How to view tar gzip contents without decompressing it

Tar files (.tar) are based on the old “tape archive” format. So if you think of how a program would write files to tape, one at a time, in order, .tar files do the same thing, so they don’t have a table of contents. However, there are some options that let you scan the .tar or other archive file and write the output to stdout or a file.

This forum has a pretty good discussion on this topic.

Yahoo! Answers Could Be So Much Better

I’ve managed to find several Yahoo! Answers pages lately that have ridiculous answers and are locked out of having better ones added.

I recently submitted this feedback:

The current policy of 4 days gives barely enough time to be indexed by other Search Engines (for instance, Google) and by then I can’t provide better answers. Why not let Questions be open to Answers until 15 days past the last answer (that is, until the topic has had no new answers posted for awhile) instead. What harm would that do but only help you get better free content at no cost.

Duh. Fail.

What is ORM and why should you use it?

I’ve been asking myself this question a bit more lately so I wanted to find some answers. Nowadays, ORM typically stands for Object Relational Mapping, and less commonly, Object Role Modeling, although the two concepts are related. Mainly I am curious about some of the new ORM implementations for Kohana 3, namely Sprig (based on Django) and Jelly.

The first page on this topic can be found over at Stack Overflow.

On the StackOverflow page is a link to this post by Glenn Block on the MSDN blog. I found it a bit surprising that this particular post hadn’t been voted on by any other Stack Overflow members as I found it an insightful and succinct explanation of why you might want to consider using ORM.

I noticed another topic that comes up in relation to ORM is DM, the Domain Model pattern, and DDD, Domain Driven Design. I thought this post entitled DDD – why bother? was an interesting take with a terrific example illustrating the benefits of an ORM system.

This post was inspired by Koes.

Dreamweaver slows me down too

This blog is great. Tons of people expressing the same thing I’ve been feeling lately… Dreamweaver is just slow.

I recently switched from Dreamweaver CS3 on Windows (running under Bootcamp on a Macbook Pro) to Dreamweaver CS4 running under Snow Leopard. I also upgraded from 2GB to 4GB of RAM. Dreamweaver CS4 is almost unusable in Design mode, on longer documents. Maybe I have to run disk utility or something, but sheesh.

I’ve enjoyed using Dreamweaver for many years, but why is it that as computers get faster and faster, Adobe software gets slower and slower?

As I’ve pointed out before, Adobe makes some of the most expensive software out there. Why doesn’t it work better?

Git for Subversion Users

I just spent a few hours reading up on Git, and have to admit I saw the light. One of the coolest features of Git is that it is distributed and provides an easy way to have a repository made up of smaller sub-repositories (called submodules in Git). Try that with SVN! Why does this matter? What’s so cool about Git? you may be wondering… Well, because the Kohana 3.0 source code is stored in several Git repositories, you can easily checkout the source to a local working copy, including only the modules you want, and also build your application in a local Git repository.

All of the following links are really helpfu.

Git for Subversion users, Part 1: Getting started

Git for Subversion users, Part 2: Taking control

git-svn is a gateway drug

Git Manual

Git User Guide

Guide on using Git with Kohana

ICANN is retarded. Literally.

I just had an amazing idea for a new TLD. So, naturally, I Google create new TLD.

I went to this link, then to  the ICANN FAQ on how to create a new TLD, then the ICANN forum…

This stuff is like from 2000. Am I missing something? The newest info about this is almost a decade old?

It seems more often lately, I stumbleUpon Ars Technica, which has a good overview of a recent plan by ICANN to allow hundreds more generic Top Level Domains.

GMail Keyboard Shortcuts Make GMail Even Faster

GMail is incredible, has been since it launched.

But if you’re not using the GMail Keyboard Shortcuts, you’re missing out. The performance of navigating GMail is instantaneous when using many of the keyboard commands, particularly archive (e) and delete (#).

Adobe Pushes Flash, PDF to US Government

The article about the security vulnerabilities of Adobe Shockwave on Slashdot also posted this, linking to an Ars Technica post about how Adobe is peddling Flash & PDF technology to Uncle Sam. Trouble is, what if you don’t want to install Flash or Acrobat Reader?

Do you really want to be forced to install Adobe software on your computer in order to access certain government forms and information?

What if you’re blind, or still use DOS? What if you wanted to access a government form on your phone? Please government, use open standards like Text, XML, XHTML & CSS for various devices, screen readers and easy & fast searchability.

I admit that I’ve used many interactive forms in the PDF format, always to send the mercenaries more of my hard-earned money.

So my plea is this: Washington, please! Stop making us all fill out so many damn forms and stick to open, accessible standards, please!

Shockwave Breaches Security in a Big Way. Adobe Breaches Etiquette in an even bigger way

Slashdot just reported that the Macromedia Adobe Director Shockwave Player may have security holes affecting millions of systems. Not the popular Flash plugin, but the evil twin that disappeared into the shadows years ago.

This is particularly saddening for a proud former Director and Shockwave developer. If you have the shockwave player installed, just go ahead and dump it.

I cringe as I say that, know that within the last several months, dozens of really smart people people I have known through the Direct-L and have been helped by countless times over the years are dropping like flies, and finding other platforms for multimedia development in an increasingly hyper-connected online world.

