Paperless

The excellent original “DOM-Scripted Lists, Revisited” article seems to have disappeared, but I found the latest revision on the Wayback Machine. A great addition to your JavaScript toolbox.

This is a script to update a WordPress blog with the latest stable version from Subversion.

How to use:

1. Download update-wordpress.sh.
2. chmod u+x path/to/update-wordpress.sh
3. path/to/update-wordpress.sh -fs ftp_server -wp /path/to/WordPress/on/FTP -ms mysql_server

Some features:

• Works with plain /bin/sh, so it should work on any Linux / BSD distribution.
• Flexible - There are input parameters for user names, passwords, and lots more.
• It will ask for FTP and MySQL passwords (-FP and -MP parameters) only if these are not provided

See the code for more documentation.

Background: Jeff Atwood uses anecdotal evidence to show that Linux audio capabilities suck.

Looks like Linux is moving up in Scott Berkun’s suckiness hierarchy: It’s now good enough for most people for most things, but it still has weak areas (audio, games) which those users find extremely painful.

Reverse anecdotal evidence: After buying my last computer in 2007, I could not get optical surround sound to work in XP (Google, Usenet, and vendor contacted). For the first time I found that Linux (Ubuntu 7.10) had better hardware support, even though the vendor only supported Windows. And there’s proof, too.

Here’s a simple script to check out all subversion repositories on a remote host. It requires that you have SSH access on the host, to be able to fetch the repository names (otherwise you can hardcode them in $repositories). You’ll also need to have Perl installed.

How to use:

1. Download checkout-all-svn.sh.
2. chmod u+x path/to/checkout-all-svn.sh
3. path/to/checkout-all-svn.sh -r http://example.org/svn/

Some features:

• Works with plain /bin/sh, so it should work on any Linux / BSD distribution.
• Works with repository names with spaces, but not yet with unusual characters.

See the code for more documentation.

Following up on the good work of Jean-Francois Roy, here’s my slightly extended version of his script to backup all Subversion repositories to a remote host.

How to use:

1. Download backup-all-svn.sh
2. chmod u+x path/to/backup-all-svn.sh
3. ./backup-all-svn.sh -h target_host (can also set target port and user name)

Some features:

• Works with plain /bin/sh, so it should work on any Linux / BSD distribution.
• Works with repository names with spaces and non-ASCII characters.

See the code for more documentation.

This might be useful if you keep your settings (.bashrc, .subversion/config, etc.) outside the home directory, like in a CVS or Subversion sandbox. Just run
make-links.sh -d path/to/home/directory/in/sandbox ~
to create symlinks from ~ to each file in the sandbox, recursively.

The script will not overwrite any existing files, but instead diff them against the sandbox file. If you want to change the diff command, just change the diff variable near the top of the code.