super-cooper » general

Codeviewer plugin test

Chad — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 02:27:39 +0000

Back a few years ago, I used a code syntax highlighter called Code Viewer that was created by Aaron Schaefer at Elastic Dog. That has since been taken over by HÃ¥kan CarlstrÃ¶m. I spent too many hours this weekend getting this plugin setup to parse Python source code. It uses GeSHi to highlight the code syntax, and I had to hack up the GeSHi CSS and my own CSS to get the Python source code to look like I wanted, but it’s about there. I highly recommend this plugin if you are looking to highlight source code of virtually any modern language. The coolest part of it is that it links to a source code file and you just point to that file, you don’t have to include the code in the post. Below is a sampling of the output, with my own CSS styling applied.

def grabNewImages( self ):
""" Recurses thru directories and looks for images to upload. I only want to upload my '5-star' images, so we scan the IPTC tags for 'r5', my way of tagging my pics I really like (usually get prints of r5s) """
images = []
for dirpath, dirnames, filenames in os.walk(IMAGE_DIR):
for f in filenames :
# Grab IPTC keywords
info = IPTCInfo(os.path.join(dirpath, f))
# Is it a 5-star photo?
if 'r5' in info.keywords:
print 'File to upload:',os.path.join(dirpath, f)
ext = f.lower().split('.')[-1]
if ( ext == 'jpg' or ext == 'gif' or ext == 'png' ):
images.append( os.path.normpath( dirpath + '/' + f ) )
images.sort()
return images
Download this code: test.txt

Windows on my Mac with VMWare Fusion

Chad — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 03:18:37 +0000

I’ve been running Windows XP Pro on my MacBook Pro for a few weeks now, and I have to say, I’m quite pleased. I have XP installed as a BootCamp partition, and at first, I booted into XP to do any GIS work. Lately, however, I’ve been working strictly in the VM, and ArcGIS works like a champ, a little bit slower, sure; but still quite reliable and stable. For the VM, I have allocated 1GB of RAM (I’m maxed out at 2GB, I have a first generation MBP) and both processors. I installed a Ubuntu Gutsy VM the other night, and that is one sweet little package. I’ll definitely be playing around with that some more soon.

Apple support rocks; wait, maybe not; OK they do

Chad — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 03:16:39 +0000

My battery on my almost 2-year old Macbook Pro finally crapped out, as pretty much all Apple batteries do I’m finding out. So I did some research and found out there was a battery recall for Macbook Pro batteries, but mine didn’t qualify according to the serial number, oh well. I then went for the advice of my local Apple retailer, who informed me that I might be able to talk Apple into giving me a new battery, based on some of the poor statistics I had gleaned from the System Analyzer about the battery – basically it was a bad battery. Sunday night I called Apple support (for the first time ever), answered a few simple questions to the automated voice recognition thing, and within about 3 minutes, was on the phone with an actual human being in the United States. Holy crap – Apple support rocks. I plead my case, she tells me that it sounds like I have a bad battery, but then tells me that my battery, based on the serial number, does not qualify for the battery replacement program. Sorry, a battery is considered a consumable item after one year. I say no way, its charge capacity is too low, it has only had one-half of its lifetime charge cycles, and you admit it’s bad. I want a new one (maybe they don’t rock after all). I hold (while she presumably goes and talks to an engineer about the matter) and then I’m told that they will replace it. They do rock! Monday I try to get a replacement from my local retailer, but they are out of stock, so I call Apple back, wait for ZERO minutes, only to get the same tech that helped me the day before – cool! She says they will have a battery out for me in no more than 2 business days; this was at noon yesterday. I come home for lunch today and find the battery waiting for me – about 24 hours after the order was put in. Not bad, eh? Apple support rocks.

I’m back!

Chad — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 03:51:49 +0000

After a two-plus year hiatus, I’m back on the Web. I decided it was time to start playing around on the Web again, and there are some Web-mapping things I’d like to toy around with, so I figured, what the hell, why not go with another WordPress install? So far so good; I was even able to hack up the MySQL dump file from my last blog (greasyvalley.com) and load those posts into this database (although there is ALOT of cleanup that needs to be done on those old posts). WordPress is better than ever.

IPython – first thoughts

Chad — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 14:45:56 +0000

After I got back from the ESRI PUG a few weeks ago, I installed and started playing around with IPython. I gave a talk at the PUG, and afterwards met a guy who told me I had to try it. Boy was he right. IPython is worth its weight in gold just on the surface for its color-coding of text and history access (hit the up arrow key to get the previous commands, like at the DOS prompt). Another gem is that you can CTRL-C code from your editor and CTRL-V it into the IPython prompt – nice. I plan on playing around with this some more, and need to install it on my Mac as well – after the impending Leopard upgrade I need to do.

How ya doin?

Chad — Tue, 03 May 2005 02:44:48 +0000

“How ya doin?”

A pretty simple, generic greeting, wouldn’t you say? Most people have their own generic greeting. Some use the timeless “Hey.”. Others use the classic “What’s up?”. Me? I use “How ya doin?”. Always have, probably always will. The thing with generic greetings is that they are just that – generic. They’re not really meant to be meaningful, and if stated in the form of a question, they’re not really meant to be answered. For example, if someone asks you “What’s up?”, you should respond with something along the lines of “Not much”; don’t really tell them what’s up.

With that in mind, the Wife and I rolled into our neighborhood Sonic this past Saturday for a couple of Cherry Limeaide’s to wet our whistles. We order, our drinks come out, and then it happens:

Me:: How ya doin?
Sonic Dude:: Well, I’ve seen better days. Just got word that my ex-cousin finally had his baby.
Me:: (Already taken back that he didn’t just give me "Alright" or some standard answer like that) Really?
Sonic Dude:: Yeah, I exhiled him from the family, but just recently here let him back in.
Me:: Uh-huh.
Sonic Dude:: I don’t feel sorry for him, I feel sorry for that baby.
Me:: Alright. Well..um, take it easy.

