Wednesday, May 5, 2010

7plus is da bomb

I began using 7plus to take advantage of a bunch of nice keyboard shortcuts it provides via autohotkey. I particularly like the Explorer Hotkeys

- F3: Open selected files in text or image editor of your choice.
- F7: Create new file
- F8: Create new folder
- Ctrl+Alt+C: Copy paths + filenames

My main problem now is learning the keys. I'll be posting an HTML cheat sheet here soon.

Thursday, July 23, 2009

Makers vs Managers - Paul Graham nails it

Paul Graham's latest post about the differences in schedules for makers and managers is a must read for anyone managing software developers, and possibly more important if you're married to one. It struck a chord with me since I was having a highly productive week at work with no scheduled meetings until yesterday afternoon.


As a developer that worked in management for a few years, its difficult to remember the importance of this concept once you've made the transition. It begins to seem like anyone can afford an hour here or there for a meeting.

Thursday, July 16, 2009

Turbogears and mod_wsgi setup

This doesn't make for the most entertaining reading, but I've decided to use this blog as my long-term memory for reference material. Currently, I'm getting started on my first python Turbogears 2.0 application, and I need to setup apache with mod_wsgi. These are the references I've accumulated. A good follow-up article would discuss issues I ran into. We'll see how motivated I am.

(Wow, this step was much harder than it should have been. I have a better understanding of our apache infrastructure now though.)



mod_wsgi integration with pylons (Turbogears controller framework)



Monday, July 13, 2009

Web advertising on coding horror

This post from Jeff Atwood last week is a humorous example of how quickly web advertising can deteriorate to appeal to the lowest-common denominator.


It would be great if services like Yahoo! Mail would allow me to select the advertisers I'll allow, or specifically block some. Of course, I don't want to pay for this feature.

Monday, July 6, 2009

Domain-Specific Language References

I've been meaning to read up on DSL implementation approaches, possibly for use in a thesis project. This is my initial list of references to review.

Martin Fowler's online book (work-in-progress)

Software Language Engineering: Creating Domain-Specific Languages Using Metamodels
by Anneke Kleppe, pub 12/8/09 (available in Safari Books Online)


Eclipse Modeling Project: A Domain-Specific Language (DSL) Toolkit
by Richard C. Gronback, pub 3/6/09 (available in Safari Books Online, looks Java heavy)

Domain-Specific Development with Visual Studio DSL Tools
by Steve Cook; Gareth Jones; Stuart Kent; Alan Cameron Wills, pub 5/24/07 (Safari books online)





Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Automated Functional Testing Article

It looks like Mr. Sutherland's article on functional testing vs. unit testing has been around for a while, but I just came across it via Hacker News.

Benefits of automated functional testing

My experience with unit tests has been largely ad-hoc, for example when I'm working with a bug-prone chunk of code. I've never been part of a large system with solid unit test coverage or worked in a TDD environment. That being said, I agree with the general premise of Tim's message. As the release manager (by default) on a fairly complex java system, having a number of solid automated functional tests was very valuable to prevent a lot of wasted testing time during busy release weekends. The ROI of creating and maintaining a large set of unit tests seems to be much less.

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Google books

I think it's cool that Google now supports the ability to embed a Google book on any webpage. Here's something I think might be fun to read with the kids, if this actually works...

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