Cool Code

If you want to plot something on the terminal in ASCII you can use “eplot”. eplot itself is a Ruby script that acts as a frontend for gnuplot. eplot can be downloaded from the project’s GitHub page. It makes it easier to pipe numbers into gnuplot, which can otherwise be a bit of a hassle. It also has a dumb terminal mode which allows us to plot using ASCII. Plotting like this provides a way to quickly check data files without requiring any x windowing system, which might not be available when logging in remotely over the terminal. ...

If you have ever been stuck as a user on an out-of-date cluster without root access it can be frustrating to ask the admin guy to install packages for you. Even if they respond, by the time they get round to it you might have moved onto something else. The moment could be gone. Luckily, as far as Python is concerned, the pyenv project allows users to install their own local Python version or even assign different versions to different directories/projects. ...

The problem If you are visiting/living abroad but still want the Firefox search bar to default to your home version of Google, it is possible to fix it! In the following solution I assume that you are from the UK and want to use the UK/GB version of Google Search: The solution Access the Firefox settings: type about:config in the address bar, then click I'll be careful, I promise. For each setting you want to modify, use the search bar to find it more quickly. Set both browser.search.countryCode and browser.search.region to “GB” by double-clicking it and typing the new value. Make sure browser.search.isUS is set to False. For both distribution.searchplugins.defaultLocale and general.useragent.locale use “en-GB”. Restart Firefox. Visit http://www.google.com/ncr, to activate a no country redirect cookie that stops the browser from looking for country-specific search results. Searching from the search bar should now give results at Google.com, but notice that at the very end of the search results URL there is a flag for UK regional content. ...

Grace a.k.a. xmgrace is a really useful tool for plotting histograms from tabular data files. Its power comes from the command line control and being scriptable. Yes, there are other options which are sometimes more suitable for specific situations (e.g. GNUplot, Matplotlib/PyLab), but for quick, basic plotting I usually find myself relying on xmgrace. Here is an example of a single line command to plot two columns from each of a large number of data files: ...