dword.dk

About a week ago I announced the initial release of my new small utility “dutree”. For an explanation of the purpose of the program, see the previous post. It was still missing an important feature that I wanted, namely gauges displaying the relative disk usage for the listed entries. This feature has now been implemented, and it is available in the new version 0.1.1. I also added an option for specifying a maximum depth for the listed entries. This makes it a lot easier to get an overview if there are many subdirectories and files. Click here to download the dutree source code.

At least it is the favourite greens of my bearded dragon (pogona vitticeps). She is called Gunnar, although that is a boys name — you can’t determine the sex before half a year or so after hatching, and even then it’s not obvious. Gunnar is around 4½ years of age now, and I’m not entirely sure whether that is young or old for a bearded dragon. I’ve heard anything between 5 and 10 years is normal, depending on their conditions and if bred or not. She doesn’t look and act old yet, though.

I just thought this was a funny little photo series, so I wanted to share it. Of course bearded dragons are not herbivores, and indeed the primary feed is crickets, grasshoppers, and a couple of mealworms once in a while. Click on the pictures below for larger versions.

I would like to announce that I have released a new simple command line utility that I call “dutree”. As the name suggests, it’s an alternative to du (a tool for summarizing disk usage), but it displays the results in a tree. This is not a big step up, I know, but I plan to add a column with gauges visually indicating the size of the entries compared to the total. I personally find that a much better presentation for getting a fast impression of the disk space used.

It’s a piece of software I have been missing many times in the past, but I never got around to implementing it. Now I used it as an opportunity for getting acquainted with some of the Boost libraries that I haven’t used a lot before. In particular dutree uses the following Boost libraries: Filesystem, Bind, Function, Lambda, and Iterator. I agree this might be a little overkill for such a small program (dependency wise, not performance), but knowing these very useful libraries makes for more effective development in other projects, so I think it pays off in the end.

This initial release is mainly for people who know how to build stuff themselves. A better build environment is planned for a future release. Click here to download the dutree source code.

This has been scheduled for quite some time, but today I finally got around to updating the software on this blog, including removing spam from the database (12,000+ comments). Now I have effectively blocked new spam attacks. Seems it was also actively being exploited to put hidden links to various sites in the posts — what a complete waste of time. I hopefully put an end to that now, at least for a while.

Yes, I know I should do this more regularly to avoid such problems, but I’m lazy when it comes to this. Not least because the process for updating the blog software is rather involved. It means I have to make a complete backup of the files and database, and create a patch with the customizations I’ve made against the old version. Then installing the new version, upgrading the database, fixing any problems caused by the upgrade, and then re-implementing the old customizations in the new version by inspecting the patch created earlier. Of course this task gets easier the more often it is done, so I should probably be doing it more often in the future.