Someone sent you an invitation to an event as an .ics file, and you wish to add it to your Google calendar

The first part is to import the file. To do this, click the + icon to the right of the “Add a friends calendar” located on the left side of the page. After clicking the icon, from the available options select ‘Import’

Now, the obvious thing to do would be to just to click the button that says “Select file from your computer”, select the .ics file and click import, but if you would do that, chances are that you’ll see the dreaded:

‘Failed to import events: Could not upload your events because you do not have sufficient access on the target calendar..’

The solution for this is to manually edit the .ics file prior to importing it and replace all occurrences of “UID:” with “UID:X” (without the quotes). After doing this and saving the file, proceed with the import and all should be fine.

Learned this from here

Many people are not aware that since the early days of the simple notepad app that comes bundled with Windows, it had the following undocumented feature: If you enter the text .LOG as the first line of the file, then every time you open the file with notepad, it will append the current date and time to the end of the document and scroll there. This is quite handy when you want a file that keeps track of the time when you added new entries.

I wanted to have the same functionality with Google Docs (with the added benefit of not needing to write .LOG at the beginning of the file). The following script (built via multiple shameless plagiarism from various sources) enables that functionality:

function onOpen() {
  var ui = DocumentApp.getUi();
  // Or FormApp or SpreadsheetApp.
  ui.createMenu('Custom Menu')
      .addItem('Insert Date', 'insertDate')
      .addToUi();

  setCursorToEnd()
  insertDate();
  setCursorToEnd()
}

function setCursorToEnd()
{
  var doc = DocumentApp.getActiveDocument();
  var paragraph = doc.getBody().appendParagraph('');
  var position = doc.newPosition(paragraph, 0);
  doc.setCursor(position);
}

function formatDate()
{
  var date = new Date();
  var datestr = date.getFullYear() + '-'+  
    ('0' + (date.getMonth()+1)).slice(-2) + '-' + 
    ('0' + date.getDate()).slice(-2);  
  var hours = date.getHours();
  var minutes = date.getMinutes();
  var ampm = hours >= 12 ? 'pm' : 'am';
  hours = hours % 12;
  hours = hours ? hours : 12; // the hour '0' should be '12'
  minutes = minutes < 10 ? '0'+minutes : minutes;
  var strTime = hours + ':' + minutes + ' ' + ampm;
  return datestr + "  " + strTime;
}

function insertDate()
{
  var activeDoc = DocumentApp.getActiveDocument();
  var cursor = activeDoc.getCursor();
  if (cursor) {
      var date = formatDate();    
      var element = cursor.insertText(date);
  } else {
      DocumentApp.getUi().alert('Cannot find a cursor in the document.');
  }
}

To enable this for a document, In Google Docs : Tools -> Script Editor, enter and save the above script and then accept the permissions.

Switching between various development environments, to save restart time, I wanted to start various services from OS/X only if they were not already running. Brew does not have a method to know whether a particular service is running (AFAIK), so the following example code parses the list of services returned by brew services list and then enables quickly checking the status of a given service and acting accordingly:

#!/bin/bash
brew services list | awk -F " " '{print $1 "=\"" $2 "\""}' > __tmp__.sh
chmod u+x __tmp__.sh
source ./__tmp__.sh # so that variables are maintained in this shell
rm ./__tmp__.sh

if [ "$php72" == "started" ]; then
        echo "PHP service is up"
fi

if [ "$openresty" == "started" ]; then
        echo "Openresty service is up"
fi

https://github.com/wilfredwee/photon-australis

Wanted a quick way to find free high quality Android apps. Google’s Play Store isn’t exactly helpful for this kind of search so I created my own service. Check it out under the fun projects menu…

When you start having too many cases in your switch statement, it might be worth looking into using a function lookup. This is possible in all languages where functions are first class citizens…

<?php
$post = "hello";
$info = "3.1415";
//-----------------------------------------------------------
// Version 1 - using a switch statement
//-----------------------------------------------------------

switch ($post) {
    case "hey": {
        print("I've been called with $info\n");
        break;
    }

    case "there": {
        print("I've been called with $info\n");
        break;
    }

    case "hello": {
        print("I've been called with $info\n");
        break;
    }

    default: {
        print("shouldn't have gotten here\n");
    }
}

//-----------------------------------------------------------
// version 2 - same thing using a dictionary of functions
//-----------------------------------------------------------

$funcArray = Array(
    "hey" => function ($param) {
        print("I've been called with $param\n");
    },
    "there" => function ($param) {
        print("I've been called with $param\n");
    },
    "hello" => function ($param) {
        print("I've been called with $param\n");
    }
);

// The data driven invocation of the correct function:

if (isset($funcArray[$post])) {
    // Invoke the relevant function if the string is found
    $funcArray[$post]($info);
}
else {
    print("shouldn't have gotten here\n");
}
?>

from here:

SQLite
SELECT datetime(MyColumn, “unixepoch”, “localtime”) FROM MyTable

MySQL
SELECT from_unixtime(MyColumn) FROM MyTable

Well, the first thing to make sure is that Guest Additions are correctly installed. For example, on Ubuntu 16.04 guest on VirtualBox 5.0.32 r112930 I received a message that the kernel headers were not found (even though they did exist). This was fixed with:
sudo apt-get install dkms

Next problem was constantly receiving a protocol error when trying to mount the host’s directory that I named hostfs in the VirtualBox shared folders dialog. This however, was my fault – the correct syntax to do this is:

sudo mount -t vboxsf -o uid=1000,gid=1000 <name-given-in-virtualbox-dialog> <empty-directory-path-in-guest>