I turn to the Wife:

Me:: Did you get all of that?
The Wife:: I have no idea what just happened there.

I put my straw into my Cherry Limeaide, and we left, both wondering what the Hell had just happened.

Some new maps: 8-Digit HUC Watersheds of Arkansas, Night Lights of Arkansas, and other assorted watershed maps

Chad — Sat, 12 Mar 2005 16:35:34 +0000

I finally found the time to finish some maps I had been working on for quite some time. Watersheds of Arkansas is one I had started back in 2003, and just never got a chance to finish. I’m very pleased with how it turned out though. The detail in the elevation is amazing. Took me a while to get the colors/contrast/transparency just right on that. Night Lights of Arkansas is one I threw together pretty quickly using an already existing template. I ran across the data one day on the web and thought it would make a nice map. Here’s the Night Lights metadata if anyone is really interested.

Both of these maps (as with pretty much all of my maps) were made using ArcGIS 8.3 from ESRI.

del.icio.us + Foxylicious = Mmm, mmm good

Chad — Thu, 24 Feb 2005 04:54:56 +0000

I had been reading about del.icio.us for quite a while now, and about how cool it was. Last week, I broke down and gave it a shot. Wow. It’s pretty slick. For those of you out there you haven’t heard of del.icio.us yet, it’s a social bookmarks manager. You get an account (it’s all free), and when you find a site or web page you like, you post it to your del.icio.us account, just like you would bookmark it in your browser. The beauty of this is that it’s all public, you can view your bookmarks from any machine, others can view them, you can share them, you can see who else has the same pages bookmarked as you, you can get feeds of other’s bookmarks, the list just keeps going on and on.

So this got me to wondering. Was there perhaps a way to import all of my existing Firefox bookmarks into del.icio.us so I could have my work and home bookmarks in sync? That would be nice, would it not? So off to our ole buddy Google I went. Well, I didn’t find a way to import bookmarks into del.icio.us, but I did find Foxylicious. And oooh what find it is. Foxylicious is a Firefox extension that syncs your del.icio.us bookmarks into your Firefox bookmarks. And it will do it for you automatically everyday if you want. So now, I just post bookmarks to del.icio.us, be it at home or work, and let Foxylicious update my Firefox bookmarks for me daily. So I actually have all of my bookmarks in three places, one of which is still public. How cool is that? Very cool, I say.

The IF function: Excel’s saving grace

Chad — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 03:44:58 +0000

I sometimes think that if it weren’t for conditional logic, Excel would be practically useless. I use Excel alot, just about every day. And just about every day, it aggravates me. But then there are the times when I figure something out, some cool way to convert numbers or perform a calculation, and Excel has redeemed itself. And so goes the love/hate relationship. The love is usually brought on by my using some conditional logic to get a job done. The other day I came across the AND function, which basically allows you to test to see if a condition or set of conditions is true or not. I needed to test for multiple conditions in an IF function, and the AND function did it for me.

My data (see screenshot) had two fields (A and B) that I needed to compare, with my result of the comparison going in column C. If A was greater than B, then put A in C (C5). Simple enough. However, there were some caveats. In columns A and C, I had VOID and (BDL) values. If column B=VOID or B=no value, then my column C value needed to be -9999.0 (to one decimal place). If B=(BDL), then C=<0.01. And sometimes I had no values at all (A12, B12). So you can see where I needed the test for multiple conditions. This was what I came up with:

=IF(AND(A5>B5,B5<>"",A5<>"(BDL)",A5<>"VOID"),A5,IF (B5="VOID",FIXED(-9999,1,TRUE),IF(B5="", FIXED(-9999,1,TRUE),IF(B5="(BDL)", "<0.01",B5))))
Download this code: excel-if.txt

The AND allows me to see whether or not multiple conditions are met inside of my logical test for my IF statement. Pretty slick I thought. Now I of course realize that I could have just went through my sheet line by line and manually done this, replacing numbers as I go. I chose not to do that for two reasons: First, I try to never alter my source data, that way I can always go back and look at my original numbers and have confidence in them, and second, what kind of fun would that be? None, of course. Right?

Remember the command line?

Chad — Wed, 16 Feb 2005 04:19:05 +0000

Aahhh, the command line, also referred to as the Command Prompt or DOS prompt. You tell most people these days to open up Command Prompt and they respond with a “Huh?”. Try it sometime. We’ve all grown so accustomed to pretty, fancy-schmancy GUIs, it’s easy to forget about our good ole long lost friend, Mr. Command Prompt. Lately, I have had the pleasure (seriously, I’m not being sarcastic) of working at the command line with some simple, easy to use, no frills programs – executables you can just copy and paste from one directory to the next, then open up Command Prompt, navigate to the directory, type in one or two simple commands, and voila!, results, usually in the form of ascii files.

The one shown here is called LOADEST, which is a stream load estimator developed by the USGS. I won’t go into what it’s for, but I will tell you it is an executable, coded in Fortran, and it runs off of four input text files supplied by the user. Took me all of a day and a half to figure out how to use it, build my own text files, and successfully run it. See the command? One word: loadest. Pretty nice.

The other command line program I used recently was png2ico, a great free tool for converting png files to favicons. One simple command executed on two png files, and you got yourself a favicon.

Oh yeah, and I got the LOADEST package via FTP from USGS, and I FTP’d on what else, but the command line.

In a time of using software that takes 45 (OK, maybe only 30) seconds just to load the splash screen, the command prompt can indeed be a breath of fresh air.