Technology

svn diff -x "-bw --ignore-eol-style" is your friend when somebody decides to change the end of line style and strip all trailing whitespace from the files in your repo.

A bunch of searching the web for things related to setuid and shell scripts lead me to this answer in Stack Exchange:

Perl explicitly supports setuid scripts in a secure way. In fact, your script can run setuid even if your OS ignored the setuid bit on scripts. This is because perl ships with a setuid root helper that performs the necessary checks and reinvokes the interpreter on the desired scripts with the desired privileges. This is explained in the perlsec manual. It used to be that setuid perl scripts needed #!/usr/bin/suidperl -wT instead of #!/usr/bin/perl -wT, but on most modern systems, #!/usr/bin/perl -wT is sufficient.

There was a comment on that answer suggesting the situation had changed recently, but the Perl docs assure me it still works.

Here’s a sequence of unbelievable things:

1. Yes, despite a lifetime in Subversion, I’m really this new to git!
2. I’m going to link to Livejournal in this post!
3. Git really doesn’t have an equivalent to svn cp filename!

I spent a surprisingly long time reviewing the man pages and surfing the internet to confirm this, but git really assumes you’ll never want to copy a file with history. Here’s that Livejournal link I promised, where markpasc has similar complaints — from 2008, no less.

I was looking for a way to copy a file with history because I needed to break a single file into multiple pieces. In my Subversion days I would have done a svn cp old-file.php new-file.php. From there I could prune old-file.php and new-file.php down to what I needed while preserving the full history for all the code that remained.

Or perhaps I’m missing something?

apiGrove is an API management tool by Alcatel-Lucent. It proxies APIs (presumably those you built and host, though the example is for Twitter) , supports authenticated access, throttles to help manage demand, usage logging and reporting. More info @apiGrove, hat tip.

What other sites share the same infrastructure with your site, or any other? Bing‘s IP search can answer. Do a search by IP number:

• ip:72.233.127.217
• ip:158.136.1.105
• ip:72.51.52.15

The Loop’s Jim Dalrymple compiled the following numbers for the time it takes various tech sites to load in a browser in late 2011:

• The Loop: 38 requests; 38.66KB; 1.89 secs
• Daring Fireball: 23 requests; 49.82KB; 566 milliseconds
• Macworld: 130 requests; 338.32KB; 8.54 secs
• Ars Technica: 120 requests; 185.99KB; 2.08 secs
• Apple: 46 requests; 419KB; 1.39 secs
• CNN: 196 requests; 269.41KB; 4 secs
• BGR: 368 requests; 2.74MB; 35.33 secs
• AppleInsider: 141 requests; 649.39KB; 5.64 secs
• Facebook: 137 requests; 993.54KB; 11.19 secs
• MacStories: 119 requests; 2.16MB; 2.13 secs

John Gruber started this by calling out The Next Web for it’s slow performance:

• TheNextWeb: 342 requests; 6MB; no time info

More benchmarks can be seen at Browsermob.

IMDBAPI.com

Twitter front-end guy Nicolas Gallagher likes both CSS and speech bubbles enough to want them unadulterated by images and non-semantic markup. The lesson from his many examples is that it all comes down to an :after pseudo element that puts the little triangle in there:

.speechbubble:after {
    content:"";
    position:absolute;
    bottom:-15px; /* value = - border-top-width - border-bottom-width */
    left:50px; /* controls horizontal position */
    border-width:15px 15px 0; /* vary these values to change the angle of the vertex */
    border-style:solid;
    border-color:#f3961c transparent;
    /* reduce the damage in FF3.0 */
    display:block; 
    width:0;
}

More examples on Nicolas’ site.

• Schema.org NewsArticle
• hNews
• rNews (and the war between rNews and hNews)
• Google News Technical Requirements

From the FAQ on the AirParrot site:

What does AirParrot do?

AirParrot lets you AirPlay your Mac’s screen to a second or third generation AppleTV. What you see on your Mac’s screen will appear on the AppleTV, wirelessly!

How do I use AirParrot?

Once you’ve opened AirParrot, click on the icon in your menu bar. Select the AirPlay device (such as your AppleTV) and then select which screen you want to mirror. To stop mirroring, simply click on the same AirPlay device in the menu!

Mark Pilgrim’s overview of HTML 5 form elements includes the following:

• Placeholder Text
• Autofocus Fields
• Email Addresses
• Web Addresses
• Numbers as Spinboxes
• Numbers as Sliders
• Date Pickers
• Search Boxes
• Color Pickers
• Form Validation
• Required Fields
• Further Reading

Six years ago this month the Zend framework preview was released and Rasmus Lerdorf published a blog post titled “The no-framework PHP MVC framework” (italics added). R. Rajesh Jeba Anbiah noted irony.