Back in the day, way before the Internet, before everyone had a modem, there was multimedia. We’re talking the days of floppy disk mailers and DeBabelizer, LivePicture and hypercard. Learning how to compress graphics for a whole interactive experience in under 800k or 1.4mb. A floppy, then a mini CD, then a CD, then a DVD. Making the most engaging theatrics fit on tiny media was only one end of the spectrum. For years, Director was the de-facto coolest way to build intensely immersive, room-filling, museum quality experiences. With Director you can used to be able to connect monitors for gallery shows and museums and plug in lights and control cameras. As amazing as the best Flash websites are, they pale in comparison to the insane stuff we were doing 5 to 10 years ago with installations, fullscreen video, and the first 3D animation software as it essentially became available to the masses. I remember trying out CoSA AfterEffects 1.0. I beta-tested PhotoShop 1.0. I was already cutting rubylith with an exacto and couldn’t wait for Illustrator 88 to come out. I made some of the best posters with LivePicture, painter, Expression and Kai’s Power Tools.

Anyway, I digress. Reading the Direct-L lately has really sucked. I’ve been debating dropping the subscription for quite a while now, but I somehow enjoy remeniscing as various people describe tasks in Director. Lingo has a quiet elegance to it. It was fun while it lasted.

I’ll break it down for you. Adobe acquired Director (and Flash and Freehand and Fireworks and some other goodies like ColdFusion server) when they bought Macromedia. Since they had their own tools like Illustrator (bye-bye Freehand) and Photoshop (cya Fireworks), Flash’s smaller runtime and fast vector routines made it ultimately the next cool way to, again, make graphics and stuff smaller (remember the floppy disk mailers?), thereby sealing Director’s fate, since it was more meant for making big projects with pristine media quality for CDs and DVDs, multimedia projects that are just much too big for our slow 24kbps dialup.

Here’s the painful irony: Now that the web and internet speeds are catching up to delivering amazing quality HD theater experience we once dreamed of, Adobe has let Director languish for so many years that it barely works, and the best and most evangelistic Director gurus have abandonded it in favor of other tools (particularly for online realtime 3D, really the only reason to still play with Shockwave) that are either supported by their makers or open source.

I really feel for anyone who continued to put their faith in Director and Shockwave over the past few years as Adobe gave you the shaft. It really stings and kills your confidence and enthusiasm for your craft when the tool maker decides to stop making the tool.

Adobe, you have not only breached security and etiquette, you have alienated some of your biggest fans and most ardent supporters.

Speaking of which, I just shelled out nearly a grand for my Adobe Master Collection CS4 upgrade for Mac and when I entered my Adobe Master Collection CS3 Windows Serial Number activation said it was invalid. Thank you, Adobe, for squashing some really cool programs and for my $949 30-day trial.

I think I’m going to download Gimp and use Aviary from now on.

One final note. If you’re not angry at Adobe, maybe you could be angry at Aptana, as some other smart people I know are, for their recent move to stop supporting their PHP plugin. These software companies are really starting to tick me off. But you really can’t blame Aptana for moving (albeit silently) to become the best Rails IDE, it’s a pretty smart move for the small open-source software provider. At least you Aptana users didn’t spend the last 10 years shelling out thousands of dollars to Aptana for your free web development IDE.

Update 2009/11/03: Adobe has released some security fixes. So maybe, if you still use Adobe Director and Shockwave, try the Shockwave Player version 11.5.2.602 update.

Snap To Grid is Broken in Illustrator and always has been

I was just reminded of one of the reasons why I hate Adobe. Aside from the fact that they abandoned the great tools from Macromedia including Freehand and Director, even their flagship vector editor, Illustrator, can be extremely frustrating… when it comes to their woefully broken Snap-To-Grid feature.

At least one other blogger feels the same. I just commented on his blog post about terrible snap to grid performance.

In a nutshell, it seems perfectly logical. Adobe owns Illustrator, Flash and Photoshop, and these are probably their top 3 sellers, so you’d assume these tools would work well together. Think again. Broken! You create a 1-pixel grid in Illustrator, turn on snap-to-grid and expect everything to just work. Well, it doesn’t.

Here’s a list of things that just plain don’t work:

1. You create an object using drawing tools. It’s all snapped to grid perfectly. You can then edit points and drag them off the grid.
2. You grab a handle with the Free Transform tool. Sometimes it will snap to grid, other times it won’t.
3. You make a symbol out of an object that is all snapped to the grid, and drag another instance onto the page. Sometimes it snaps, sometimes it doesn’t.
4. You edit a symbol in context. If it was snapped, sometimes just clicking into the symbol to edit it unsnaps the object points.
5. You edit a symbol in context to snap the edges and points to the grid and escape the symbol. The symbol is now unsnapped.
6. You have an object that is snapped to a 1px grid, copy and paste it to Photoshop. Your line edges are now antialiased. They shouldn’t be – a 1px wide piece of vector art in Illustrator becomes a fuzzy blob when pasted.
7. As Steve pointed out on his post, You type in values for widths or heights of objects that should be on the grid. Save, close and reopen your document and you’ll see that Illustrator added minute amounts of measurements to your object. Presumably these are rounding errors? It’s unclear.
8. You click the pen tool and assume that when you click to draw a path, all points will always be on the grid. They almost never are.

There’s probably several more examples. Basically snap-to-grid is useless. Come on Adobe – get your act together.