Linux keyboard shortcuts

Have you ever gone to hit ctrl-tab (to switch tabs) or ctrl-w (to close current tab) in Firefox and suddenly all your Firefox windows (even the one playing radio on another desktop) disappear? (I'm using Ubuntu and Gnome, but I get the impression this problem affects all Linux distros and all window managers.)

It must be old age making my fingers clumsier but I didn't even know ctrl-q did that until a few weeks ago. Yet I've done it a couple of times by accident recently, and when I did it today I decided Something Has To Be Done.

The solution is not just joyously simple, but I also learnt another cool function while I was there. First the solution: System|Preferences|Keyboard Shortcuts. Assign ctrl-q to do something; then Firefox never gets to see it. I assigned it to the calculator app which is nicely harmless.

I learnt this trick here, which also mentions that the same idea works in XCFE (go to keyboard panel). I'm betting KDE has something similar.

And the cool function? Looking through the other keyboard shortcuts I saw Alt+Print takes a screenshot of just the current window! You have no idea how many times I've clicked Print, then opened up Gimp to crop the screenshot to show just the window of interest. I'm now alternating between feeling very foolish and feeling very empowered.

jquery, click here to crash IE8

IE6/7/8 had me pulling me hair out again, but I've just found the problem!

Here is the stripped-down code that shows the problem. We have a few divs, one that is active (and can be resized and dragged). The others are inactive but can be clicked to turn them into the active item.

var currentItem=null;

function makeActive(item){
if(currentItem){
    currentitem.css({borderWidth:1,zIndex:998})
        .draggable('disable')
        .resizable('disable')
        .click(function(){makeActive($(this));});
        ;
    }
item.css({borderWidth:3,zIndex:999})
    .draggable('enable')
    .resizable('enable')
    ;
currentItem=item;
}

Clicking back and forth between two items was fine in firefox, but IE8 would lock up (IE6/IE7 were the same). I kept stripping it down until it clicked (pun intended, sorry!). Yes, on each loop the click handler is added again. Each click handler is calling this function recursively and I think that is what locking up IE8.

The solution is simply to change the .click line to look like this:
   .one('click',function(){makeActive($(this));});

That doesn't just make IE8 happy, it is also more clearly describes the click handler we want. In fact now I understand the problem I'm surprised firefox was not crashing too.

P.S. resizable('disable') does not work in JQuery 1.7; it is apparently fixed in JQuery 1.8 though.

jquery plugin: image magnifier

I've just released my first fully-fledged and useful jquery plugin:

     http://dcook.org/software/jquery/magnifier/

It allows you to magnify an image and examine just one part of it.
Handles on the edge of the "magnifying glass" allow resizing it, which alters the degree of magnification.
The plugin is fully documented, with numerous usage examples.
It runs on all major browsers and operating systems.
Naturally it is open source (MIT).

find, grep and tr

A practical example of three useful unix commands, and how they can work together.

I thought I had found another chance to use sed (see Right Sed Fred, I'm too sexy to search and replace), but in the end did not use it; I wanted to remove newline characters but sed works line by line so this is not possible. (There is a way to do this with sed apparently, but it looked awfully hard to understand.) So I used tr instead.

Here is my final command:
find /path/to/myfiles/ -mtime -125 -name '*txt' -print | grep -v xxx | tr '\012' ' '

The first part:
find /path/to/myfiles/ -mtime -125 -name '*txt' -print

means search all the *.txt files under the given path, that have been created or modified in the past 125 days. It outputs one filename per line.

However it include some files I didn't want. Luckily they all had the same filename component ('xxx' in my example above), so were trivial to identify. I used "grep -v" which means exclude anything that matches.

At this stage I had the list of filenames, but one per line. I wanted to use them as the parameters to a batch file, so needed them all on one line. I couldn't get sed to work, but stumbled on a way to use the "tr" tool. It takes two parameters: the character to replace, and what to replace it by. '\012' is octal for the unix linefeed character. So
tr '\012' ' '

means replace LF with a space. I slapped this on to the previous command and got just want I wanted.

(For unix beginners, the | is called the pipe character, and it means take the output of the command before it and give it as the input to the command after it. Many unix commands are designed with this kind of piping behaviour in mind.)

Jquery cheat sheets

A cheat sheet, printed out, can be invaluable. Here are a few I've looked at:

My choice:
http://www.javascripttoolbox.com/jquery/cheatsheet/

Nice and compact, going into good details. It comes in colour, but the wonderful thing is it also comes in Excel format, so I could edit the colours.
It doesn't show the new in 1.3 functions, and doesn't point out the deprecated ones ($.browser and $.boxmodel); I annotated that myself using the "Too Colourful" one below.


Too new:
http://labs.impulsestudios.ca/jquery-cheat-sheet

This one is nice, fits on one page, already monochrome (though using a light grey for optional parameters, which is hard to read). Does not show the parameters like the my first choice above. It is for jquery 1.4, showing what is new for 1.4; but I also wanted to know what to avoid if I wanted to write a plugin that would work back to 1.2.


Too Colourful:
http://www.artzstudio.com/files/jquery-rules/jquery_1.3_cheatsheet_v1.pdf
2 pages worth, shows what is new in jquery 1.3, and what is deprecated. Uses colour and looked terrible as a b/w print-out. Also, it lists each version of similar functions (such as event handlers), which is why it needs two pages instead of one.