If you need to debug Analytics tracking, consider using this chrome extension. It will replace the tracking code with a debug version that prints debugging info to the JavaScript console.

If your project manager wants to do gatekeeping on a project, as a developer you need to follow the following guidelines (e.g. by using something like this issue checklist template).

In order to reduce the number of rejects we get from clients, we want to review all code written before it goes to the staging server.

Note: This process is tailored to our specific needs and tools at makandra. While it will certainly not apply to all (especially larger tea...

I have no idea how it's supposed to work (or why the don't have a print CSS), but this works for pages written with Markdown:

1. "Edit" the wiki page
2. Copy all text
3. Run a Markdown interpreter and pipe its result, e.g.: kramdown > /tmp/github.html
4. Paste your markdown
5. Press Ctrl-D to finalize your input
6. Open the generated HTML file and print it.

O_o

When you print out a HTML pages, all raster images (like PNGs) will appear aliased. This is because a printer's resolution is usually much higher than that of a computer screen.

If an image absolutely must look awesome when printed, a solution is to embed the image in much higher solution than needed (e.g. four times the horizontal resolution), then scale it down to the desired width using CSS.

Note that this will slightly alter the image's appearance on the screen because browsers will scale down the image [using an anti-aliasing method](...

ExpandAnimations is a LibreOffice/OpenOffice.org Impress extension to expand presentation animations before exporting to PDF. This way the exported PDF will have one page per animation stage.

Single step and slow motion for Cucumber scenarios can come in handy, especially in @javascript scenarios.

# features/support/examiners.rb
AfterStep('@slow_motion') do
  sleep 2
end

AfterStep('@single_step') do
  print "Single Stepping. Hit enter to continue"
  STDIN.getc
end

If you're using spreewald, these tags are available as @slow-motion and @single-step (with dashes instead of underscores).

Note: You can also [prevent the selenium webbrowser wind...

The colors in Rails log files are helpful when watching them but, since they are ANSI color codes like ^[[4;36;1m, can be annoying when you are reading the logs with a tool that does just prints those control characters (like less or vim).

Remove them with sed:

cat staging.log | sed -r "s/\x1B\[([0-9]{1,3}((;[0-9]{1,3})*)?)?[m|K]//g"

This will print the log without colors to your terminal. You can pipe the result into less for example.

To have a file you can vim around with, just write that output into a new file:

ca...

When cucumber encounters a failing step in a @javascript feature, the selenium browser window instantly closes. Sometimes you do not want that, because you need to see what is going on. You can click through the data your feature created, when you add the following file to your features/support directory:

#features/support/examiners.rb

After('@leave_the_window_open') do |scenario|
  if scenario.respond_to?(:status) && scenario.status == :failed
    print "Step Failed. Press return to close browser"
    STDIN.getc
  ...

Sometimes you want to use a vanilla Ruby method like a block. You can use Object#method to obtain a method reference that responds to #call:

foo_plus = "foo".method(:+)
foo_plus.call("bar") # => "foobar"

The method reference also understands #to_proc so you can feed it to block-taking methods by prefixing it with &:

printer = method(:puts)
[1, 2, 3].each(&printer) # will print one line per number

I believe that when WEBrick has trouble bringing up your Rails application, the WEBrick component that is supposed to print you a pretty error message has a bug and sometimes fails with this message:

"undefined method `bytesize' for #<Array>"

Starting the application in Passenger gave me a stacktrace in log/development.log that pointed to the actual problem.

Possible causes discovered by looking at the logs
-----------------------------------------------------...

While it might seem trivial to implement an invoice that sums up items and shows net, gross and vat totals, it actually involves a lot of rules and caveats. It is very easy to create invoices where numbers don't add up and a few cents are missing. A missing cent is a big deal for an accountant, so it is important for your invoices to list correct numbers.

Note that this is not legal advice. Also note that while this note has a number of code examples in Ruby and MySQL, the concepts apply to all programming languages and data stores.

When ...

Note that converting from RGB to CMYK will usually degrade your colors because no exact mapping is possible. Anyway, this Stackoverflow post worked for me:

gs -dSAFER -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -dNOCACHE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
-sColorConversionStrategy=CMYK -dProcessColorModel=/DeviceCMYK \
-sOutputFile=output.pdf input.pdf

Use the PDF toolkit:

sudo apt-get install pdftk

To rotate page 1 by 90 degrees clockwise:

pdftk in.pdf cat 1E output out.pdf    # old pdftk
pdftk in.pdf cat 1east output out.pdf # new pdftk

To rotate all pages clockwise:

pdftk in.pdf cat 1-endE output out.pdf    # old pdftk
pdftk in.pdf cat 1-endeast output out.pdf # new pdftk

The E (old pdftk) or east (new pdftk) is meaningful if you want other rotations. From the man page:

The page rotation setting...

Pdfposter is a Python script that allows to convert large PDFs into a PDF with multiple pages that can be printed and turned into one big poster.

In Ubuntu, you can install it with
sudo apt-get install pdfposter

Scaling to the desired size is a bit cumbersome. If you want to split large.pdf, I suggest you run
pdfposter -vns 0.5 large.pdf larger.poster.pdf
which will tell you into how many pages the file would be split. Then simply tweak the -s value till you get the desired number of pages, and remove the -n to generate the r...

Grep prints one line per match. To return the number if matches, use the -c switch:

grep -c "something" filename

However, if a word appears more than once in a line, it is only counted once.

To count every match, you can use sed to force line breaks on multiple matches:

sed 's/something/something\n/g' filename | grep -c "something"

You can unpack a .tar.gz file into the current directory like this:

tar -xzvf archive.tar.gz

The options used are

-x

Extract

-z

Unzip

-f

Process a file input

-v

Be verbose, i.e. print each extracted file

Side notes:

• The dash is optional (tar xzvf ... works as well).
• For .tar.bz2 archives, use j instead of z (tar xjvf ...`)
• In order to create a *.tar.gz archive, use -c flag instead of -x flag.
• The order of parameters matters.

This will install a printer called "PDF":

sudo apt-get install cups-pdf

Files will be put into ~/PDF/ without any questions asked.

Sometimes PDF cucumber tests fail at the first test run and succeed at the second run. You can fix this with this step:

When PDF generation is ready
And I follow "Save as PDF"
# Checks for PDF contents go here

Here is the step definition:

When /^PDF generation is ready$/ do
  Then 'I should see ""'
end

Automatically convert bitmap images like JPEGs, GIFs and PNGs to the crisp, clean, scalable vector art of EPS, SVG, and PDF with the world's best auto-tracing software.

The trick is this: send a low-resolution version of your image to the screen, and a high-resolution version to the printer.

The Ubuntu Documentation on LaTeX says, that the packages tetex are no longer supported. You can install the alternative texlive (380 MB) via apt-get.

sudo apt-get install texlive

PhantomJS is a minimalistic headless WebKit.

It has fast and native support for various web standards:

DOM handling, CSS selector, JSON, Canvas, and SVG.

PhantomJS can be fully scripted using JavaScript. It is an optimal solution for headless testing of web-based applications, site scraping, pages capture, SVG renderer, PDF converter and many other usages.