This SNL rap about the Chronicles of Narnia is just hilarious!
Archive for December, 2005
Chronic-what-cles of Narnia
Saturday, December 31st, 2005Source control without committer access
Friday, December 30th, 2005Update: It turns out both CVS and SVN have a solution to this problem called vendor branches. This page has a great description of the technique with subversion!
Many open source projects require local file customizations to tweak, customize, and fix bugs when building a real world site (e.g. Drupal, OSCommerce, Roller, phpBB, etc…). My preference is always to checkout from their source control and start working rather than downloading an archive file and extracting it. (more…)
Time boxed versus feature boxed releases
Thursday, December 29th, 2005There are pros and cons to both approaches:
1. Feature boxed releases allow you to focus on getting the features the business side needs in the release and getting them right. However feature boxing is more easily prone to scope creep, continually pushing the release date, and spending too much time getting a feature “just” right instead of getting it in front of customers.
2. Time boxed iterations continuously keep the organization focusing on what’s most important (more…)
Drupal on Windows with IIS installation problem and solution
Monday, December 26th, 2005I’ve been looking at redoing my website boatblogger.com using Drupal instead of the Roller weblogger. Most of the users that started using boatblogger found roller a little to frustrating and eventually left for the bigger free blogging services. I’m also researching CMS systems to replace our home grown article publishing system at work so it’s a
valuable learning experience in that regard as well!
Anyhow, while my hosted servers run Linux, I use Windows as my desktop so to setup my Drupal dev environment I installed (more…)
Defrag in Windows in safe mode
Saturday, December 24th, 2005I’ve discovered that the only way to really get a good defrag in Windows is in safe mode. Reboot Windows, hit F8 before the starting Windows screen comes up, select safe mode, and then Start -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Disk Defragmenter. (more…)
Ruby rdoc viewers still leave room for improvement
Friday, December 23rd, 2005First a question, how do you go about looking up Rails or Gems API docs quickly while programming?
As a relatively new Ruby user I’ve just always assumed something was wrong with my Ruby installation because the following wouldn’t work: ri ActiveRecord::Base so I’ve always relied on running gem_server. Alas there is nothing wrong with my installation (more…)
Bad domain names
Tuesday, December 20th, 2005
If you haven't already seen this, this is a must read on bad
domain names. This had me in tears laughing!
Tabbed terminals for Windows redux 2
Sunday, December 18th, 2005For the past few months I’ve been running Gnome-Terminal under Cygwin as my tabbed term of choice but I’ve always disliked having to run X on Windows just to run a terminal emulator.
Now, thanks to an anonymous comment pointing to me VeraTerm on my previous post, I’ve discovered the open-source successor to VeraTerm called Poderosa. (more…)
Calling the US from Europe with Skype
Friday, December 16th, 2005I arrived in Germany this morning. Before I left I setup our home machines in San Francisco with Skype so I could call home without having to pay. We had our first Skype converstation this evening using an open wifi access point I found. It was definitely telephone quality and totally free, excellent! I look forward to (more…)
Rails schema migrations… wow!
Friday, December 16th, 2005Managing code versions, unit testing, building releases from a branch,
etc… are generally well understood processes where you’ll find
numerous organizations following similar practices.
Now go to the database schema and every company seems to have a
different home grown aproach to managing the database schema, migrating
changes, restoring older versions, etc.. Also, every solution I’ve ever
seen has involved updating the overall schema for fresh installations
as well as writing a migration SQL script for existing schemas. Not so
with Rails migrations!
I was blown away with this simple and elegant solution where you do the
migration to update an existing schema and then your overall schema
(for new installations) is automatically updated. This video demoing Rails migrations is a must see in my opinion!
Some other interesting reading on the subject: Robby on Rails, Buck Blogs, ScottStuff, API docs, and Gluttonous
