Posts

2009-12-27
How to teach users the command line

Now that computers are firmly in the hands of casual users, is there some way to teach them how to use the command line without throwing them head first into grep? Of course, anyone with the time and inclination (and someone to contact when they get stuck) can learn to use the shell. Also, of course, there's an entire spectrum from those who would never touch a mouse to those who would never touch the keyboard if they could avoid it, so there must be room for shifting the bar to entry.
2009-12-25
vCard 3.0 validator and parser

Did you know that even the vCards listed in the official RFC are not valid? It clearly says The vCard object MUST contain the FN, N and VERSION types. Still, the example vCards are both clearly missing the N type. As somebody else remarked, releasing a format spec without some reference validator is bound to result in all sorts of invalid implementations.
2009-12-16
Recursive unRAR and delete

Just a continuation of a script mentioned at LinuxQuestions, to extract RAR archives in their respective directories in a directory tree. An additional option is available to delete the archive files after finishing extraction.
2009-12-10
Sort blocks of text in files

Ever had to sort a file alphabetically, only to realize that you'd have to do it manually because every item that needs to be sorted is spread over more than one line? This just happened when I exported my Gmail contacts to vCard, which it turned out were sorted by formatted name (FN) instead of name (N). The result was the following script, which takes two pattern and some input, and returns the sorted output. The example returned by ./sort_blocks.py --help is exactly the code to re-sort Gmail contacts. I'd love to know if you find any bugs or possible improvements to this script. Enjoy:
2009-12-07
Range arithmetic in Python

The XML 1.0 and 1.1 standards define some ranges of Unicode code points which are valid, and some "compatibility characters" which should not be used. CDS Invenio (a FOSS CMS; update: sorry, the link is dead) already has some code to clean up text to remove invalid characters, but it doesn't remove the compatibility characters. Using the existing code for HTML 4.01 made the W3C Markup Validation Service complain, so I wanted to exclude the compatibility character ranges from the valid ranges, and get the most concise hexadecimal ranges corresponding to the resulting set to plug into a Python regular expression. Here's the ~~resulting~~sloppy and ugly code (I'll post updated code and/or a link to the source repository if this is included at some point):
2009-11-30
Firefox profile folder cleanup script

Here's a simple script which can be useful if you want to version control the Firefox profile folder, or just to keep it slim. Please see the embedded documentation for more information.
2009-11-20
LHC beam again

From the LHC operations web site, pages "LHC1" and "LHC3", taken as soon as the beam completed a round in the accelerator. See also the log book (Update: sorry, the link is dead) and the CMS e-commentary (Update: sorry, the link is dead).
2009-11-14
N-way Git synchronization with extra cheese
2009-10-30
CERN logo in SVG

Just putting out my attempt to create a minimal SVG image for the CERN logo:
2009-10-14
Unit testing Python + MySQLdb warnings

There seems to be several methods out there, based on elevating warnings to errors using warnings.simplefilter (Update: sorry, the link is dead). Here's another method, based on recording warnings in a variable (Update: sorry, the link is dead), and checking that the last one is a MySQLdb.Warning. Hopefully to be integrated in INSPIRE.