jqsimple-class 0.1.1

September 27th, 2010

Last week I released version 0.1.1 of jQsimple-class. The main addition in this version is support for using jQsimple-class in CommonJS environments, such as node.js. All one has to do is place the CommonJS build of jqsimple-class somewhere in the include path and then do:
var jClass = require('jqsimple-class').jClass;
From there on out the API is the same as the browser one. The CommonJS build also has the same testsuite as the normal build, and passes all of the tests.

Outside of that, the standalone build has been stripped down to the bare necessities, shrinking the minified standalone build of jQsimple-class from 10KiB to 3KiB (the version that uses jQuery is just 1.5KiB).

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jQsimple-class released

September 16th, 2010

Today I’ve released the first version of jQsimple-class, a small JavaScript class-declaration library. The reason I wrote it is that the usual way of building classes in JavaScript is frankly quite ugly, and inheritance is equally ugly. With jQsimple-class I’ve tried to make it as simple and intuitive as possible to write classes in JavaScript. The library itself is very small, and the syntax is simple. It’s meant to let you quickly declare a class, and easily extend others, and then get completely out of your way. It only exports a single variable/function, named jClass (Class is a reserved word in JavaScript, so I went for the next best thing). Using jClass, and methods on it, it is possible to build classes, virtual classes and extend classes.

jClass() takes a single parameter, a JavaScript hash, where keys are method or attribute names, and the values are any valid JavaScript type. jClass.extend() lets you build a class that extends one or more existing classes. jClass.virtual() lets you construct a “virtual” class. That is to say, a class that can not be instantiated, but that can be extended by others.

Internally jQsimple-class uses some jQuery methods, but it does not depend upon jQuery to be used, a standalone version that bundles the parts it needs (not all of jQuery, and without exposing them to the public namespace) is available for applications that do not use jQuery. I have written an extensive testsuite for jQsimple-class to make sure that things work as they should, and it works across all modern browsers.

For more examples and the full API, see the jQsimple-class documentation. jQsimple-class version 0.1 is available for download now. Minified it is only 1.5K (or 9K for the standalone version). Any feedback is welcome, feel free to do so in the comments, or, if you find a bug, on the bugtracker.

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A very simple one-liner REPL for perl

March 2nd, 2010

Here’s a very simple one-liner REPL for perl, it’s not very advanced (like ie. re.pl) but does well in most cases:
perl -MData::Dumper -MTerm::ReadLine -e '$r = Term::ReadLine->new(1);while(defined($_ = $r->readline("code: "))){$ret=Dumper(eval($_));$err=$@;if($err ne ""){print $err;}else{print $ret;}}'

It uses Term::ReadLine, which gives a simple session history if you have a Term::ReadLine::* implementation that supports it. It will also use Data::Dumper so that you can quickly see any data structures, you can always use scalar(STATEMENT) if the return value differs in list and scalar context.

Here’s an alias that can be shoved into .bashrc :
alias 'perl-repl'='perl -MData::Dumper -MTerm::ReadLine -e '\''$r = Term::ReadLine->new(1);while(defined($_ = $r->readline("code: "))){$ret=Dumper(eval($_));$err=$@;if($err ne ""){print $err;}else{print $ret;}}'\'''

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SWEC 0.4

October 15th, 2009

About two weeks back I released SWEC version 0.4. The largest new thing in this release is an updated file format for writing test definitions. Thew new format is a lot more flexible, and will also allow me to extend its syntax with more capabilities more easily later on. It can still read the old file format, and I’ll keep the compat code in there until SWEC 0.6 – so people have time to update their files (only minor changes are needed to update them to the new file format, should only take a couple of minutes).

Other than that I extended the command-line parser, so you can now say “swec example.com -s /test.html” where you would previously have had to do “swec --baseurl example.com -s /test.html“. Other than that it’s mostly a bunch of cleanups, some refactoring and a few minor bugfixes, in addition to a new test suite so the thing can be properly sanity-checked before release.

If you need to sanity check dynamic websites, give SWEC a go.

Posted in perl, SWEC | 1 Comment »

Fixing PHP documentation woes

October 14th, 2009

I prefer writing in Perl or Ruby, but sometimes the choice of language has been made by someone else, a position I have found myself in lately. When using perl and ruby, there’s always perldoc and ri, so documentation is a quick command away in any of my terminals, which thanks to screen is never fewer than ten. PHP however, has no such tool, the docs are in HTML and many distros don’t even package the HTML docs. So, to avoid the pain of switching out of the safety of my terminal and into a web browser all the time, and speed up my work, I wrote an app, phpdocr. It’s quite simple, it scrapes php.net (and caches the result for quick viewing later) and displays the parsed HTML in your pager – resulting in something sort of like perldoc or ri. So if you have the same itch, grab it from http://random.zerodogg.org/phpdocr.

The app itself, of course, is not written in PHP – it’s written in ruby.

Posted in Random, Ruby | 1 Comment »

Sanity checking mason

October 13th, 2009

I have found myself doing quite a bit of mason at work lately, both maintaining old legacy stuff and as the view in a catalyst app.

While doing this I found myself missing the old ‘perl -c’ to quickly sanity check code, however naturally that won’t work on Mason – as mason is essentially HTML with inline perl, not the other way around. As such I wrote a quick script that emulates ‘perl -c’ by loading the file using mason inside eval then printing any errors. The script itself is pretty simple, though it doesn’t have any support for printing useful line numbers – but at least it gives an idea of what/where the problem is. The script also declares $c and $m, as at least for Catalyst – those will be available.

