Jamie Flournoy's Software Development Blog
I’m not using Windows currently, but when I do use it and I need a command prompt, I’m suddenly reminded of the weakest link in the whole Windows user experience: the atrocious console window thing.
Many times I have searched for a replacement. It looks like there finally is such a thing, and its ultra creative name is Console. I haven’t tried it out, but if you need it, there it is.
(via Ben Kittrell)
I’ve been playing around with Graphviz this weekend. I first used it a few years ago with a Perl script that sorta kinda knew Cold Fusion and JavaScript syntax and could output the Graphviz .dot file format, as a means of visualizing all the dependencies between source code files in a project with no compilation phase and no automated tests. It helped me answer a few questions that I had about the code: What should I write tests for first? What should I leave alone, because breaking it breaks a bunch of pages? What pages do I need to test in order to make sure that changes to a deeply-buried chunk of included code didn’t break anything? Having a simple tool that draws graphs of nodes in a fairly clean form can be really useful.
Continue reading “Ad Hoc Software Planning with Graphviz”
For two weeks (ending on this past Wednesday afternoon), most of my days and nights were occupied with a self-administered crash course in the Ruby programming language, outside of the Rails framework. I had struggled somewhat with Objective-C in January, partly because of the massive combined burden of learning the language, the Cocoa framework, the Xcode IDE, and the odd but brilliant Interface Builder. So, I wanted to try and attack Ruby in isolation.
Continue reading “Ruby Deeper Impressions”
I started programming in Ruby this week, and so far I like it a lot. From my initial use of Ruby as a backup automation scripting language, here are my thoughts.
You might be wondering, why am I working on backup scripting now? Don’t I have some big project I’m supposed to be working on 24/7? Yes, and actually this work is in the critical path of that project.
My super fast laptop is still away being repaired for a video problem, so I’ve taken a major hit in terms of the resources of my main computer: 90% less MHz, 36% less display area, 50% less memory. In the meantime, I’ve been avoiding tasks that need a lot of CPU or graphics performance and instead working on things that are easier on my old desktop computer.
This week, I decided that I would pause working on the design and implementation of my startup project, until I had really sorted out my server backup and monitoring situation.
Continue reading “Ruby First Impressions: Backup Scripting”