[pasted file names]
^D
$

And voila - the files are gone. I haven’t used this (or xargs) extensively, so try at your own risk, but it seems to work nice so far.