CyberShadow’s blog

Looking for color grep for Windows? I was. I didn’t find exactly what I was looking for; instead, I found something better.

ack is a tool like grep, designed for programmers with large trees of heterogeneous source code.

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I’ve written a small tool which downloads the history of a Wikipedia article, converts it and imports it into a new git repository. The main motivation behind writing it is being able to perform a per-line blame of the article’s history. I had tried levitation, but that tool seemed to be oriented towards large imports (or it might just be buggy), as it attempted to create huge binary files and ran longer than my patience would allow when I gave it the history of just one article. Also, I wanted the tool to take care of the downloading and importing part – so I could be one command away from a git repository of any WP article.

The tool can be made faster (all the XML and string management stuff adds an overhead), but right now it’s fast enough for me. One thing that can be optimized is making it not load the entire input XML into memory – it’s possible to do the conversion by “streaming” the XML. Another current limitation is that it’s currently hard-wired to the English Wikipedia.

Requires curl and (obviously) git. You’ll need a D1 compiler to compile the code.

Get it here: http://github.com/CyberShadow/wp2git

I have made a few improvements to GraphStudio, the open-source GraphEdit clone:

• The limit for text entry in certain combo boxes has been removed
• Basic XML graph saving support has been added (only filters and connections at the moment)
• Pins are now referred by their indexes in XML rather than by ambiguous names
• Added command-line /render parameter, which loads a graph, plays it and exits

XML support and /render allow scripted generation and rendering of XML graph files.

Source, download.

Starting with a new hourly-paid freelancing job, I needed some software to track the amount of time I spend working. I tried a few time tracking programs out there, but they all turned out to be bloated and clumsy (not to mention not open-source), so I decided to roll my own. (continue reading…)

If you’re one of the few crazies like me who prefer doing web development using command-line tools, you might appreciate this simple command-line calculator which can operate on RGB colors. It supports the 4 basic arithmetic operations and grouping using parens. (continue reading…)

PuTTY Knife is a small program that, when launched, creates a context menu that contains all of your PuTTY sessions. KiTTY is a PuTTY fork with a bunch of new features. Since KiTTY stores its sessions in another registry key, PuTTY Knife doesn’t “see” them. (continue reading…)

At least here in Moldova, many computer stores publish their price lists as Microsoft Excel (.xls) files on their web sites, often in a zip archive. To compare the prices for a product in several stores, one usually has to download and unpack the price lists for each store, then search through each one manually.

I made myself something to automate this last year; here it is in case someone finds it useful.
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