The State Of My Vim Configuration

 - 3 mins read
I’ve grown to become a huge Vim fan over my years of programming, probably beyond what most people would call normal. I think my interest in Vim stems from my interest in the tools that I use to code; I appreciate the manner in which I write code almost as much as the code I write. In the craftsman philosophy, I’m a big fan of functional tools that serve their purpose well, CoolTools for example.
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Simple Sidebar Navigation with Sausage.js

 - 2 mins read
Several weeks ago, a friend linked me to Sausage.js, “a jQuery UI widget for contextual pagination.” I would call it more of a sidebar navigation widget. The example page was intriguing and prompted me to add it to this blog. Requirements My inital goal was based off the CouchDB example linked on the Sausage homepage. I was slowed down by trying to figure out the exact JS and CSS requirements, which aren’t specifically listed out, and some conflicts with my local CSS for this blog, the main Sausage div requires height 100% and I had something else set to 100% height which didn’t work well…
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Air Speakers For Everyone

 - 2 mins read
Earlier today, the private key from Apple’s Airport Express was found and released, along with some Perl code, finally allowing for anyone to create their own “Air Speaker” without using the Airport Express. With this code, any OSX or Linux computer can now be turned into an AirSpeaker, that any iPhone or iPod Touch, or iTunes, can now stream music to seamlessly. This really is fantastic because it allows a great deal of flexibility with how you play music, which has been limited for years now.
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On Easily Replacing Text In Vim

 - 2 mins read
Or more specifically: search and replace using the current visual selection. Lately with my job, I’ve been spending more time refactoring old code than writing new code. Refactoring and manipulating code (and text) is something that I think Vim is great at, once you really understand the different modes and motions that Vim has, see Stack Overflow for a good summary. Vim’s Search and Replace mode is what I’ve primarily been using and while refactoring, I found some Vim tricks I wanted to share.
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Toggle OSX Audio Output From The Command Line

 - 2 mins read
I spend alot of time at my computer and with that much usage, have both speakers and headphones for different hours of the day. I was initially physically swapping 3.5MM audio output plugs on my speakers, lotsa actual effort! I then figured out I could plug my headphones into the “rear” speaker output and switch output through the audio control in OSX, much easier! But that was even work, to open the audio panel and chose the correct source, so today I figured out how to toggle sources in Applescript and the command line.
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Dynamic Fabric Commands For Managing Cloud Servers

 - 3 mins read
Fabric is a Python CLI tool for interacting with remote servers, that I’ve been pushing at work the last few months. It’s great for organizing simple tasks to run locally or remotely, this blog is even being deployed using Fabric currently! It’s a great tool. The two main ideas of Fabric are that you have hosts and tasks you apply to those hosts. Fabric uses fabfile.py as its default instruction file, similar to a Rakefile or makefile.
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Shmoocon 2011

 - 3 mins read
I attended my second Shmoocon earlier this month in Washington DC, a conference which I’ve begun to describe to my friends as a ‘hacking and security’ conference. Shmoocon is a wonderful mix of computer security folks, physical security folks (lockpicking), and hackers (folks just interested in how things work). It’s fun to attend and find many examples that prove you really aren’t as safe as you thought, you really can’t trust most companies or people, but there is plenty that you can do about it, once you know to how to defend yourself.
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Upgrading To Blogofile 0.7

 - 3 mins read
I saw recently on PyPI that blogofile, the Python blog engine that builds this blog, updated to version 0.7. This prompted me to upgrade my blog from 0.6 and detail the changes here, since the blogofile docs don’t seem to have kept up. For the most part, this was discovered through trying to build my blog until it worked. I used the the blogofile init simple_blog and blogofile init blogofile.com projects as examples of “working” 0.
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Scraping Comcast's Website and the 250GB Limit

 - 2 mins read
It’s bad enough that I cannot get FIOS at my apartment and am stuck with Comcast cable, but their website is a terrible mishmash of redirects and “preloading” pages, making it near unusable. My only reason for using their website is to verify my automatic billing is setup and that my bandwidth usage is below their 250GB cap. I decided to automate this and through feedback from other Comcast users, found some interesting results about their bandwidth caps.
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