Archive for Blog

Find and eliminate illegal characters

I’ve been looking for a solution to a problem that a friend of mine has, with a bunch of files spread across several different folders which as gotten some really nasty characters in their file names, most likely because they used to reside on a windows partition.

While searching for a solution I came across this one app called detox which worked perfectly, and here is how I did it:

cd /path/to/folder/with/bad/files
find . -exec detox --dry-run {} \;

This will actually scan recursively, and the –dry-run flag won’t change any thing but it will give you a list of suggested changes, just remove the flag and re-run if you want to execute them.

Hope this could be of some help to others finding themselves in the same boat.

Minitube

Tired of watching sloppy video playback from YouTube? I was, and it got me pretty exited when I came across this project called minitube.

It’s basically a browser for YouTube, you can search content (of course), add playlists, share videos to your Twitter/Facebook account but also via e-mail. But best of all, it can float on top of your screen so you can do some productive work while watching your favorites:) Pretty awesome when you want to follow a tutorial or just general multitasking. The app runs on Linux (GTK), OS X & Windows. The user interface is clean and simple, no clutter;)

One of the other things I found which is a huge plus and worth to mention is that the playback is flawless! And this has never been the case for me.

Gnome Shell Extensions

For everyone using Gnome 3 (the awesomest DE!) they have launched a pretty wicked shell extension site, it’s still in alpha but worked great for me.

You can create an account, write comments and even upload your own extension, but the main thing is they feature a one-click installer for existing extensions, just hit that link and the selected extension is installed and even loaded directly, no download/install/restart crap. It will also detect currently installed extensions, this thing is just awesome! One thing I miss though, is the ability to search for extensions, but I am sure they will fix this:) Check it out here.

Gnome 4 real?

Got this nice feedback today from gnome while trying to copy some files, seems that my beloved DE really suits it’s title:D

Traq, the new kid on the block.

I was looking for something like trac the other day, because trac is a pain to set up and just a little too much for my small company. After browsing around for a while I came a cross this new project that simply runs on php/mysql, it’s called traq and my first impressions are positive.

I haven’t given it much testing yet, but I added a couple of our projects and successfully connected them to their dedicated svn repo. At a first glance it appears to have everything I am looking for in a ticket system, it can handle all the stuff I find most important like:

  • access control
  • users & groups
  • tickets
  • roadmap
  • changelog
  • wiki

You can browse the source of your repos, view revisions and you even get some graphs. The interface could use some polishing but overall it looks pretty nice, and if it does the job, I really don’t care:) A couple of other things worth to mention is that it also has support for themes and 3rd-party plugins.

Honestly I wish I could write a little bit more detailed, but I’ve only scratched the surface yet, so we’ll see. Visit traq for more information.

Jon Kristian is Stephen Fry proof thanks to caching by WP Super Cache