Tips, software, instructions, and thoughts on all things tech.
I recently launched several major new features for Curvature, my program that generates maps of the twistiest roads world-wide. I’ve had these in the works for several years and finally found the time to wrap them up.
Where to eat in Middlebury? A long running topic of discussion with my colleagues is: “Where should we eat for lunch?” Our small rural town has a pretty vibrant dining scene for its population with between 40-50 establishments that serve food or drink. This number is just large enough to…
Drupal 8 has a great Plugin API that not only allows one to write plugins that modify Drupal core’s behavior, but also to define your own pluggable system that you and others can plug into as well. The Plugin API documentation has a number of examples that cover many common…
Several years after creating Curvature –my program that analyzes road-geometry and builds maps of twisty roads– it now has a dedicated site of its own: roadcurvature.com The new site is written to help non-techies understand how to use the curvature files with step-by-step instructions and a lot less jargon than…
As a software developer or system admin have you ever encountered regular expressions that are just a bit too hard to understand? Kind of frustrating, right? As a rule, regular expressions are often relatively easy to write, but pretty hard to read even if you know what they are supposed…
Update October, 2020: Curvature is now available as an in-browser map. Update November, 2016: New dedicated Curvature site — roadcurvature.com Update October, 2013: Google Earth KML files generated by curvature.py are now available covering the entire world. In the process of taking up motorcycling this summer I also gained an…
The RiverLevels widget provides an easy way to monitor the amount of water flowing in your favorite streams and rivers right from your Dashboard. The RiverLevels widget is of particular interest to whitewater kayakers and canoeists. Once any United States Geological Survey (USGS) stream-gauge station is selected, it is automatically…
Let’s say you are working on a large feature or update that requires a bunch of commits to complete. You finish up with your work and are then ready to merge it onto your master branch. For example, here is the history of my drupal repository after some work updating…
For the past few months I have been doing a lot of work on the phpCAS library, mostly to improve the community trunk of phpCAS so that I wouldn’t have to maintain our own custom fork with support for the CAS attribute format we use at Middlebury College. The phpCAS…
Here is a quick command to generate a list of the top pages in the Apache web-server’s access log: gawk ‘{ print $7}’ /var/log/httpd/access_log | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -n 20 Parts of the command explained: gawk ‘{ print $7}’ — return only the 7th…
