Bless: Hex editor

It’s not every day I need to use an hex editor. In fact, when I had to edit a file for some strange character, I didn’t have any hex editor installed. After a few searching I decided to install and use Bless. There’s not much we can ask from an hex editor. Just that it does its job well 🙂 And Bless does its job well. The user interface is clean and with a traditional three-column layout (file position, hex data and ascii data). At the bottom you get a conversion table, which is handy if you need some of the bytes in other format (like binary string). One of the cool things that I liked is the way data gets underlined in both the hex and ascii columns in a synchronized way. This eases the browsing experience a lot. On the downside I had a minor problem getting it to work. Bless needs to have configured a directory to which it writes temporary files. When I installed it, this wasn’t configured bey default. However, it’s a problem very easy to solve: just go to Edit -> Preferences and type /tmp (or other) at the Temporary Directory field. Happy hex-editing

Tags: bless, hex editor

Sudo !!

How many times did you type a command and forgot to type sudo first ? What do you want to say when that happens ? No, not that…you might want to say : sudo !!

Sudo will understand you desperation and guess that you forgot him when you typed the last command. No, I’m not kidding. If you type "sudo !!", sudo will be invoked with the last executed command. This is exactly for those situations and it’s brilliant. I couldn’t find a better way to represent the feeling and at the same time solve the problem. It’s easy to forget sudo, but it’s hard to forget "sudo !!", when you forget the first one 🙂

Just a small tip for today, have sudo fun (that’s when you’re allowed to do what you always wanted) 🙂