isambard

Quote of the week (4 Jan)

steven — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 06:12:35 +0000

May all your troubles last as long as your New Year’s resolutions.

Recursive folder content lists in OSX

steven — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 09:09:32 +0000

Every now and then you’re really grateful OSX is essentially Unix with a smiley face. Since that allows you to easily get under the hood for those “should be simple” tasks.
For this one, I needed to produce a list of files within a collection of folders which, for demonstration purposes, we’ll call media files.

Recursive file list

This is easy:

Open a terminal window
Type cd (there’s a space after ‘cd’)
Drag the folder you want to start from into the terminal window. It should then complete the path automagically.
Press Enter to navigate to the selected folder.
Enter the command ls -RF > list.txt

This will produce a list of all files in the directory, and subdirectories, as list.txt in the starting directory. Feel free to give it a more useful name.

Once more, with filters

So now you’ve got a list of all the files in the folders. But if you want to find a subset based on filename (say, for example, the list of media files identified in the title as being 2009 releases) then use the wonders of unix to ‘pipe’ the file list to GREP to filter it before writing the file:

ls -RF | grep '2009' > 2009.txt

This will produce a list of only those files with ‘2009′ somewhere in the title.

Advanced options

Armed with LS and GREP you can pretty much produce any subset of any folder set you require. Enjoy!

Quote of the week (28 December)

steven — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 03:47:36 +0000

From Arthur Bloch:

If your project doesn’t work, look for the part that you didn’t think was important.

Quote of the week (21 December)

steven — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 04:50:44 +0000

From Robert Brault:

A blogger is an average person who happens to have a need to count his friends every half hour.

Quote of the week (14 December)

steven — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 11:20:36 +0000

From unknown:

QA didn’t break anything, it was broken when we got it.

Love the way this simply quote re-directs criticism of QA when bugs are uncovered.

Quote of the week (7 December)

steven — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 11:11:30 +0000

From Kent Beck, quoted at 37 Signals:

By far the dominant reason for not releasing sooner was a reluctance to trade the dream of success for the reality of feedback.

Quote of the week (30 November)

steven — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 11:08:12 +0000

From Seth Godwin:

If you’re getting feedback, realize that the person must care a lot to have sent it.

Bad usability calendar

steven — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 19:40:25 +0000

I’m a firm believer that one of the most effective ways to learn is to study mistakes, yours or other peoples. Which is why I used to live at Web pages that suck when first starting out in developing web content.

Just come across a similar, humoured, approach to usability in the Bad Usability Calendar. Highlights a different usability issue for each month. Which means it’s not much use as an actual calendar but very useful as a quick usability prompt.

Granted a bit late now to pick up the 2009 edition. But watch the space for the 2010 copy.

Quote of the week (23 November)

steven — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 19:36:12 +0000

From an unknown source, but referenced in university notes for an agile course:

Ready, fire, aim (the fast approach to software development).
Ready, aim, aim, aim, aim … (the slow approach to software development).

Quote of the week (16 November)

steven — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 19:20:20 +0000

From The Rapture of the Deep, by Michael Zinsley:

An adventure is never fun while it’s happening.