Author: bakert

I try to stick to “default is better than configuration”. But there’s some stuff I absolutely must have on a Mac to be useful.

• Launcher (Alfred)
• App Switcher (Witch) set to nonmiminized windows only.
• A way to send tasks to rememberthemilk.com from Alfred
• bunnylol plugin for Alfred (internal to Facebook)
• Set Desktop to “Sort By Kind”.
• solarized theme for iTerm2
• Make left Alt work as +Esc in iTerm2
• atom with vim-mode and ex-mode.
• MacPorts installing gpg for passwords, apache2 and MySQL for webdev.

1. Clone the project

         $ git clone https://github.com/OWNER/REPO.git
   

   You may need to fork the project and clone your own forked version.

2. Make a branch and switch to it

         $ git checkout -b YOURBRANCH
   

3. Make your changes
4. Add your changes to the index

         $ git add -p
   

5. Commit your changes

         $ git commit -m "My commit message"
   

6. Push your changes

         $ git push --set-upstream origin YOURBRANCH
   

7. Visit https://github.com/YOURUSERNAME/REPO/tree/YOURBRANCH
8. Click on New Pull Request
9. Write something sensible
10. Click on Send Pull Request

Yesterday I wanted to gradually shade between two hex colors. To perform artihmetic/math on hex colors in PHP you need to break them apart, turn them into decimals, change them back into hex and then put them back together.

Here’s what I came up with:

function hexColorToRgb($color) {
    return [hexdec(mb_substr($color, 0, 2)),
        hexdec(mb_substr($color, 2, 2)),
        hexdec(mb_substr($color, 4, 2))];
}

function colorGrade($p, $start, $end) {
    $start_rgb = hexColorToRgb($start);
    $end_rgb = hexColorToRgb($end);
    $rgb = [$start_rgb[0] * (1.0 - $p) + $end_rgb[0] * $p,
            $start_rgb[1] * (1.0 - $p) + $end_rgb[1] * $p,
            $start_rgb[2] * (1.0 - $p) + $end_rgb[2] * $p];
    return dechex($rgb[0]) . dechex($rgb[1]) . dechex($rgb[2]);
}

// Example:
$start_color = 'c4dbf5';
$end_color = '333333';
echo colorGrade(0.25, $start_color, $end_color); # 9fb1c4
echo colorGrade(0.5, $start_color, $end_color);  # 7b8794
echo colorGrade(0.75, $start_color, $end_color); # 575d63

I ran into a little problem adding php -l to a Makefile. PHP lint is a little verbose outputting “No syntax errors detected” for every file that has no problems. I don’t really want that output but getting rid of it with grep -v means that make treats no errors (grep didn’t find any lines to show) as a failure and errors (grep found some lines to show) as a success. make then terminates in the success case and continues or exits with success in the failure case!

lint:
	@! find . -name "*.php" | grep -v "^./vendor" | xargs -I{} php -l '{}' | grep -v "No syntax errors detected"

The trick is to negate the exit code of the entire pipeline like so:

lint:
	@! find . -name "*.php" | grep -v "^./vendor" | xargs -I{} php -l '{}' | grep -v "No syntax errors detected"

I was reading about Gill Sans and I looked at the sweet Penguin cover in that article and I wondered if I could do the same in CSS.

Here’s my attempt:

You can see it on it’s own page at bluebones.net/penguin.

All the libraries I found via $ composer search required coding to work. But csrf-magic only requires that you include the project file and everything else happens magically. (Behind the scenes it adds a hidden __csrf_magic form element to all forms). This does mean that error handling is by default kind of ugly, but there’s a hook to change that should you wish.

[zarquon ~] history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head
1772 vi
1727 c
1496 php
1458 git
1394 ssh
1303 cd
887 ls
711 pass
380 sudo
379 ruby

Compare to nearly four years ago. New: c, ruby [but was there in 2008], pass, sudo. Climbers: vi, php, ssh. Fallers: git, cd, ls. Old: mate, rsync, cat, make.

MacVim is the de facto standard vim for OS X now. But you don’t necessarily want to run it as a separate GUI application. If you’re making a quick edit in a terminal you want to stay in the terminal environment.

You can achieve this with mvim -v {filename} where mvim is this shell script.

• Install a version with vim with +clipboard. You can check your current setting with :echo has('clipboard'). “1” is good, “0” is bad. This lets you access the system clipboard with (for example) “+p to paste.
• Add clipboard=unnamed to .vimrc and restart vim. You are now using the system clipboard by default for all cut/copy/paste operations.

I’ve always admired the simplicity of Mustache templates but the complication of internationalization support has always prevented me using them until a recent project. I used them in my Magic: the Gathering tournament software.

Mustache templates look like this:

<h2>Create Event</h2>

<form action="{{formAction}}" method="post">
  <label for="format">Format</label> <input type="text" name="format">
  <label for="cost">Cost</label> <input type="text" name="cost">
  <input class="btn btn-primary btn-block" type="submit">
</form>

You can see a bunch from the project at https://github.com/bakert/tournament/tree/master/views.

As long as you have { "require": { "mustache/mustache": "~2.5" } } in your composer.json using them is as simple as:

$loader = new Mustache_Loader_FilesystemLoader('path/to/templates');
$engine = new Mustache_Engine(['loader' => $loader]);
echo $engine->render('template_name', $arguments);

I wrapped this up in a class (Template) and a global (T()) so I could make calls like this:

echo T()->signin($args);