Category Archives: Coding

Basic Open Source Collaboration on Github

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A couple of weeks ago I encouraged a college student to make his project open source and post it on Github (or Gitlab or Bitbucket or whatever). What had not occurred to me is that this person had never had to collaborate with other coders professionally or privately. He did not understand the implications or the process of pushing code to Github. The following is adapted from an email I wrote to this gent to explain the ins and outs, whys and wherefores of collaborating on Github.

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A Better Python strftime / strptime Table

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I present two tables that reformat the Python strptime, strftime documentation. The first is a short table with the most useful directives, the second is a longer table with all of the directives. This is easier for me to scan than the native docs. Hopefully it will help others as well.

UnitDirectiveDescriptionExample
YEAR%Y4-digit1970, 1988, 2001, 2013
MONTH%mDecimal zero-padded01, 02, ..., 12
DAY%dDecimal zero-padded01, 02, ..., 31
HOUR%H24-hour clock, zero-padded00, 01, ..., 23
MINUTE%MDecimal zero-padded00, 01, ..., 59
SECOND%SDecimal zero-padded00, 01, ..., 59
TIMEZONE%zUTC offset(empty), +0000, -0400, +1030
ISO format%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%z

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speedtest-easy released!

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Want to see if your ISP is providing the service they promised and don’t care about “scientific methodology?” Use speedtest-easy!
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Twitter Embedded Timelines on self-hosted WordPress

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Quick tip for hosting Twitter embedded timelines on a self-hosted WordPress. You will need a mere two links:

The Jetpack plugin brings an array of cool features to self-hosted that was previous only available via WordPress.com. It was non-obvious why I could not simply follow the instructions in the guide, and searching the plugins for “Twitter Timeline” does not bring up much useful information.

Enjoy your new embedded Twitter timeline!

VMware Fusion Networking Tips and Tricks

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Overview

VMware Fusion’s networking configuration is a bit obscure and it is difficult to find information about it on the ‘net. I usually only need to achieve the following bits of config change, and they really only serve my need to tightly control all the things. I am posting this information here so that I never forget again.

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A Clean, Usable Facebook

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Updated Dec 10, 2013 – Facebook completely re-vamped their design about six months ago and the new look and feel is actually manageable for me without the hacks listed below. I still know people using them, but I have not maintained these settings for the new Facebook.

Updated Aug 19, 2012 – Re-enabled header, removed groups photos specifically
Updated Aug 16, 2012 – removed “Pages and Ads” section
Updated Aug 8, 2012 – liberate tuteme ex inferis – added javascript

I am not a fan of Facebook’s user experience. Although I deactivated my account for a couple months and felt a state of blissful peace, I was eventually drawn back to it for social reasons. However navigating the super-busy UI felt like that scene from Event Horizon where the guy rips his own eyes out in the horror of his surroundings.

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