Recent Posts
One year of Linux —
A little more than a year ago, I started working at XIV (IBM).
The change was rather dramatic in terms of technologies that I work with. I went from being a .NET web developer to a python developer, dealing with a lot if IT and system.
Furthermore, I stopped working on a Mac (this is do miss), and have almost not touched windows for the entire year (which I haven’t missed at all).
jQuery Compatible JSONP with Nginx —
I got inspired by this awesome article by Gabriel Weinberg to hack a bit on nginx.
It’s a great article which I highly recommend to read.
The part that specifically interested me was turning JSON into JSONP compatible calls, usable both for proxying remote / local apis that doesn’t supply JSONP functionality and for simple to padd local static JSON files.
What bothered me though was the fact that the name of the method to pad into the JSON response was hard coded.
Fixing Thunderbird crashes on load and Mutt fails with fetched mail —
If you use your unix mail spool/box with any type of fetchmail (ahem fetchnotes), on rare occasions, the mail box might be corrupted, typically missing a single starting character.
Thunderbird will fail miserably without any explanations, and Mutt will complain that the mailbox is invalid.
Open the mailbox (/var/mail/$USER usually) in your favorite editor (vim of course), and have a look at the beginning of the file:
It should start like this:
Mocking Python imports —
Writing unit tests with Python is a joy, especially with the excellent mock library.
You can tweak the language and mock almost anything to your will, making testing even the smallest of units very easy.
HOWEVER , mocking imports, when a class / module depends on imports which you might not have on your machine, such as windows modules (oei vei) when you are (and you should be) on a nix machine.
Solarized color scheme for Octopress —
Created a solarized theme for octopress. Inspired by Ethan Schoonover’s own homepage.
The source is as always on github.
To add this to your own Octopress instance :
1 2 3 cd /my/awesome/octopress/dir git clone http://github.com/erikzaadi/solarized-octopress-theme .themes/solarized rake install["solarized"] zsh users : run
1 rake install\['solarized'\] instead of the last command
Customize To toggle between light and dark mode, edit sass/custom/_colors.scss and change $sol and ``$solarized`:
auto installing vundle from your vimrc —
You should be using vundle Vundle is a vim plugin manager, ala pathogen.
Vundle allows you to specify in your vimrc what vim plugins you wish to load, and it’ll automatically download (git clone if possible) and enable vim plugins.
Vundle can get a name of a plugin as it appears in the vim plugin directory, a github :user/:repo style string, and even a full git url.
1 2 3 Plugin 'Syntastic' "uber awesome syntax and errors highlighter Plugin 'altercation/vim-colors-solarized' "T-H-E colorscheme Plugin 'https://github.
Blog now hosted on Amazon S3 —
After migrating my blog from wp to octopress (see previous post), I started thinking that it might be a waste using a (shared) hosting account just to serve static files. Since I use Amazon Web Services a lot, I thought I might give Amazon S3 a shot.
There’s a zillion posts out there of how to make a static site in S3, including for octopress sites, so I won’t bother you with repeating the steps here (see the links in the end of the post).
mv {word,octo}press —
After my wordpress blog was hacked twice, and I got a warning from google that I host malware (!), I decided that enough is enough, time to ditch Wordpress and hope never to see php code again.
I managed to resist the urge to roll my own blog engine (haven’t we all been there?), and decided to use octopress.
After being victorious over ruby and rvm who thought it’d be hilarious to make me go crazy while making earthquake work, I thought I might give octopress a shot.
Startup weekend Haifa (2011) —
Last week, a Startup Weekend event took place in Haifa.
Being somewhat of an addict to Startup Weekend, I attended.
Although the location was a bit smaller and less equipped than the previous Startup Weekends in Tel-Aviv (Yaffo), the organizers worked hard to make it a fun and enjoyable experience.
I pitched an idea there that didn’t get enough votes unfortunately, although I had a lot of positive response from people.