Pretty much the first thing I did with it is start hunting for free web development ebooks. I was quite surprised to find that there wasn’t a free tag reference for HTML5.

So I made one.

It’s not in the Amazon store, but you can download and copy it to you Kindle over USB.

Download HTML5 Reference here.

I’ve tweaked this code to build a simulation of objects orbiting about a point. The only key difference is that the gravity for each ball is recalculated relative to the “sun” with each animation step. I’ve also removed collision detection with the window borders.

There’s a live example here. View the source for the.. er.. source.

As part of the course we used one of the major data mining products on the market. As an class of Masters Degree students, learning about the subtle intricacies of our chosen subject, the product served us well. We were able to tweak and twiddle with more switches than a 747. We had the luxury of time to run, re-run, rinse and repeat data processing over and over. I’m equally sure that for professional data mining consultants, hired by large wealthy companies to trawl vast private data repositories, these products are worth the thousands of pounds of license fees they pay.

But what about everyone else? What about the campaigns working to holding government to account over public data? What about the new-breed of data journalist exposing stories otherwise hidden in obscure facts and figures? What about the data evangelists enlightening and entertaining with wonderful visualisations? How accessible is data mining for these people? How affordable? How usable?

Not enough.

With increasingly more data being placed in the public domain, so increases the need for tools to explore this data. Data Mining tools are out there, but are no-where-near as accessible as the data that requires them.

It is with this in mind that I have begun to develop an accessible, usable and intuitive suite of tools to explore data sets. The first of these, Clusterbomb, will mine data sets to expose the hidden clusters of records buried within. I’m expecting to have an alpha release out early next year, but for now sign up to the mailing list to keep an eye on developments. Clusterbomb is also on Twitter and Facebook.

❝To be ahead of the rest, you need to see more than they do❞

It makes use of TinyMCE for the editor, so not HTML needed. The user-generated content is filtered through the damn handy strip_tags function and saved in a text file that is writeable by the server.

The single page itself can be styled independently and just calls a few php includes to insert the content HTML. There’s options in the config.php file to set the admin username and password along with site meta, error messages and a few other bits and bobs. Single CMS is bundled with JQuery and modernizr and makes use of most of the sweet stuff from the HTML5 Boilerplate project.

If you want to have a play around, the source is up on GitHub. It’s MIT Licenced, so feel free to use, abuse and reuse.

Download Simple CMS Here

AdBlock

Blocks all (well most) ads on sites around the web. No-one likes ads, apart from the people pushing them, this plugin makes them go away.

Flash Block

Blocks all those irritating flash animations from jumping straight down your eyeballs when all you want to do is read an article. It lets you choose which flash objects to enable with a click. You can also white-list sites, preventing flash from being blocked at all (YouTube is white-listed by default).

Keep My Opt-Outs

A plugin provided by Google to stop Google from using your browser habits to send targeted ads. Needless to say, they don’t market this very widely, but it is there.

Ghostery

Ghostery aims to block those nasty tracking scripts from running in your browser. It doesn’t promise to block everything, and requires a little configuration, but something is better than nothing.

KB SSL Enforcer

This plugin checks every site you visit for SSL support, if it does it forces you to use it. SSL ensures that the information sent over the internet can only be read by the site you’re visiting and no-one else along the way.

Google SSL Web Search

Adds a secure version of Google search to your search engines list. You should set Google SSL as your default search engine.

There’s certainly more that you could do to improve your safety while on-line, but adding these plug-ins to your browser is a good start.

Here’s another bit of Gitty loveliness for you: Custom Config Parameters.

The primary configuration file in Git is found in .git/config. In here are the configuration parameters for your repository. Git provides a tool to manage this file – git config. Handily this tool lets you store your own configuration parameters too.

How to do it

If you have a look inside .git/config you’ll see that data is structured in key-value pairs grouped in to sections.

[branch "master"]
	remote = origin
	merge = refs/heads/master

Which is accessed by running a command like this…

-> git config branch.master.remote
origin

And modified like this…

-> git config branch.master.remote newValue

You can define a new section to store your own data like this…

-> git config mydata.mykey valueA

You can store multiple values too…

-> git config --add mydata.mykey valueB

And fetch them all like this…

-> git config --get-all mydata.mykey
valueA
valueB

Delete a single value like this…

-> git config --unset mydata.mykey valueB

Delete all key values like this…

-> git config --unset-all mydata.mykey

And to remove a whole section…

-> git config --remove-section mydata

What to do with it

That’s great, but what can you do with it?

Why not use it to store parameters for your workflow scripts? Here’s some ideas.

• The locations of CSS and JS files to be minified
• Compilation output directory
• The latest version release number (if your not a tag fan)
• Feature branch meta data (owner, decription, etc.)
• A list of deployment servers

If you use this feature in your scripts, drop a comment below.

However, their method makes use of the vcprompt package, which has to be compiled and installed. A worthwhile exercise, but a bit unnecessary for a simple prompt. The following snippet of scripting will do the same job, just pop it in your .bashrc file.

function pre_prompt_print(){
    GIT=""
    BRANCH=`git branch 2> /dev/null | grep \* | awk ‘{print $2}’`
    if [[ "$BRANCH" != "" ]]; then
        GIT=”[git:$BRANCH]”
    fi
    printf “$USER@$HOSTNAME$PWD $GIT\n”
}
PROMPT_COMMAND=pre_prompt_print
PS1=”-> ”

This will give you a command prompt looking something like this…

craig@craig-laptop:/home/craig/myGitProject [git:master]  
->

How imaginative is my hostname eh?

I didn’t spend too long on this, and I know it could be better refined. So if you have any suggestions, drop a comment below.

GEdit has a few keyboard short cuts for working with the application. But there’s also a lot of great short cuts for working within the document. These, however, arn’t documented anywhere.

GEdit uses the GTKTextView widget to display and edit text, it’s for this that the short cuts are undocumented.

I’ve collected all the GTKTextView keyboard short cuts I know of here. I suspect that there are more (moving the cursor to the start and end of sentences for example) but I haven’t found them yet.

Also, as the GTKTextView widget is used throughout Gnome, you’ll find that these short cuts can be used all over the place (like in textareas on websites).

Navigation & Selection

These short cuts can be used to move the cursor around the document. Navigation shortcuts can be used with the Shift key to select text.

Deleting

These short cuts can be used to delete sections of text.

On my hunt, I’ve found the following few links to be worthwhile.

Python Plugin How To for gedit 3

My first gedit plugin

Gedit Plugin

It’ll also be worth checking this out.

PyGTK 2.0 Tutorial

It’s not much, but it’s a start…