To disable the GUI in Ubuntu (i.e. to run it as a headless VM), do the following:

sudo vim /etc/default/grub

Change: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash" to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="text"

save, then run: sudo update-grub and restart.

To enable gui again, just change from text to quiet splash.

All you need to do is iterate over all of the files in directory, and then rename by echoing the name & running sed on it, i.e.

for i in *; do mv $i `echo $i | sed 's/search/replace/'`; done

If you need to iterate over a tree of directories or only rename certain files, you can run this command

for f in `find . -type f -name "filename"`; do mv $f `echo $f | sed "s/search/replace/"`; done

If you are using git, you can also exchange mv with git mv.

As always: backups and/or version control are your friends!

find . -type f -exec sed -i 's/search/replace/g' '{}' \;

To make sure your find and search are looking for the right things, you can do the following 1st:

find . -type f -exec grep 'search' '{}' \;

This command tells find to search all files recursively and pass the to the sed stream editor, which in turn search and replaces all the occurrences (see the g flag at the end, which stands for global).

To avoid certain files, you can exclude them from the find command, i.e.

find . -type f -not \( -name '*.json' \) -exec grep 'search' '{}' \;

This will recursively search all the files, but exclude files with the .json extension.

You can also make this more complex by excluding json and JavaScript files, i.e.

find . -type f -not \( -name '*.json' -o -name '*.js' \) -exec grep 'search' '{}' \;

The -o is the logical or operator.

N.B: the -i argument for the sed command means ‘edit-in-place’. You can pass a value with it to create a backup. This might not be a bad idea. As with most (all?) Linux commands, you fly without a net & there is no undo. Version control is the net I use.

I sometimes get confused about the exact syntax of the command, hence the quick post.

Sometimes however you have changes that you can’t or don’t want to commit for whatever reason. Git lets you easily create a standard patch file that you can apply on another clone or branch.

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# To create the patch
git diff --no-prefix > path-to-patch/name-of-the-patch-file

# To apply the patch:
patch -p0 < path-to-patch/name-of-the-patch-file

If you have an existing git diff output that didn’t use the --no-prefix argument, you can just apply the patch like this:

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patch -p1 < path-to-patch/name-of-the-patch-file

Voila.

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sudo /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb

Here you can get a bit more information on this handy little command

Overall I love vim: it has a steep learning curve, but it’s very powerful.If you are touch-typing and loath the mouse as much as I do, it’s fantastic. But I found myself missing out on some of TextMate’s great bundles, and JSLint integration is one of them. After some googling around and looking at different solutions, this is the one that was easiest to install and I like the functionality.

First download & install JavaScript Lint. On OSX & Linux, you can do so by copying the resulting folder into your PATH. I put it in /usr/local/bin/.

Then get the JavaScriptLint vim plugin by Joe Stelmach and restart vim.

Off you go. When you save a JavaScript file in vim, you will get a window with JSLint warnings. If you want to configure JSLint to show/hide certain errors, you can edit the config (jsl.default.conf) in the folder. You might want to backup the file before editing it.

Happy linting!

Hopefully this makes up for it: as a treat for the new year, I thought a little jQuery plugin that I wrote would be handy for some people: please welcome Elpaginator!

What it does:

It looks for a ul or ol within a wrapper & adds pagination depending on the maximum number of items specified.

Features:

• paginates if there are more items than the user specified
• displays number of items left or pages, i.e. 1-10, 11-20, etc or 1, 2, etc
• html of pagination is fully configurable (wrapper need to contain class of page-list!)
• the number of the list item if ordered list is used is correct (uses start attribute that is deprecated, but there is no real alternative yet as IE6 & 7 don’t support CSS for this yet)
• support for ul & ol
• very lightweight (less than 200 lines WITH lots of comments)  

You can find the elpaginator script & a demo page in my svn repository.

