Category: Programming

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Code School will be Having a Black Friday Special!

CodeSchool logo

I have found Code School to be a great resource both for those just learning to code as well as those who are experienced coders, but want to learn a new programming language. It has multiple paths: Ruby (including Ruby on Rails), JavaScript (includes jQuery and CoffeeScript), HTML/CSS, iOS, Git, and an Electives path for miscellaneous technologies such as R and Chrome DevTools.

The normal price for a subscription at Code School is $29 per month, or $290 per year. However, it appears that they intend to run a Black Friday special for yearly subscriptions. The price will be revealed this Friday. If you don’t already have a subscription, or your subscription is about to run out, this could be a good time to sign up!

Unfortunately, Code School is still lacking Python, though you can learn it at Codecademy (which is free).

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Creating Compressed Files for Each Folder

zip file logo

I had quite a few folders that I wished to compress into ZIP files, all of which happened to exist in a single folder. In Windows, you can certainly compress multiple folders by selecting them all and then right-clicking and selecting “Send To” –> “Compressed (zipped) Folder”. However, this will put all folders into a single zipped file. What if I wanted each folder to have its own zipped file?

Using 7-Zip, I was easily able to do this.

Once 7-Zip is installed, open a Command Prompt and change to the folder in which all your to-be-compressed subfolders reside. The command below will create ZIP files, also in the main folder, from all those subfolders. The assumption here is that 7-Zip is installed in “C:\Program Files\7-Zip”; if it is elsewhere, change this attribute accordingly.

FOR /F "usebackq delims=?" %i IN (`DIR /B /A:D`) DO "C:\Program Files\7-Zip\7z.exe" a "%i.zip" "%i"

For some other options you can use, this post was of great help.

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The New City of Houston City-Wide Fee Schedule has been Published!

Houston Hackathon logo

Back in 2013, I was on the winning team for the City of Houston’s Open Innovation Hackathon, and we produced a replacement for the previous fee schedule. The new fee schedule is now on the public City of Houston website!

Update: The new fee schedule, which was at http://www.houstontx.gov/finance/feeschedule/, is not available as of 2015-09-10.