Need to View Files from your Chrome Cache? Here's a Solution!

Here's a great solution to a problem that I was about to solve the hard way. I was trying to retrieve some images (just the images) from a web page I had visited in Chrome.

(They were wrapped in a design that wouldn't allow just right-click, then save as. And, yes, I had a good reason for needing them... it's a long story regarding my church's flaky web provider.)

In Chrome, if you type "about:cache", it brings up a list of the files the browser has recently loaded. When you click on them, though, you see a large HTML file with a hexadecimal code in the body. This is true even for binary files like .jpg or .png.

Senseful Solutions has posted a great little tool for translating the hex back into pages (or, in my case, images): Viewing Chrome cache (the easy way).

This is what programming is all about: making people's lives easier by creating elegant solutions to everyday problems.

XML Formatting in Edit Plus

I was thinking of writing a macro to help me format XML in Edit Plus. Fortunately, someone else already came up with a better solution 5 years ago.

In case this link ever dies, here's the code he used:

var stdin  = WScript.StdIn; var stdout = WScript.StdOut; var xml = WScript.createObject("MSXML2.DomDocument"); xml.loadXML(stdin.ReadAll().replace(/\t/g, '').replace(/\r|\n/g, '').replace(/\>\</g, '>\n<')); stdout.Write(xml.xml.substr(0, xml.xml.length-2));

This is why I love the internet.

Scheduling for Makers

Here's a great essay by Paul Graham: Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule.

One of my favorite parts:

When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That's no problem for someone on the manager's schedule. There's always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker's schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.

For someone on the maker's schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn't merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.

This shines a lot of light on some of the most frustrating parts of my previous job as a Business Systems Analyst. I was never happier than when I had a meeting-free day to work on my deliverables and help my developers with theirs. The problem was that I was also expected to attend a lot of planning, project management, and status meetings that shouldn't have been in my job description.

Meetings interrupt creative and analytical processes. They use time that would be more efficiently spent on solving problems. Sometimes they are a necessary evil, but often they are just plain evil.

I wish every manager and every scrum master would read Graham's essay, digest it, and internalize the lessons. It would make a world of difference to the people who work with and for them.