Biodegradable Geek

Quake Live Tips

Quake Live is a free, manly game to play. QL is a version of Quake 3 that runs as a browser plugin for Firefox, Safari, and IE. It features a skill-matched game finder, a friend’s system, and other modern features. Think a Lite, browser-based version of Steam. Quake 3 came out in 1999, and people [...]

Learning to Program on Your Own

Learning how to code is like learning anything else – You have to do it. The hardest part is figuring out where to begin, and then you need some mechanism to show you that you’re making progress. The latter is important because it motivates you to keep going. First, have a goal. I initially wanted to [...]

Small Vim Shortcut for PHP Tags

The short tags in PHP have been deprecated as of 5.3.0. Short tags provided a shorter alternative to the annoying-to-type <?php and <?php echo. Instead, you could use <? and <?= respectively. This was great but it caused problems when working with XML files, and the short_tags option was disabled in the PHP config by [...]

The Gmail Captcha is Optional

When you try to login with bad credentials, Gmail gives you a captcha to fill in before your next login attempt. Not only does this captcha appear randomly (keep putting in the wrong username and it will sometimes appear, sometimes not) (update: now it appears to be more consistent), but it’s also optional*. Just put [...]

Bash Tips for Power Users

Every Geek site needs an obligatory Bash Tips post Copy Files Securely Between Two Machines I used to always forget the syntax for this, until I realized that the syntax is exactly like the standard cp command. In fact, you can copy files like you normally would using scp, on your local machine. The following are equivalent: $ [...]

How to POST Form Data Using Ruby

POSTing data on web forms is essential for writing tools and services that interact with resources already available on the web. You can grab information from your Gmail account, add a new thread to a forum from your own app, etc. The following is a brief example on how this can be done in Ruby [...]