You can clone the gist, or just copy+paste the code:

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Dynamically loading git bash-completion

October 12th, 2009

I have to admit, I love git. It has really made me more efficient, and I can’t honestly think of ever switching back to ie. svn.

My shell is bash, and up until now I used a very simple bash completion for git, but at times I do see myself wanting something a bit more comprehensive. However, I really don’t want bash to be slow to open (of course, the definition of “slow” is quite individual – over a second is way too much ;), which it can be if it needs to load all bash completion definitions when starting. Therefore I wrote a small bash function for my .bashrc that will dynamically load the git bash completion when it first is accessed. Bash starts fast, and I get git bash completion – problem solved (well, the first time git bash completion is used, it of course takes a tad longer than normal because it needs to load it first, but that’s completely livable). As a bonus, it will fall back to my old and simple completion if the proper one is not available.

Here’s the code snippet:

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Vote for the Socialist Left Party on the 14th of September

September 10th, 2009

Disclaimer: This is a political post. If you’re not interested in politics (or not interested in Norwegian politics), please ignore it.

The date for the Norwegian general election is closing up fast, and I would like to urge my readers to vote for the Socialist Left Party (SV). The last chance to vote before the actual election day is, in many municipalities, tomorrow, the 11th of September. The actual election day is the 14th of September. Remember that every single vote counts!

We don’t need any dark blue experiment with our economy, healthcare or our children. We need a fairer government that works for equality, that takes the climate changes seriously and are prepared to act now rather than later, when it’s too late. We need a country where women earns the same as men, not merely 85% (avg.) of what a man makes and we need to treat everyone with the same amount of respect.

The economic crisis has shown us how bad it can get when we allow as much market freedom as we do. There are a few select people that gamble away at the stock market, keeping any earnings for themselves while socializing the problem if they experience losses. Norway has, largely thanks to SV’s socialist finance minister, managed the financial crisis very well. We need a market that is more controlled, not less! We can not allow capitalists to gamble away our jobs, nor can we allow the parties on the right to privatize our healthcare system, and by doing so throwing that into the same chaos that has caused the crisis we are now in.

If you want more information about SV’s politics, visit http://www.sv.no/ (http://sv.no/Language/English for English), or contact me directly and I will try to answer any questions you have.

For these reasons, and more (see the website), vote SV the 14th of September.

Posted in Politics | 2 Comments »

Music sorting 0.2

August 14th, 2009

Last week I released mussort version 0.2. This release is a huge update from version 0.1 that I released back in early 2008.

mussort is a simple command-line music sorting program. It recursively processes a directory tree, and then sorts whatever music files it finds there, renaming the files and putting them in a nice directory tree.

0.2 added a load of features designed to make mussort faster. It introduced optional caching of file tags, which has a major impact on the performance on subsequent runs on a directory tree. I optimized away an insane amount of readdir() calls that it kept doing over and over, even though nothing had actually changed since the last readdir(). It also only supported id3info and ogginfo as sources for information, which is problematic because ogginfo is very very slow at times. So in 0.2 it can use the Audio::File perl module if it is available. It provides redundancy (should Audio::File fail for an ogg file, it falls back to ogginfo, should id3info fail for an mp3 file it tries Audio::File) and a large speed increase for ogg vorbis files. It can also use id3v2 if it is available. Because of the caching however, even without Audio::File, any subsequent runs on ogg vorbis files will be a lot faster.

When it comes to actual features, the largest one is support for detection of compilation albums. It will locate an album that contains a lot of different artists and then put those into a single directory named after the album, rather than put them into separate artist/album dirs. For those that don’t want that, it is important to note that the feature is optional and must be explicitly requested (like case-insensitive sorting).

Other than that there’s a bunch of code cleanups, along with minor additions, such as selectable verbosity (–verbose, –quiet) and the option to keep all duplicate files around (–keepdupes). mussort is also now hosted on github, so if you are interested, fork the repository and let’s see what cool stuff you can come up with! Remember to prod me with a pull request so that any nice things you do get included upstream.

Posted in mussort, perl | No Comments »

Day Planner 0.10

April 16th, 2009

Day Planner 0.10 was released on the 25th of March! This release is, imho, a great step forward from 0.9. It fixes various minor bugs, cleans up parts of the UI, handles strange or broken iCalendar files better, enforces UTF-8 encoding on the calendar and adds a plugin system.

The largest new feature is the plugin system. Day Planner now comes with support for plugins, complete with a simple file format that allows users to easily install third party plugins. Its purpose is of course to make it easy for other people to alter the behaviour of Day Planner, or add features to it easily, without having to resort to patching the app itself, but also to make it easier for me to add optional features that perhaps not everyone wants (for instance, 0.10 comes with a tray icon plugin. It is disabled by default, but those that want to use it can do so quite easily). The API is simple, and somewhat inspired by the Gtk2-perl API, to make it feel somewhat familiar for people already used to signal-based programming.

The tarball comes with an example plugin, plugins/HelloWorld.pm that is well commented and explains how to do some of the basic things like hooking into signals, displaying simple dialog boxes and adding events to the calendar. The API itself is documented in DP::CoreModules::Plugin (access the documentation by running perldoc modules/DP-CoreModules/lib/DP/CoreModules/Plugin.pm from the base directory of the Day Planner tarball or git repo).

If you want to write a plugin, and need some help or pointers, feel free to join the Day Planner irc channel, #dayplanner on irc.freenode.net and I’ll be glad to help.

Git

As mentioned earlier, Day Planner is now using git instead of subversion. After I learned git I now greatly prefer it over subversion, and have thus moved all of my projects to it. Information on how to use the Day Planner git repo can be found at http://www.day-planner.org/index.php/development/git:

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