Using locate to quickly change directories

You’ve probably got a bunch of directories and subdirectories in your home folder that are organized logically, rather than a mess of top-level directories scattered all over the place. Although the former is cleaner and better organized, it also takes more time to get to where you’d like to be. Luckily, linux comes with /usr/bin/locate […]

Grabbing an apache-generated directory listing

So it turns out that one of my professors, whose lectures I attend less frequently than I should, chooses to play classical music at the beginning of lecture when students are walking in. A couple of people started a thread on Piazza back when the course began to identify as many of these tracks as […]

How to tell if your system is big endian or little endian

I was on MDN when I noticed that Chrome’s V8 (at least) was little-endian, meaning that a hexadecimal number you’d write as 0xCAFEBABE is actually stored as BE BA FE CA if you read the bytes off memory. It made me wonder how you could most easily determine if your system is little or big […]

Backing up dropbox with rsync

Update I don’t use this system anymore. Learn about my new backup system instead. At UC Berkeley, Dropbox has become the de-facto standard for cloud sync and live backups, especially for team projects that don’t particularly fit the game of traditional version control. (It is nice to keep local copies of git repositories on Dropbox […]

Tidying up SASS with a one-liner

At the Daily Cal, we maintain a ton of CSS code for our website’s WordPress theme. But instead of using a single enormous stylesheet, we check in SASS files to version control which are recompiled on deployment (or for development testing). In one directory, we have a bunch of scss-type files like so: ./ ../ […]