Do you not hate that moment when you think to yourself, “I should add an alias to my .bashrc file, so I will not have to cd to this long-ass path a few hundred more times over the next two weeks,” but then you just keep coding. However, that’s hardly the only issue with aliases. After a few years, you’ll start to accumulate 10′s and 20′s of aliases across multiple machines. Your only option is to peek into your dotfile to see what goodies you might have stashed away weeks, maybe months ago.

Metis – Goddess of Wisdom

I wrote Metis to solve this problem. Metis saves aliases that will cd to the current working directory. If you’ve forgotten your saved aliases, type ‘metis’ and press return. Aliases for everyone.

No more manually refreshing after switching back to your Hacker News tab. No more holding down Ctrl/Cmd while clicking an outgoing link to open an article in a new tab.

Download
Download from the Chrome Web Store.

Future
In the near future, we’ll be adding more tweaks and perhaps a settings component for toggling individual tweaks off and on.

Got an idea? Contribute! You can fork Coley’s Hacker News on GitHub.

So who wants to play some Uncharted 3 online? =]

UPDATED literally seconds after being published.

This article is directed towards Naughty Dog, the PlayStation game development studio.

When your new PS3 game, Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception, released I was one of the first at Gamestop that morning to pick it up. I handed the cashier nearly $65.00, including tax, in exchange for my copy of Drake’s Deception. I diligently spent the next few days playing the Uncharted 3 campaign. The first time I play a game, I like to play it all the way through, no frills. No co-op, no multiplayer, no nothing… until I beat the campaign. That’s just always how I’ve been.

Well I finished Uncharted 3 a few days ago, and it was pretty good. Too bad I’ll probably never put it in my PS3 again. I know that it seems odd that I would say that right after stating that is was a pretty good game. Normally I never would, but today changed things.

Today I was ready to play Uncharted 3′s multiplayer mode. Unfortunately for you and me both, Naughty Dog, you want me to pay $9.99 extra to play your game online. This is a mistake. Do you realize which industry you’re in, Naughty Dog? Do you realize that you released in parallel with Modern Warfare 3, a game that not only gives you hours of breathtaking campaign, but also gives you one of the best multiplayer experiences out there, all for $65 bucks? The thing is that I don’t even like the Modern Warfare games, but I can’t help thinking that all of my friends that bought MW3 instead of Uncharted 3 got a lot better deal.

I played Uncharted 2 online without having to pay extra, so why should I have to with this title? Is multiplayer any better in this one? It doesn’t matter. The sad fact is that my copy of Uncharted 3 has little to no replay value now. I could have read on the package that you have to activate multiplayer, or trolled forums to look up multiplayer information on the title, but I didn’t. You want to know why? Because I trusted Naughty Dog. It was a trust you could only find in a developer that nurtures your need for their quality games. A trust that I had only shared before with Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid and Silent Hill series, and Capcom’s Resident Evil series.

It wasn’t until after I was disappointed that I was aware that I had this trust for Uncharted. I trusted that you would deliver the absolute best you could for my $65. Why do you need an extra $9, when you’ve delivered great stuff before with just $65 of my money? I know that you’re a company that heavily relies on the revenue that these games generate and probably don’t care if I play your game anymore. You just care that I paid the initial $65 in the first place.

Being a developer myself, it is your developers that I feel the most sorry for. They actually care about people liking and playing their game, not just the money dished out to play it. Because of your greed, hundreds of people just like me will attempt to play your game online, but won’t be able to because they either refuse to pay extra, or don’t have the money to do so. So the game will get played once by those not willing to spend. That’s how we’ll remember Uncharted 3.

My deepest apologies go out to the creative and development staff at Naughty Dog.

View the demo.

I’ve been messing around with uploading videos to YouTube via their Data API(a really cool project I’ll be writing about later). I wanted to make a button that matched YouTube’s yellow-ish Upload button, but later added a some of my own bits to make the button a bit more unique. It is made using nothing but CSS3:

.btn {
     background: #fffbc6; /* Old browsers */
     background: -moz-linear-gradient(top, #fffbc6 0%, #ffdb18 100%); /* FF3.6+ */
     background: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, color-stop(0%,#fffbc6), color-stop(100%,#ffdb18)); /* Chrome,Safari4+ */
     background: -webkit-linear-gradient(top, #fffbc6 0%,#ffdb18 100%); /* Chrome10+,Safari5.1+ */
     background: -o-linear-gradient(top, #fffbc6 0%,#ffdb18 100%); /* Opera11.10+ */
     background: -ms-linear-gradient(top, #fffbc6 0%,#ffdb18 100%); /* IE10+ */
     filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient( startColorstr='#fffbc6', endColorstr='#ffdb18',GradientType=0 ); /* IE6-9 */
     background: linear-gradient(top, #fffbc6 0%,#ffdb18 100%); /* W3C */
     -webkit-border-radius: 3px;
     -moz-border-radius: 3px;
     border-radius: 3px;
     border: 1px solid #efc300;
     color: #9c4900;
     font-family: Arial;
     font-size: 14px;
     text-shadow: 1px 1px 0px #d3cdb3;
     filter: dropshadow(color=#d3cdb3, offx=1, offy=1);
     padding: 4px 10px;
     -webkit-box-shadow: 0px 1px 3px 0px #000;
     -moz-box-shadow: 0px 1px 3px 0px #000;
     box-shadow: 0px 1px 3px 0px #000;
     cursor: pointer;
     text-decoration: none;
     position: relative;
}

