RancidMeat: Mini SFTP Server

January 20th, 2010

screenshotCoreFTP is a shareware client/server suite. However there is also a freeware server half-way down this page.
 
It’s dead simple to use: double-click, make up a user/pass, click start.

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Managing Path Dependencies

January 14th, 2010

So you’ve got some commandline tools but they each depend on a bunch of dlls? You could dump the whole mess together in one dir, but that’d be awful. Adding a dozen tool-specific dirs to your PATH isn’t pretty either. The answer: symlinks!
 
What’s that? Windows doesn’t have symlinks? How about shortcuts? No luck there. Well there are still batch files…
 
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Montage of Everything

December 24th, 2009

In total, about a half-hour that should make your day.

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Definitions

December 22nd, 2009

*Sigh* Guess these typical theological definitions haven’t been echoed enough on the net… Do watch the Qualia vids though.
 
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Skepticism 101

November 20th, 2009

Baloney Detection Kit

Carl Sagan’s book, The Demon-Haunted World, is an introduction to skepticism, critical thinking, and pseudoscience. The above video is based on one of its chapters.
(Wikipedia link) (Amazon link)
 
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More Chemistry Vids

October 4th, 2009

For some reason, probably ignorance or lucky sampling, I get more fanboy rush from small-scale chemistry than astronomy. Any other excuse that I came up with just now got trumped with, “Nebulae do it way bigger with unparalled whiz-bang.”
 
No wait, “On small scales, the physics can be tinkered with.” *teehee*
 
I’ll start and end this linkdump with Theodore Gray, the persona MacGyver could’ve been if the producers didn’t mind lawsuits.
(see final link)

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Happy Blasphemy Day

September 30th, 2009

Today’s the day to openly criticize religion (more so than usual). I like the idea, but until it catches on, it’s a bit like “provoke your abusive spouse day”. This year, I guess the appropriate context is to do stuff in amiable locales to build popularity. Sooo, +1 blog hotlinking satirical pics!

Edit: A blogger’s doin’ a snarky Let’s Play-esque summary as he reads through the bible.

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Messing with the Clipboard

September 27th, 2009

So you want to dabble in commandline wizardry, but you don’t want to get into that hard bash scripting stuff just yet? With these, you can live in the GUI and use a terminal to mangle your clipboard.
 
For the casual piping exercise we’ll sort this list:

Hermes
Zapp
Leela
Amy
Zoidberg
Fry
Bender
Professor
Kif

 
I’ve got instructions for each platform below the fold.
And for advanced folks, there’s a way to run a script without saving a text file.
 
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RancidMeat: Unix Utils

September 15th, 2009

If you alternately use Linux and Windows, no doubt you’ve had utility withdrawal. To deal with it, there are ports which you can put in a folder and add to your PATH.
 
– The venerable UnixUtils. Here’s another mirror. A bit old but they work. Don’t pass these up, especially grep/pclip/gclip/sed.

– This standalone wget stays current.
 
– Never use ‘more’ again. Less is available for Windows too. Get v429 to avoid the dll dependency.
 
NetCat too. Be warned: your virus scanner may summarily quarantine it for being a ‘Hacktool’. :/
 
– A Japanese build of gawk which has its |& networking intact. Who cares about readable error messages. :P
 
– There are a lot of up-to-date ports in GnuWin32, including an English gawk (minus |&), but you have to check their dependencies. If the one requirement is Win32, just get the “Binaries” and drop the exe in your folder. However, many of those packages require that you also get “Dependencies” dlls and lug them around with the exe. I’ll mention how to deal with that in another post.
 

Sorry no native bash for Windows. Well there are Cygwin and MSYS, but they’re like mini operating systems.

App-Fu: Commandline 7-zip Sfx

September 2nd, 2009

Hidden feature: 7-zip can create commandline self-extracting archives, for use in batch-fu. The GUI simply lacks a checkbox.

A) Here’s the goofy commandline way.
The -t arg is optional, but it’s a reminder that this is, deep-down, the 7z format.

“…\7-Zip\7z.exe” a -t7z somefile.exe somedir\ -sfx

B) Self-extracting archives are literally archives with an executable header tacked on at the beginning.
You can turn an existing 7z archive into an sfx by concatenating.

copy /b “…\7-Zip\7zCon.sfx” + somefile.7z somefile.exe

Or if you’ve got unixutils…

cat “…\7-Zip\7zCon.sfx” somefile.7z > somefile.exe

C) The third way is a cheat.
Replace the graphical header “…\7-zip\7z.sfx” with a copy of 7zCon.sfx. That way the right-click:”Add to Archive…” dialog will make commandline sfx’s all the time instead.

 

Z) Then copy that exe anywhere and the following will extract to an arbitrary location (-o) silently (-y).

somefile.exe x -o”C:\Somewhere\besides\here\” -y