Do Know Evil - Tyler Mulligan’s Tips and Tricks

I was trying to figure out how to cut rendering time with smarter CSS. In my quest, I came across a plugin by google for Firebug called Page Speed which not only answered my question in the ‘Use efficient CSS selectors’ section (* #header #menu a:hover — Tag key with 2 descendant selectors and hover pseudo selector) but provided more details on the subject on the Page Speed Documentation.

“Descendant selectors are inefficient because, for each element that matches the key, the browser must also traverse up the DOM tree, evaluating every ancestor element until it finds a match or reaches the root element. The less specific the key, the greater the number of nodes that need to be evaluated.”

So, #home is faster than #menu li a#home; at least in Mozilla’s case. More on this here

My latest article on Accessing your favorite media via the terminal has been published.

Yeah, the name sounds cliche but man oh man is this app slick. Compared to some of the others I tried, this one _just_worked_ and had the options I needed, plus more.

sudo apt-get install gtk-recordmydesktop

You can select a specific window or an arbitrary area and it compresses to ogv automatically.

Here’s a quick video I recorded in seconds — http://z.nexuizninjaz.com/videos/nst.ogv

codepad.org is an online compiler/interpreter, and a simple collaboration tool.

Back in 2008, I posted about the project management system, Project Pier, which was a fork of Active Collab. The system served my groups and I well for a while… but it was limited in different areas. Overall I thought it too slow and not so much tailored for software development as the new system I’m been using Redmine.

Redmine is a Ruby “clone” of the python based Trac system, which is also pretty good. I say clone because it’s really just influenced by I Trac, there goals were different than the Trac project. I decided on Redmine because it seemed to fit the bill for my group’s needs.

- It supported SVN and git browser integration.
- Per project wiki
- Per project user levels
- Issue tracking
- lightweight
- extendible (already some nice modules for download)

I haven’t had much hands on experience with Ruby but my buddy Dan Kinsley is a big advocate of RoR and after installing this, I can see why. The install was smooth and professional, largely done through the terminal. It went through without a hitch and immediately after logging into the newly setup system, I noticed how fast it was. This application makes good use of javascript and AJAX.

I was able to get SVN and git repos hooked in pretty quickly with specific projects and so far it’s been helping me manage tasks and layout projects better and faster than Project Pier.

Because I use a dark theme for GTK, I’ve been working on a darker theme for the ubuntu forums using Stylish. It’s not complete but certainly usable. If you’d like to try it out, you can install the theme (after you install stylish) by going to the userstyle page.

Parasite is a program much like Firebug, except this is for GTK based applications.

By opening a program with parasite enabled, you can literally click elements of the GUI to reveal their properties.

The installation is pretty simple, open a terminal, clone the git repo, compile install and run. I like to make a folder for software I checkout from SVN or Git in my home dir so I don’t get things all messy. You need git to clone, so if you don’t have it installed already:

$ sudo apt-get install git-core

Clone it:

$ mkdir ~/git_software && cd ~/git_software && git clone git://github.com/chipx86/gtkparasite

Compile and install it:

$ ./autogen.sh && make && sudo make install

I run 64bit, so I had to do the following command to get things working:

$ sudo cp /usr/local/lib/gtk-2.0 /usr/lib64/ -r

Try it out (prefix an application name with GTK_MODULES=gtkparasite):

$ GTK_MODULES=gtkparasite gedit

Trying to avoid looking like a fanboy but whygitisbetterthanx.com is a really well done website explaining the pros of Git version control.

Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 has many improvements on the prior release of Intrepid 8.10, however 2 things were removed that I didn’t agree with. They are pretty easy to change back so I wanted to share them with you all.

Update Notifier in system tray

I guess the idea behind this change was intended to make updates more obvious… but to power-users like myself, I consider it an annoyance. Every time I’d run apt-get, a “update yo shiz” window would pop up above my terminal and anger me. I’m not the stupid windows user Ubuntu’s starting to treat me like. I just don’t have time for updates that require a restart in the middle of the day when I’m trying to get some work done.

gconftool -s --type bool /apps/update-notifier/auto_launch false

tip from launchpad

Ctrl+Alt+Backspace

This would classically restart X… but for some reason they removed this as well?!?! Whatever, here’s how to fix it.

sudo aptitude install dontzap && sudo dontzap –d

tip from Chris Johnston

When I first switched to Linux, I was running a lot of things in WINE because I was having trouble finding good linux alternatives for a few programs I use every day. Many programs weren’t a problem because they were designed (or redesigned) to be open-source and cross-platform. Those of you who have been following along have seen me recommend some applications as I made the switch but for the record, here’s a quick breakdown.

Cross platform applications that didn’t effect my switch to linux:
Web browsing: Firefox
Email: Thunderbird
(S)FTP: Filezilla
Web browsing: Opera (used for testing)

Applications I used on Windows and their alternatives I’ve found for Linux:
Text Editing: - Notepad++ | Geany
IRC: mIRC | Konversation (tried kvirc for a while but it’s too buggy)
Music: MusikCube | Amarok 1.4 / Exaile

The other programs I use are either minuscule or obvious (e.g. AIM to pidgin).

Today I’d like to share with you another great application that has replaced uTorrent (which I ran in WINE for a while and disliked), Deluge. What I love about deluge is that it is a native application with an interface that looks and behaves much like uTorrent does. Right click open folder in uTorrent in WINE is very face palm because it would try to open it in the stripped down windows explorer type thing :shudder:.

Anyway… I started using deluge at version 0.5 or so and since then it’s had a major code rewrite and feels more solid and (appears it) is now more extendible. Below is a screenshot of how nice it looks.

It even has a web-ui (if you install the package). You need to run this manually with the following command:

deluge -u web

The only thing it’s missing (that it had in earlier versions) is a good RSS plugin. There are some “solutions” like the FlexRSS plugin or Feeder (web ui only; good luck, have fun with installing that) but they are inferior to uTorrent. However, that is not enough to send me away and I highly recommend this as a Linux torrent client.

To install the latest version in Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope, I added the following PPA to my software sources >> https://launchpad.net/~deluge-team/+archive/ppa