Commanding Chaos for Coworking, Open Source and Creative Communities

August 2008 Posts

Ubiquity: Web Services + Microformats + Quicksilver = Mashups (in your browser)

Wed, 08/27/2008 - 07:03 -- rprice

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.
Mozilla Labs » Blog Archive » Introducing Ubiquity

The overall goals of Ubiquity are to explore how best to:
* Empower users to control the web browser with language-based instructions. (With search, users type what they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do.)
* Enable on-demand, user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs. (In other words, allowing everyone–not just Web developers–to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing.)
* Use Trust networks and social constructs to balance security with ease of extensibility.
* Extend the browser functionality easily.

I think Microsoft is going to copy the hell out of this and release a "Microsoft Live OpenWeb Command Window Beta" before mid-September.

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awk magic: renaming batch files

Wed, 08/13/2008 - 04:46 -- rprice

Hmm, somehow, files that should be jpegs have the extension ".null"... ugly!

ls -1 | \
awk -F\. '/.null/ { print "mv " $0, $1".jpg" }' \
| bash

Let's say you have a bunch of files named "image.jpg.jpg"... ugh!

rprice@server$ ls -1 | \
awk -F\. '/.jpg.jpg/ { print "mv " $0, $1"." $2 }' \
| bash

Now they are renamed to just "image.jpg", that's pretty simple

Next challenge: you have several images which are named "image(1).jpg"... what do you do?

rprice@server$ ls -1 *\(1\)* | \
awk -F '\(1\)' '{ print "mv "$0 "(" $1 "" $2 "" $3 "" $4}' | \
awk -F\( '{ print $1 "\\(" $2 ")" $3 "" $4 "" $5}' | \
awk -F\) '{ print $1 "\\)" $2 " " $3 "" $4 "" $5}' \
| bash

Now they are also renamed to just "image.jpg" - you are a winner!

...and if you had anything named "image.jpg(1).jpg", you will have to run both of these scripts. Lucky you!

For more awk tutorials, check out Drupal Easy.

P.S. if you also have a database that has the same nasty file names like this in it, example:
34,135887,image with spaces,image_with_spaces.jpg(1).jpg,image/jpeg,1
export the thing as a CSV and then apply the following script to the file before you drop all the rows and put them back in:

awk -F, 'BEGIN { OFS = "," } {
sub(/\([0-9]\)/, "", $4)
sub(/\.jpg\.jpg/, ".jpg", $4)
split($4, arr, "/")
print $1, $2, arr[2], "files/legacy/" $4, $5, $6
}' files.csv

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SXSW 2009? Turn Your Old Media Empire into a New Media Paradise

Tue, 08/12/2008 - 10:51 -- rprice

Question mark is because we proposed the talk, but it's up to the people to decide whether they'd like us to present...

The form we filled out had lots more info on it, but here's what the site says:
Turn Your Old Media Empire into a New Media Paradise

Companies that have been at forefront of the publishing revolution, before the days of the internet, have recently found themselves behind the eight ball. While they struggle with their digital strategy, smaller leaner companies have been capturing their traditional audience on the web. However, many of these companies forget that the ability to create compelling engaging content is their greatest asset. Instead of placing their focus on pages views, they should be placing it on the pages themselves. This presentation will show how we used Drupal and other open source technologies to to transform a couple of 100 year old magazines into fresh and relevant web 2.0 destinations - from both a technical and philosophical perspective.

The whole deal is, Content is King, but media companies are withholding their content from their audience, because they don't want to cannibalize their print business (or insert traditional medium here). Eric (@xentek) and myself (@liberatr) are proposing this topic, so vote, comment, or otherwise show us some love.

Other Drupal-Related Sessions
Another Local's Session

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