Vince Cima

TrophyScraper (or trophy-scraper) is a Ruby command line tool for downloading PSN trophy info for one or more users. It attempts to be a good neighbor by only downloading what it needs to. Use it for personal records or as the backend of a webapp. Go over to GitHub for more info. Enjoy!

Much like with Git, its easy to use TextMate as the editor that Mercurial will use for commit messages.

1. Open your ~/.hgrc file (create it if it doesn’t exist).
2. Add this entry to the [ui] section:

    [ui] editor = mate -w 

3. Save the ~/.hgrc file

Next time you do hg commit TextMate will open a temporary file you write your commit message into. Type your message, save the file and then close the window to finish the commit. The -w flag on the mate command tells TextMate not to return control to the command line until the editor window has been closed.

I finally finished the GiantBomb.com Wordpress widget I have been working on. You can install it from inside your Wordpress installation by searching for ‘GiantBomb’ or you can go the plugin page directly. If you find any problems or feel like contributing, head over to the GitHub page to get started.

Sun recently shipped their second revision of OpenSolaris. It defaults to installing to and booting from a ZFS zpool. Intrigued by ZFS’s effortless snapshotting I decided to install OpenSolaris in a VM and try out its abilities as a fileserver. As a part of my research I learned that Sun produces a GUI management tool for ZFS but that its not included. I set out to get it installed and this is how I was able to.

What You’ll Need

1. A working installation of OpenSolaris 2008.11.
2. A copy of the Solaris Community Edition.
3. My Perl installation script.

Instructions

Sun doesn’t distribute the ZFS GUI tool with OpenSolaris, but it does come with the binary only Community Edition, possibly for licensing reason. However, OpenSolaris includes the package management tools that ship with regular Solaris so its relatively easy to bring the packages over. This site has a list of the packages required for the Java Web Console, which the ZFS manager plugs in to. Finally, a kindred spirit provided the package names for the ZFS plugin. With the help of the Solaris Package Companion I was able to sort out the dependencies I needed to install and I wrote the script below to do it.

The Script

The script needs to be run as root or as a user with administrative privileges. Change the $pkg_srv variable to point to the source of the packages if necessary. The “smcwebserver enable” line will cause the Java Web Console to be started at boot up, remove it if you want to trigger its start manually.

$pkg_src = "/media/SOL_11_X86/Solaris_11/Product";
@packages = (SUNWjhrt, SUNWjhdev, SUNWj5dev, SUNWj5rt, SUNWj6rt, SUNWjato, SUNWmcon, SUNWmconr, SUNWmcos, SUNWmcosx, SUNWmctag, SUNWmfrun, SUNWzfsgr, SUNWzfsgu);
foreach $package (@packages) {
system("cp -R $pkg_src/$package /var/spool/pkg");
}
system("pkgadd");
system("smcwebserver enable");
system("smcwebserver start");
system("firefox https://localhost:6789");