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Benjamin Oakes

Photo of Ben Oakes

Hi, I'm Ben Oakes and this is my geek blog. Currently, I'm a Software Developer at Hedgeye. Previously, I was a Research Assistant in the Early Social Cognition Lab at Yale University and a student at the University of Iowa. I also organize NewHaven.rb. I do development with Ruby, JavaScript, SQL, HTML, and CSS. I have an amazing fiancée named Danielle Smith.

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New open source projects: Maid and TabCarousel

by Ben

I’ve been hard at work taking some code I had originally written for myself and packaging it up as two open source projects. I’ve been very happy about the amount of interest I’ve received in both. I encourage you to take a look and see if what I’ve released would be useful to you. Feedback (and contributions) are welcome!

Maid

(Install, Source Code)

Be lazy! Let Maid clean up after you, based on rules you define.

Maid keeps files from sitting around too long, untouched. Many of the downloads and other files you collect can easily be categorized and handled appropriately by rules you define. Let the maid in your computer take care of the easy stuff, so you can spend more of your time on what matters.

Think of it like the email filters you might already have, but for files. Worried about things happening that you don’t expect? Maid doesn’t overwrite files and actions are logged so you can tell what happened.

Maid is inspired by the Mac OS X shareware program Hazel. This tool was created on Mac OS X 10.6, but should be generally portable to other systems. (Some of the more advanced features such as downloaded_from require OS X, however.)

Your rules are defined in Ruby, so easy rules are easy and difficult rules are possible.

TabCarousel

(Install, Source Code)

A Chrome extension to help you keep tabs on info you want to monitor. It’s great for cycling through tabs on an external display, like a TV.

TabCarousel is simple: open tabs you want to monitor throughout the day, then click the toolbar icon. To stop, click the icon again.

By default, TabCarousel will flip through your tabs every 15 s, reloading them every 5 min. It’s great on a unused display or TV. Put Chrome in full-screen mode (F11, or cmd-shift-f on the Mac) and let it go.

If you want to change how often TabCarousel flips through your tabs, right click on the toolbar icon and choose “Options”.

Example Uses

On a HDTV that has a computer attached, open the NewRelic overview (and Background Tasks, etc.) for each app you’d like to monitor. Set NewRelic to kiosk mode for each page, then hit the “Tab Carousel” toolbar button.

The TabCarousel wiki has more.

New on GitHub: utilities

by Ben

I spent some time over the last few weeks pulling together lots of command line tools that I’ve written over the last few years. I’ve shared them on GitHub.

Some fill in gaps that I wish *nix systems would have by default (such as prune vs uniq or reverse vs rev). Others just script things that I do commonly or are just tedious to do (such as backups2git, github-init, timestamp, latest-migration-path, and std-timestamps). Some are just there for fun (such as is-computer-on). Most of them are written in Ruby, but some are plain old Bash scripts. Lots of the Ruby scripts make heavy use of ARGF, which is awesome for writting shell scripts if you’ve never used it.

I also spent some time documenting (and remembering) how they worked. (Most of it was just shuffling comments around.) Almost every command has a --help option that prints usage information and a short synopsis now. I hope you find them useful!

See them on GitHub