Month: February 2007

Wgett: Download Manager

I’ve mentioned before that I use wget as my download manager. By default, it’s a simple command-line downloader, but if you dig deep into man wget, you’ll find a wealth of options.

Here’s what I have in my .profile (for bash):

#wget and resume any file
wgett()
{
wget --timeout=40 -t inf -c "${1}"
}

Yup, and so that’s why the title is not a typo. I’ve aliased wgett to this cute little function that waits for a timeout of 40s before retrying (but does it indefinitely) and then picks up where it left off. It’s invaluable, and it’s how I survive the Indian Internet.

Safari Web Inspector

Safari Web Inspector
I make my living as a web developer these days and a good “page inspector” tool is an absolute essential. For that reason, I switch to Firefox and the amazing Firebug tool when I write webdev code. I used a recent nightly of Webkit and was pleasantly surprised by its inbuilt Web Inspector. It lists the DOM, the CSS style computation, the box model and some bit of element properties. The interface is amazing, I love the HUD style effect, and it’s much less distracting when the element is shown as the parent in the hierarchy (see the top div in the image above) instead of it being placed in a pageful of tags.

What it still doesn’t do is display any kind of javascript information. The Webkit guys seem to have gone with a separate application called Drosera (which allows people to debug javascript, attach to any Webkit-ish app etc.) and it makes my browser hang badly when attached to it (and hence I couldn’t test and name a verdict).

So my personal feature request list for the Web Inspector would be:

  1. A Javascript console, watch/breakpoint functionality is not a must, but definitely must have a console.
  2. A Request/Response Inspector, especially those of XHR Requests.

If I get these two things I’ll switch to Webkit entirely. As it is, I love it’s Mac-iness, but like Firebug too much to let FF go.

(and yeah, what you see in the pic is the Web Inspector inspecting itself. Apparently, it’s written mostly in HTML and JS. Cool!)