So I had this great idea yesterday (for coders, at least): remap [shift+space] to [underscore]. Turns out I am far from the first to think of this, which only enforces its awesomeness as an idea.

Mac: Put this in ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict:

{
	/* turn shift + space into underscore */
	"$ " = ("insertText:", "_");
}

Linux: for a PC keyboard, try:

xmodmap -e 'keycode 65 = space underscore'

or on a mac keyboard:

xmodmap -e 'keycode 57 = space underscore'

Or if neither of those work, run:

xmodmap -pk | grep space | awk '{print $1}'

and use that number instead of 65 or 57 above.

You can put this keybinding in ~/.xmodmaprc or somesuch if you like it.

Not a very exciting realisation, but an annoying one:

$ irb
>> class A
>>   def self.meth; puts "class method!"; end
>> end

>> A.meth()
class method!

>> A.new().meth()
NoMethodError: undefined method `meth' for #<A:0x5ad160>
	from (irb):11

ick…

(sadly enough, most of my posts tagged “ruby” would be equally well tagged as “things that suck in ruby”)

I can feel things getting ugly…

Recently I’ve been dealing with package managers, and debating which one to use. In different projects I’m currently using .deb packages (for cydia) and python .eggs (for the cheese shop / pypi / easy_install).

I’m a big fan of pypi / simple_install for python modules, but it obviously doesn’t make sense for general software. On the other hand, .deb repositories are a big world, and I don’t want to have to release all my python eggs in that global namespace.

But now I am writing a tool which relies on both python packages and installed command-line software. How on earth do you specify dependencies across packaging worlds? Should we release all packages on all packaging systems in order that any future package can depend on the appropriate version of your package in its chosen package distribution format? ugh…

And then we just get into these meta-packagers like easy-deb

What’s the answer? Perhaps if there was some way to delegate dependencies? So for example my .deb package could depend on easy_install and pypi:somelib. Then there would only need to be a single “pypi” package which could ensure the pypi-world dependencies for somelib were satisfied and somelib is installed.

(I don’t know how that would go for uninstalls though. Especially considering that simple_install can’t even do uninstalls…)

Excuse the rant, and please point out if something does in fact exist to ease the headache…

This is the plugin version of a script I made a while ago to set the opacity of each feed in google reader’s feed list according to how many unread items are in it.

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new and shiny! (and almost entirely incompatible with the previous version :s)

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I’ve been working on this a little while now. At work, I use ruby. It has its good points, but my language of choice is still python. I am, however, blown away by rspec. So I’ve tried to bring some of its features into python (namely and should_receive matchers).

Thus was born mocktest. The readme has all the examples you should need to start using it in your own testing code.

It’s also available from the cheese shop, which means you can just run easy_install mocktest to install it on your system.

I should note that this code builds upon the excellent Mock library by Michael Foord.

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