logit - selective logging of commands from a Bash shell

I spend a lot of time running custom scripts on datasets in a unix bash shell - typically I'm running various tools on DNA and protein sequence datasets. I need to try different tools, edit files and change parameters.

I wanted a way to capture those commands that worked and ignore all the others that simply listed directories, ran the editor, etc. Cutting and pasting from the shell history was really inefficient and the output of script was too voluminous.

To solve this I have written logit - a tool that lets you selective log commands and comments to a file while you work in a shell.

logit consists of a Ruby script and an associated bash shell script. When you run 'logit start' it creates a custom bash sub shell that you do your work in.

You can log comments to the log file with:
$ logit 'here is a comment'
And you log the last command you ran with just:
$ logit
There are other options to help you log commands further back in your history.

The resulting log file contains only those commands and comments that you chose to log. As such it serves as a concise record of a work session and may form the basis for an executable script in itself.

The regular Bash history mechanism is does not allow you to record lines from your history in a files. I'm not clear why but the cleanest solution I could come up with was the pairing of a Ruby and a Bash script. In practice you only ever deal with the Ruby script.

The code is distributed freely under the MIT license and can be found on Github at https://github.com/craic/logit

CSS and Rails - Migrating from Less to Sass

In my Rails projects over the past couple of years I have been using Less to make my CSS files easier to work with. Less is a CSS pre-processor that lets you use variables for color, etc.

Less is pretty similar to Sass and I didn't see any real reason to move away from it. But then Rails 3.1 made the decision to uses Sass and CoffeeScript as CSS and JavaScript preprocessors. So now I want to migrate my Less files over to Scss (the v2 format of Sass) so I can go with the flow in current Rails versions.

Sass comes with a conversion tool called sass-convert that you can find in the bin directory of the gem.
You can find where that is located with 'gem which sass'. But this gave me this error:
NameError: undefined method `build' for module `Less::StyleSheet::Mixin4'
From the sass github site it seems like sass -convert has not kept up with changes in Less and there seems little motivation to fix the problem.

Never mind - the Less and Scss syntaxes are pretty similar and my files do not include anything too complex, so manually converting them in an editor is quite feasible. In fact the main difference is that Less prefixes variables with @ and Sass uses $. The important exception here is that @import should not be changed as it is exactly the same in Sass.

Less has an equivalent to Sass Mixins. You create a custom class and then insert that into other CSS blocks. Here is an example followed by the Sass equivalent.
.my-mixin {
  color: red;
}
.my-class {
  width: 200px;
  .my-mixin;
}

In Sass you would write:
@mixin my-mixin {
  color: red;
}
.my-class {
  width: 200px;
  @include my-mixin;
}
Making this conversion is easy enough to do with find and replace in your editor.

The easiest way to validate the modified files is to run sass on them and check the css.
$ sass my.scss my.css

You can try validating the CSS using a service like http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator

Setting a Title for a Tab in iTerm2 on Mac OS X

 iTerm2 (http://www.iterm2.com) by George Nachman is an excellent terminal emulator for Mac OS X that is highly configurable. I it prefer over the system Terminal application.

I tend to have a number of terminal sessions open at the same time and for a while I have wanted a way to give each Tab in the window an informative name. You can do that through the iTerm2 preferences but I wanted a way to set it directly from the shell command line.

iTerm2 can be scripted via AppleScript and so I wrote a simple script to do the job. It uses a system application called osascript which will execute a AppleScript script from the Unix command line.

The code is freely available at https://github.com/craic/iterm_title - see the README for more details.

The code should be a useful starting point if you want to write something in AppleScript that you can call from UNIX.