Category: CoolTools

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Adding custom slash commands to Slack

Slack’s custom slash commands perform a very simple task: they take whatever text you enter after the command itself (along with some other predefined values), send it to a URL, then accept whatever the script returns and posts it as a Slackbot message to the person who issued the command. What you do with that text at the URL is what makes slash commands so useful.

For example, you have a script that translates English to French, so you create a slash command called /translate, and expect that the user will enter an English word that they’d like translated into French. When the user types /translate dog into the Slack message field, Slack bundles up the text string dog with those other server variables and sends the whole thing to your script, which performs its task of finding the correct French word, chien, and sends it back to Slack along with whatever message you added with your script has, and Slack posts it back to the user as The French word for "dog" is "chien". No one else on the team will see message, since it’s from Slackbot to the user.

— via Creating Custom Slash Commands for Slack

Great tutorial walking you through one of the many useful features of Slack. This will get included in the CALIcon15 session.

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Apache Allura is an open source repo/project management system

Apache Allura is an open source implementation of a software “forge”, a web site that manages source code repositories, bug reports, discussions, wiki pages, blogs and more for any number of individual projects.

Source: Apache Allura™ / Wiki / Home

Looks like it could be a good alternative for folks looking for something that is not Github to help manage code and projects. Written Python, uses MongoDB as its dbm, search is SOLR powered.

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Build nginx with Google PageSpeed module for better performance

This tutorials explains how to build nginx with the latest version of the nginx_pagespeed module on Debian Jessie. The PageSpeed module applies web performance best practices to pages, and associated assets (CSS, JavaScript, images) and therefore speeds up your web site and reduces load times.

How to build nginx with Google PageSpeed module on Debian 8 (Jessie) https://www.howtoforge.com/tutorial/nginx-with-ngx_pagespeed-on-debian-8-jessie/

Seems like an interesting weekend project.

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Syncthing for syncing data between devices

Syncthing replaces proprietary sync and cloud services with something open, trustworthy and decentralized. Your data is your data alone and you deserve to choose where it is stored, if it is shared with some third party and how it’s transmitted over the Internet.

Source: Syncthing

Interesting. Unlike the open source ownCloud that does rely on a central server this appears to use a peer to peer strategy to sync data between devices you select with no hub server. See Syncthing’s Getting Started page for more details. The whole thing is open source and available on Github.

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Want to disrupt the legal industry? How about some block chain tech?

Millions of developers use Git on a daily basis and rely on commit hashes to create an ordered guarantee of history. However, Git users must manually choose who they trust to update commit changes.

However, imagine the following scenario:

  1. Thousands of transactions, or pieces of data are being recorded each second.
  2. All of that data can be committed to a Git repository. Perhaps data can be batched together into a single commit.
  3. After recording thousands of commits, each containing thousands of transactions, a single hash, such as “f883f426c6da861bb31c5b5d645e638d44cb2c1f” is published each day.

This hash guarantees the integrity of all of the commits in the Git repository. The hash could be tweeted, or even published in a newspaper, guaranteeing an ordered history of events.

via Is Git A Block Chain? · Domus Tower.

I think block chain technology is one of the few truly innovative and disruptive technologies in the legal space. I mean let’s face it does law practice need another expert system, search engine, or  document assembler? All of that tech is decades old at this point and improvements are nice and useful but hardly disruptive. Block chain on the other is actually something pretty new that provides lots of interesting potential in the legal space.

Imagine following the scenario outlined above but instead of just uniquely identifying bits of code, you’re talking about legal documents. Contracts, leases, bills of sale, judicial opinions, briefs, opinion letters, statutes, regulations, complaints, answers, depositions all uniquely identified and identifiable in a block chain. That would be an actual innovation and would disrupt the entire legal system.

Work is starting in this area with some interesting papers already beginning to turn up on SSRN. If you’re truly interested in disrupting the legal industry quit looking at warmed over 20th century tech and focus on something truly new.