Keith Bentrup’s Portforlio

So cygwin allows you to port all the great *nix utilities to a Windows environment, and that’s useful because 1) there are some many handy tools and 2) you can write scripts or tasks once and use them everywhere (Unix, Linux, OS X, Windows).
Today, let’s discover how you can get two of the most useful [...]

I’m on a simplification kick, and I’ve been dramatically reducing the clutter in my life and enjoying the results.
I recently noticed a good deal on a drive at Microcenter and thought “Why keep 5 external drives (1.3 TB total, 5 usb cables, 5 power cords) when a single drive (1.5 TB, 1 usb cable, 1 [...]

The fastest download is no download, so I was trying to prevent even the 304s (last modified requests & responses) on a recent project. It had been a while since I had to configure Apache for this, but here was the start of a .htaccess file:

<FilesMatch “\.(ico|pdf|flv|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|css|swf)$”>
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault “access plus 10 years”
</FilesMatch>
# compress [...]

wget can be a very handy tool during development. Combine wget with other *nix utilities (like time and cron), and you can write some very useful scripts/snippets. For example,

wget -p -H -nv http://www.my-domain.com/cart/ 2>&1

uses -p/–page-requisites to download all the files necessary to render the page while -H causes it to span domains if necessary. [...]

So I was having problems backporting some changes to a fork of our platform today. WinMerge kept reporting files as different in the summary view, but displayed no differences in the file comparison view. I looked closer and noticed the character sets were “different”.
A developer on the team had started saving files in the repository [...]