Category Archives: Techy

Programming! Also Linux, web design, hardware… But mostly programming.

make your Mac listen up

I'm so tickled I can't stand it. All right, so Speech Recognition stuff on a Mac is pretty darn cool by itself, but now I've got a nice Apple Script that opens up Safari with various tabs of my favorite sites, and it does this when I tell my Macbook "Get on it."
Also posted in OS X | Tagged , | 5 Comments

my organizational side run amok

I installed Delicious Library earlier and have spent all afternoon and evening scanning in barcodes from my CD’s, DVD’s, books, and games. Wow, that sounds like the dorkiest thing ever: while everyone else in this country is watching the Superbowl, I’m sitting alone in my apartment, waving barcodes at my computer. I [...]
Posted in Techy | Tagged | 1 Comment | Current music New and Approved (remix) by No Doubt

chmodding and Ruby

Recently, I switched from a Powerbook to a Macbook, and to copy my files from one to the other, I used a pen drive. Since my pen drive has a FAT file system, it treats everything as being executable. This, however, is not the case on a UNIX-like file system like OS X. In order to save myself the hassle of manually chmodding thousands of files, I wrote this Ruby script.
Also posted in Linux, OS X, Programming | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

ArtRage

I downloaded the free starter version of ArtRage 2 the other day and I’m just now getting around to playing with it. I have no talent with drawing people or objects, but I was able to whip this up in a few minutes, and Todd was able to discern that it’s a human face, [...]
Posted in Techy | 1 Comment

new iPod and boot issues

I’m finally upgrading my iPod Shuffle to something with a screen! Yesterday, due to the free shipping and free engraving offered, I ordered from Apple online a Product Red iPod Nano. I’m now incredibly excited about it getting here, even though it’ll surely take a week or more for it to get shipped [...]
Posted in Techy | Tagged | 4 Comments

my slugification

I’ve been doing nothing but sleeping, eating, and playing different video games so far during my winter break, and it’s fabulous. I feel like such a slug! I get up a little before noon, eat a bit while playing the Sims, go visit my dad out at my brother’s house construction site, come [...]
Also posted in Video games | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

vampire and zombie Sims

I bought The Sims 2 Nightlife Friday night and I’ve been playing it like crazy since then. I was very excited about the possibility of having vampire Sims, which was introduced in Nightlife, so I set about finding and then wooing one of the in-game vampires with one of my Sims. I was [...]
Also posted in Video games | Tagged , , , | 38 Comments

using Ruby to rename files and edit their content

Recently at work, the web admin for the computer science department came into our lab and told us that my employer's site was broken. The admin had need to make all .php files not act as PHP scripts, and instead, all files with the extension .sphp would now run as PHP scripts. Since [...]
Also posted in Programming | Tagged , , | 7 Comments

finding invalid foreign keys in Rails

Sometimes it would be useful to tell users of your Ruby on Rails application if there is a problem in the database, such as some foreign keys are invalid. As an example, let's assume you have two models, Book and Author, such that each Book has an author_id which connects with Author via its [...]
Also posted in Programming | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

DefaultKeyBinding.dict

To make it more convenient for me to take clean notes, as opposed to notes filled with "x^2" and "y_j", I looked into changing the key bindings in OS X.
Also posted in Config files, OS X | Tagged | 1 Comment