Options

This is how you initialise the pagination:

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$('#wrapper').elpaginator();

Possible Options are:

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$('#wrapper').elpaginator({
  MAX: 10,  // maximum number of items per pagination
  list: 'ol',   // whether it's an ul or ol. Default: ul
  style: 'items', // other value is pages -> show 1-5 6-10, etc, or 1, 2,
  paginationHTML: '<div class="pagination"><ul class="page-list"></ul></div>', // HTML for the pagination. Is appended to the wrapper
  paginationListItemHTML: '<li><a href="#"></a></li>' // HTML for the pagination items
});

A live example of it working can also be seen on the new Top Gear site (look at the sidebar for the lap times table).

String concatenation always creates a new string.

Thus, writing:

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var str = "This is a long" +
  " string. That's why we want to " +
  " split it over several lines";

is slower & more memory intensive than writing:

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var str = "This is a long\
 string. That's why we want to\
 split it over several lines";

Just be careful you don’t have trailing spaces as that will mess it up.

However, rather than creating 3 methods that sit in the global namespace, I wanted to use a singleton object that would only add 1 global variable. Since there is no need for private methods, the object literal pattern is appropriate. In my opinion the names of the methods make it very straight forward to use. Good names mean less looking up, mean less mistakes, mean faster development. Your Technical Project Manager will love you for it :-)

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// To create/set a cookie:
cookie.set('name', 'value, 234); // last argument is number of days until expiry. If none is provided, it will get deleted when the browser is closed

// To get the cookie value:
cookie.get('name');

// To delete the cookie:
cookie.erase('name');

As always, you can download the latest version from my svn repository

Long story short: the interactive mode keeps TextMate from getting all the data so you don’t get the .rxxx & .mine files which are needed for FileMerge to show you the differences.

To fix this is:

1. go into your TextMate Subversion Bundle
2. go to the Update to Newest (HEAD) command and add --non-interactive after '#{svn}' update

You can see the resulting code here (change on line 14).

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require_cmd "${TM_SVN:=svn}" "If you have installed svn, then you need to either update your <tt>PATH</tt> or set the <tt>TM_SVN</tt> shell variable (e.g. in Preferences / Advanced)"

"${TM_RUBY:-ruby}" -r "$TM_SUPPORT_PATH/lib/shelltokenize.rb" <<END
 svn = ENV['TM_SVN'] || "svn"
 ruby = ENV['TM_RUBY'] || "ruby"
 support = ENV['TM_BUNDLE_SUPPORT']
 paths = TextMate.selected_paths_array

 # TODO: Ideally, we'd like to use a tooltip for one and not others, but we can't switch from a tooltip
 # to dynamic HTML output (or maybe we could double-fork a process?)
 # if ((paths.size == 1) and not (File.directory? paths[0]))
 #   puts %x{#{svn} update #{TextMate.selected_paths_for_shell}}
 # else
     update = IO.popen("'#{svn}' update --non-interactive #{TextMate.selected_paths_for_shell}", 'r')
     format = IO.popen("'#{ruby}' -- '#{support}/format_status.rb'", 'w')
     update.each_line { |line| format.puts(line) }
 # end
END

# force TM to refresh the current file..
rescan_project

I’ve come across this quite often lately, so I quickly put a little jQuery plugin together to make my life a bit easier.

It works on input fields and it works just like any other jQuery plugin.

All you need to do is call the plugin with the selectors you are interested in, i.e. $('input:text.email').autoInputLabel();

The options are specified in an object literal & can be:

• blurColor - colour of the text when the label is displayed
• focusColor - colour of the active text, i.e. user input
• value - the label that should be displayed

By default, the plugin displays the value of the value attribute. If there is none, it checks whether there has been a value provided by the user. Otherwise it looks for the label associated with the input field (that is probably hidden, otherwise why would you use the plugin?). The label needs to be associated to the input field with the for attribute.

The plugin only works on <input type="text"> fields.

You can download the latest version from my public svn repository