ohryan.ca

A Web Developer in Winnipeg

  • Linux: Finding Newer Files [OR How To Create A Patch File]

    in

    The linux `find` command is very powerful, it has tonnes of switches and options that I’m not terribly familiar with. Even though I’ve been a LAMP developer for over 5 years, I don’t work on the command-line too often. Yesterday I ran into a problem that I had never tried to resolve before. I was working on a large project on a development server and I had some updates I wanted to push to the production server, but I had lost track of which files I had updated. I dug through the find manual for a few minutes and discovered the `-newer` flag, from man “File was modified more recently than file.” With this flag you can generate a list of files that are newer than a given file. If I set file to a file I knew had been updated before my last set of changes, I could pull a list of patch files.

    find /path/to/project/ -newer /path/to/project/last-archive.tgz

    After some more digging and trial and error I found the proper syntax for rolling up all these files into a nice little patch archive:

    tar -czvf patch-20070321.tar `find /path/to/project/ -newer /path/to/project/last-archive.tgz -print`

  • Fix Firefox 3 URL Bar

    in

    Firefox 3 has an annoying new URL bar that takes up about 75px in screen real estate for each auto-completed URL. It’s referred to as richResults in about:config. In the previous beta releases you were able to manually add a preference to remove this feature. As of firefox 3 beta 4 (or maybe beta 3, i didn’t install that release) this no longer works for whatever reason.

    If you prefer the old style urlbar, you need to install the oldbar extension. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6227

  • Rogers Please Get A Clue, Seriously!

    in

    rogersucks.png

    Above is a screenshot of Roger’s latest mobile internet plan for blackberries.

    “1.5MB of data – enough for tons of picture uploads and profile updates”

    Um Rogers, I hate to break it to you, but most of my pictures are over 2MB.

    If you mouse-over the “legal” fine print it explains the data overages, “$10/MB for the first 5MB, $5/MB for the next 5MB, $1/MB for the next 10MB and $0.50/MB for remaining overages.” This means uploading 3x2MB pictures is going to cost me approximately $45. Really Rogers?! Really?
    For comparison, transferring 3x2MB pictures through a service like amazon’s S3 would cost about $0.00035. There is no way in hell that Rogers is paying over 100,000x more than amazon to maintain their infrastructure!