love is all around

Just got back from SuperHappyGropOpDevHouse, the Vancouverized version of SuperHappyDevHouse, a 12-hour hack-a-thon event that began in San Francisco, birthplace of many things geeky and freaky.

SuperHappyDevHouse is a hackathon event that combines serious and not-so-serious productivity with a fun and exciting party atmosphere. Come to the DevHouse to have fun and get things done. Not a marketing event. It’s a non-exclusive event intended for passionate and creative technical people that want to have some fun, learn new things, and meet new people.

Yay! Met up with some new friends and some old-skool friends (hi Brendan!). Wasn’t very productive as I was too busy catching up with people and sharing ideas. The event was an overwhelming success, as far as I could tell. Vancouver needs more of this! Our little tech community needs to be nurtured, and regularly infused with beer and pizza and coffee and hallway conversations.

It was nice to see so many ‘Geeks for Good’ - people working on cool projects to help make the world better.

Notable conversations:

• Free Geek Vancouver - who are doing great work and are looking for a Ruby on Rails hacker
• Starting a “Work From Home” club
• Talking with DavidA about Gambier Island
• Drupal - my recent conversion, and how someone should write a Pingback module

DropUnrar is a handy tool I made for recursively extracting RAR archives.

I use it to extract movies that I’ve downloaded via Bittorrent, which are often RAR-compressed and sometimes split into multiple directories.

Just drag the top-level movie directory onto DropUnrar, and it will scan through it and all its subfolders looking for RAR archives and extracting all it finds.

Also included is a utility called “DropUnrar and delete RAR files”, which does just that. It is identical to DropUnrar except that it deletes the RAR files after it’s done expanding them.

DropUnrar is written in Perl, and wrapped using Platypus, an awesome script-wrapping tool for OS X.

Download DropUnrar v0.1

Click here to download unrar.pl, the Perl script that DropUnrar is based on. It can be used by itself as a CLI version of DropUnrar (requires you to have the unrar binary installed - I use the one from Fink).