.btn:hover {
     background: #fffbc6; /* Old browsers */
     background: -moz-linear-gradient(top, #fffbc6 0%, #fffbc6 50%, #ffdb18 100%); /* FF3.6+ */
     background: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, color-stop(0%,#fffbc6), color-stop(50%,#fffbc6), color-stop(100%,#ffdb18)); /* Chrome,Safari4+ */
     background: -webkit-linear-gradient(top, #fffbc6 0%,#fffbc6 50%,#ffdb18 100%); /* Chrome10+,Safari5.1+ */
     background: -o-linear-gradient(top, #fffbc6 0%,#fffbc6 50%,#ffdb18 100%); /* Opera11.10+ */
     background: -ms-linear-gradient(top, #fffbc6 0%,#fffbc6 50%,#ffdb18 100%); /* IE10+ */
     filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient( startColorstr='#fffbc6', endColorstr='#ffdb18',GradientType=0 ); /* IE6-9 */
     background: linear-gradient(top, #fffbc6 0%,#fffbc6 50%,#ffdb18 100%); /* W3C */
     -webkit-box-shadow: 0px 0px 3px 0px #000;
     -moz-box-shadow: 0px 0px 3px 0px #000;
     box-shadow: 0px 0px 3px 0px #000;
     top: 2px;
}

I’ve recently worked on another button that scales, and uses an image sprite for its rollover state. All this with just one element and some css. I’ll be publishing a write-up of that on here as well, so keep a lookout.

If you use WordPress as much as I do, you’ll notice that you can’t use this method with WordPress’ body_class function. Even though body_class accepts a string parameter that it will embed into the class attribute, we cannot pass any data detailing the browser version to this parameter. The PHP runs on the server before the conditional comments run in the browser, making it impossible to add the respective classes dynamically.

Fortunately there is an easy way to do this with jQuery:

var b = $.browser;
if(b.msie) {
     var v = b.version.split('.')[0];
     $('body').addClass("ie ie" + v);
}

This snippet must be placed within jQuery’s document ready callback to work properly. Keep in mind that this snippet does not require WordPress to work, but it was written with WordPress in mind.

A couple of days ago, I launched Vale Report with some help from a few friends. Vale Report is a media outlet that gathers the latest news from all the leading entertainment industries: anime, comics, movies, music, and video games.

This is a collaborative project that a friend and I came up with. We found that not only do we enjoy writing about these industries, but so do a lot of our friends! So far, we’ve gathered nine writers, including myself. Out of those nine, only a handful have fully jumped on board and become dedicated writers for the blog. My hopes are that lenient writing roles and lenient writing quota combined with the fresh launch will motivate more of our nine to contribute.

If you are at all interested in writing for Vale Report, shoot me your info via my contact form, and we’ll get you all set up.

I’ve recently started using the inspiration sharing service, Forrst. I’m not a very active member, yet I seemed to have accumulated a lot of traffic from them. If you were to check out my Forrst profile, you’d notice that I’ve only made a total of 4 posts and have only amassed 10 followers. Those are strikingly low numbers for having 71 clicks on a demo page in 4 days.

I posted a small snippet about proportionately scaling images dynamically with jQuery. While on Forrst, the post didn’t get too much activity(12 likes and 7 comments), but from utilizing goo.gl url shortener, I was able to determine that many more users clicked through to the content I posted on Forrst than commented or liked the post combined.

If Forrst can drive this sort of traffic, I would recommend harnessing it as much as possible. Every time you publish a post on your blog, shorten the link with goo.gl and post it to Forrst. Watch your goo.gl dashboard over the next couple of day to see if the ‘number of clicks’ figure doesn’t soar.

I’m trying to fancy the place up a bit. I like the color scheme a lot. I’m going to try my hardest to make this next theme as functional and elegant as possible. I might even add some custom post types such as “Projects.”

Suggestions, feedback? Leave a comment to tell me what you think.

I’ve been developing a WordPress plugin for the Marketing Technology Blog called Awesome Authors. Doug wanted to give his blog’s authors more incentive to publish posts. Enter Awesome Authors WordPress plugin. This wigetized plugin shows the gravatar and info of the most recently active authors of your blog. The author with the most recent post will be displayed first, the author with the second latest will be displayed second, and so on.

Awesome Authors allows you to select “Sticky Authors.” These authors will be displayed at the front of the list no matter how long ago their latest post was published. Conversely, you can select authors to be “Excluded Authors.” These authors will never be displayed in the list no matter how many posts they have or how recently their last post was published. You can also set a minimum post requirement. If you set this to, let’s say 10, then only authors with 10 or more published posts will be displayed on the Author Bar. Some of the other options include gravatar display size, and how many authors overall to display.

Awesome Authors hasn’t been released yet, but it will be soon!

Here are some screenshots to demonstrate how Awesome Authors works. You can also view it running live at the bottom of the Marketing Technology Blog.

I’ve been spending most of my free time running through the grungy industrial halls of The Sprawl. A space station built directly into Titan, one of Saturn’s moons. This is where the story of Dead Space 2 takes place. You start off as Issac Clarke, in a straight-jacket. Eventually you get free, arm yourself, and start dismembering every Necromorph that comes into sight. The gameplay is phenomenal. The enemies are horrifying. The score is spine-tingling. Dead Space 2 is mostly a very great experience, but…

As most modern video games do, Dead Space 2 lacks something vital: the snatch. You know exactly what I’m talking about. That moment at the end of a movie, tv series episode, or video game where, right at your greatest moment of excitement, they take it all away and roll the credits. Leaving you confused, worked-up, and wanting much much more. The ending was very uneventful, and left me thinking: “If this series goes on, will anything that occurred in Dead Space 2 have really mattered? If it were taken out of the series, would something be missing? Doubtful.”

Gameplay: awesome; Storyline: terrible.