2010-12-27
So, something really simple was staring me in the face and I ignored it. CSS transforms. I’ve switched to that, but I still like the webkit stuff, it was fun to glue together.
This Sunday I tinkered for a few hours on a little project. I registered the Unicode version of my domain name, upside down (ǝɥɔɐɔʇǝʌlǝʌ) This was inspired by the post from The Sad Story Of The Unicode Snowman: ☁→❄→☃→☀→☺→☂→☹→✝.ws as posted on Hacker News.
It had to be a .com, but I bought it from DreamHost anyway.
Next I thought about Upside-Down-Ternet from a while back, but I wanted mine to be all upside down.
So, I glued together some stuff and I now have an upside down copy of this website at that domain. It’s a bit rough right now, I’m rendering it in Webkit with wkhtmltopdf and then rotating and slicing with ImageMagick, all glued together with PHP and some shell scripting.
I want it to be an actual HTML copy eventually, but if you visit my domain it should show you anything on www.velvetcache.org. You can even view this post: http://www.ǝɥɔɐɔʇǝʌlǝʌ.com/2010/12/27/www-ǝɥɔɐɔʇǝʌlǝʌ-com
I added a little link to all of my pages to let you flip them in place, it’s the very bottom right and it says “[dılɟ]”. It’s my newest little easter egg, like the Konami Code.
So I’m working on a little admin interface and I decided to tail some logs. It’s in PHP and Google came up with some stuff, but they were all a bit finickey and not well documented. So I wrote my own!
Here’s the basic concept:
- Open File
- Seek To End
- Loop:
- Seek Back By Chunk Size
- Read Chunk
- Count Newlines
- Stash In Buffer
- Break If Enough Newlines Total
- Trim Extra Line & Cruft
- Done!
Here’s the code:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 |
function tail ( $file, $lines, $max_chunk_size = 4096 ) { // We actually want to look for +1 newline so we can get the whole first line $rows = $lines + 1; // Open up the file $fh = fopen( $file, 'r' ); // Go to the end fseek( $fh, 0, SEEK_END ); $position = ftell( $fh ); $buffer = ''; $found_newlines = 0; $break = false; while( ! $break ) { // If we are at the start then we are done. if( $position <= 0 ) { break; } // We can't seek past the 0 position obviously, so figure out a good chunk size $chunk_size = ( $max_chunk_size > $position ) ? $position : $max_chunk_size; // Okay, now seek there and read the chunk $position -= $chunk_size; fseek( $fh, $position ); $chunk = fread( $fh, $chunk_size ); // See if there are any newlines in this chunk, count them if there are if( false != strpos( $chunk, "\n" ) ) { if( substr( $chunk, -1 ) == "\n" ) { ++$found_newlines; } $found_newlines += count( explode( "\n", $chunk ) ); } // Have we exceeded our desired rows? if( $found_newlines > $rows ) { $break = true; } // Prepend $buffer = $chunk . $buffer; } // Now extract only the lines we requested $buffer = explode( "\n", $buffer ); return implode( "\n", array_slice( $buffer, count( $buffer ) - $lines ) ); } |
You can give it a try on some junk data here: http://static.velvetcache.org/pages/2010/12/03/tail-in-php/
This week Jerod Santo released a nifty little app he had written for the Mac called Detours. It’s pretty cool, it’s a nice GUI where you can add routing information. So, you can make the DNS resolver think google.com is located at 127.0.0.1. Stuff like that.
I use Linux though, and I wanted some of that goodness. Unfortunately, Jerod told me that Detours uses some OS X specific API calls. So, cool for Mac folks but lame for me.
That evening I set off to write a portable version of Detours by using the hosts file (/etc/hosts) on Linux. Naturally since I’m groking a text format it’s uglier, and it requires a daemon/client set up since the hosts file is write-locked for normal users.
But, I got one working that night and I’ve built it out since then. So I present to the Linux users of the world, Detours Clone. Lame name I know, if you have a suggestion for a better one let me know.
Anyway, I have a nice Python daemon and three Python clients (Qt4, GTK+ and a web server!). They speak JSON over TCP sockets (bound to 127.0.0.1 of course) and work well so far. I even wrote a few tests and a distutils installer.
So go check it out!
The Qt4 Client
This weekend I participated in Node Knockout with Jerod and Cody. It was awesome, we made a game in 48 hours (less than that of actual working time).
LazerCatz!
It was a lot of work, how much?
We had 129 total commits, 82 were mine, 35 belonged to Jerod, and 12 to Cody. That’s not 100% accurate because Cody had some git problems part way through, so I committed things for him. In those commits we had 245 file changes.
The final product had 974 total lines of code, as broken down by CLOC:
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------------------------------------------------------------------- Language files blank comment code scale 3rd gen. equiv ------------------------------------------------------------------- Javascript 4 130 43 750 x 1.48 = 1110.00 CSS 1 26 4 167 x 1.00 = 167.00 HTML 1 0 0 57 x 1.90 = 108.30 ------------------------------------------------------------------- SUM: 6 156 47 974 x 1.42 = 1385.30 ------------------------------------------------------------------- |
If you have a minute, give it a shot at http://www.lazercatzthegame.com/.
