Technomancy

When one is programming, the humble print statement is used frequently for debugging purposes. I’ve written a python module debug_print_statements that provides some simple functions to print helpful information. It uses some pretty cool introspective python stuff.

Download the latest version here (v0.1)

print_line_number()

Calling this function will print the file and line number of where that function is in the file. It will figure out by itself what the line number is. Printing the line number is helpful to see if a piece of code gets executed, but as you add or remove lines from a file, this number can change, which makes it hard to go back to that place in the file.

print_local_variables()

When you call this, all the local variables will be printed (along with their names)

In Firefox if you open a folder of bookmarks (by middle clicking the folder or clicking ‘open all in tabs’), it will replace all your open tabs. This can be turned off, open up ‘about:config’ and change “browser.tabs.loadFolderAndReplace” from true to false. This makes it open a bookmark folder in new tabs.

Source

After hours of searching I found a simple command line programme to get the current X & Y co-ordinated of the mouse pointer from the command line. Source

Here is the full source:

#include <X11/Xlib.h>
#include <X11/Xutil.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int
main(int argc,char **argv)
{
	Display *display;
	Window root, root_return, child_return;
	char *display_name;
	int screen;
	int root_x_return, root_y_return;
	int win_x_return, win_y_return;
	unsigned int mask_return;

	if (! (display_name = getenv("DISPLAY")) ){
		fprintf(stderr,"environment variable DISPLAY must be setn");
		exit(-1);
	}
	if (! (display = XOpenDisplay(display_name)) ){
		fprintf(stderr,"%s: Cannot open display %sn", argv[0],
			display_name);
		exit(-1);
	}
	screen = DefaultScreen(display);
	root = RootWindow(display,screen);
	XQueryPointer(display, root, &root_return, &child_return,
		      &root_x_return, &root_y_return,
		      &win_x_return, &win_y_return,
		      &mask_return);
	printf("%d %dn",root_x_return,root_y_return);
	return 0;
}

Compile it with:

gcc -o xpos xpos.c -I/usr/X11R6/include -L/usr/X11R6/lib -lX11

And run it with

xpos

By default in Firefox when you enter something into the address bar that isn’t a URL, Firefox will preform a Google “I’m feeling Lucky” search and display that. In order to get it to do a normal google search and show you the results, type about:config into the address bar and then type keyword.url into the ‘Filter’ box. Change the value to http://www.google.ie/search?hl=en&num=100&q= et voila. The change will happen immediatly.

Source

renick is a Python plugin script for the XChat IRC client for automating

Many IRC networks (such as FreeNode) have a NickServ to allow people to register nicks. However if you get disconnected you will leave behind a ‘ghost’, and you’ll need to reidentify. This script makes that easy. If it happens, just run “/renick” and the ghost will be killed,your nick changed and you’ll be reidentified. See the top of the file for documentation on how to specify the nicks.

Just put this file in the ~/.xchat2/ directory and it’ll be automatically loaded when XChat starts. If you are disconnected, just enter “/renick”

nf is a simple command line script that reads in text from stdin, looks for any decimal numbers and replaces them with the thousands separated version of that number and prints it back to stdout

Many commands will print numbers & text (eg wc -l) which can be sorted using sort, but it’s hard to see how big 345768782 is. 345,768,782 is much easier to read. Some commands (eg du -hs) will print human readable units (eg MB, GB), but they cannot then be sorted.

Some examples:

cd ~/music/
du -h | sort -n | nf