Es Tea Double Eye » tools

Crossloop now for Mac!

Stii — Tue, 05 May 2009 12:46:29 +0000

Some time ago, on my now defunct blog, I raved about Crossloop. With good reason too. It makes desktop sharing fantastically simple. I then moved to Apple Mac and forgot about it, until now! They released an OS X version! (Although, in all honesty, i have not tested the Mac version yet!)

The big plus is that it enables desktop sharing between Mac and Windows. Yes, I know both of them have Remote Desktop sharing, thing is, Crossloop just makes it so much more simple! Check it out. It really is as simple as:

This is a great technical support tool. A must have in the tools arsenal!

How to calculate the days between two dates using Python. Quickly.

Stii — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 10:56:38 +0000

This is one of those pretty useless things, but you never know when you might just have the need for something like this… I have not taken the time to investigate a quicker way using Bash, but my love of Python made me use it without even thinking twice! :)

I first fired up the interactive Python interpreter by simply typing the command python. Next, I imported the datetime module. Did a simple timedelta between two datetime objects and Jack’s your uncle.

$ python
Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, Apr 15 2008, 22:57:26)
[GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5465)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license"
for more information.
>>> import datetime
>>> print (datetime.date(2009, 03, 31) \
... - datetime.date(2009, 02, 06)).days
53
>>>

Python not only is an excellent programming language, it is also a brilliant general purpose toolbox! Bash/Awk/whatever experts, is there a quicker way maybe? Would love to know.

I love SVN

Stii — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 13:52:52 +0000

The past two days have been a complete nightmare… I’m on an important deadline when I noticed some very strange posts appear on Afrigator. Posts from sites like Mashable and Boing-Boing. Wow! They like Afrigator that much that they’ve subscribed?! Although I’d love to believe that is the case, it simply was not true… I digress.

I started delving into our parser scripts trying to root out the problem on ground level. Make changes left, right and center. Testing, redo-ing, answering the phone, answering calls on Skype from my sweet love of my life, losing track of what I’ve done and BAM! things are a complete mess…

So, what would be the quickest solution? Start over and do it properly. At least, for me that is sometimes the best option. Now, if you’re having nightmare days, you’ll know when it happens that you bugger shit up so badly that you’ve completely forgot to make backups before you started breaking your months of hard work. Its that sickening sinking feeling…

Fortunately, Subversion (SVN) is not only for keeping revisions of your software, but actually allows you to go back to a snapshot of your code right about where you started doing the dumb stuff. There are a number of ways to recover, although this was what I did as a quick and dirty solution. Took me less than a minute.

Find what the revision number is before you mucked it up.
Export that revision to a different directory.

svn export http://svn.afrigator.com/trunk/ -r 4815

Copy the source file back to your working repository.
Check it in

svn ci -m "Fix the mess I made"

Viola! You’re good to go and start messing it up from scratch again!

Now I do know that the best way to prevent this from happening is to never have it happen in the first place, but hell, if and when it happens, be thankful that you’ve got SVN!