Time to eat Humble Pie

Alec the Geek

why Mac users are a bunch of wallies

Well we went out and bought an iMac for the family, to replace the Windows XP system that was showing his age, so now we have joined the army of Mac wallies.

It ’s a sweet machine though and so far the missus has found it easier to switch from Windows to OS/X than moving from IE6 to IE7. Go figure!

(Updated — I would however like to point out that personnally I still continue to use Linux on my laptop, “Mac is just for the kids you understand”)

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So what’s the deal with Ajax?

I have been spending the last few weeks working in an Ajax environment and whilst I am no Ajax expert there are some observations I feel compelled to make.

1. The benefits are substantial for the end user of your software (interaction, features offered…) so it’s worth doing.
2. It’s a pain to debug because you are spreading your code across multiple locations and languages.
3. It’s worth using a templating system (e.g. HTML::Mason) when writing web apps, with or without Ajax. It makes live a lot easier when generating mark up.
4. The Ajax paradigm leads to a different architecture at the back end. Something like this:
   1. A module generates
      1. Some Basic HTML and place holders for data, but no data
      2. Lots of Javascript (but remember to use an Ajax library such as YUI)
   2. This first page loads and makes an Ajax call
   3. A second module on the server responds to your Ajax call and supplies data (or whatever)
   4. The web page is populated by the Javascript via the DOM and and can be used.
   5. The user interacts with your Javascript (and forms etc.)
   6. Your Javascript makes an Ajax call
   7. goto 3

So you can see what I mean about things being spread around. It’s a lot harder to work with that a traditional form based approach.

Handy Hack:Perl DBI count rows returned from select statment

my $rowCount = $dbh->selectrow_array(

                                 qq{

                                      SELECT count(*)

                                         FROM my_table

                                       WHERE attr1 = ?
                                },undef,
                                $myValue);

In theory it’s a bad thing to assume a select will return a single scalar value instead of multiple attributes and rows, however with a count clause we should be pretty safe. N.B. using the $dbh->rows() function or similar is not correct on a select statement.

Modified after a suggestion from Randal. Thanks mate.

What I add to Linux that helps make it better

As a follow up to a post I made back in 2002

What I add to Windows that helps make it better « Alec the Geek

I have recenlty had to rebuid my machine from scratch and this is what I feel the need to install.

I thought I would outline the extra goodies I use on my Linux system:

1. GnuCash accounting software
2. Eclipse (not used very much, but can be handy to have around sometimes)
3. The Java SDK
4. BOUML for UML modelling
5. Freemind, and now VYM, mind mapping software
6. I still prefer Adobe’s Acrobat reader to the OSS versions supplied with Linux
7. Evolution is my PIM and email client (but KDE Kontact is also good), not an extra goody per se, but you need to choose which PIM to use. Evolution is the default on Ubuntu anyway
8. gworldclock to get the time in multiple time zones
9. Skype to chat to my friends all over the world
10. Automatix for Ubuntu to I can access all those pesky Windows media files people keep sending me
11. Mozilla Composer is still my favourite HTML editor
12. esvn for Subversion
13. svk for distributed version control
14. Envy to install my ATI Graphics driver — it does in such a way that suspend now works correctly.

Pretty much everything else is already there by default.

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So Linux users must be the real {men|women|third sex}

Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | I hate Macs

Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work; computers for people who earnestly believe in feng shui.

Fabulous op piece from Charlie Brooker describing why Mac users are a bunch of wallies who can’t use real computers. Makes me feel all smug about using Linux, although I have lots of Mac using Geek friends who are definitely not wallies.

Mind you if it’s a choice between Windows and OS/X I think I’ll “take a Mac please Bob”.

And I know lots of you don’t have a choice and are stuck on Blue-Screen-of-Death-Ville.

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Handy Hack: How to use Vim netrw in ftp passive mode

The Vim editor can edit files on a remote machine using ftp to open and save the file (other protocols such as DAV and scp are also supported). The plugin is called netrw and comes standard with modern Vim.

When using ftp it is often the case that passive mode must be used across firewalls, which is not ftp’s default behaviour (at least not on my Linux system). However ftp often has a command line switch to force passive (e.g. -p). Just add let g:netrw_ftp_cmd="ftp -p" to your ~/.vimrc file. You will need to change this depending on the specific options and features of your ftp program.

Have source and change control, or else be afraid; very afraid…

IDEs are not a panacea, but neither are they all bad « The Wandering Glitch 2

Is he saying a common source code control policy is a bad thing?

I say unequivocally that both source code control and change management are absolutely vital. However using an IDE over the top of these tools can be problematic for a variety of reasons:

1. How does one handle the sharing of code and modules between IDE projects when the common code is in the version repository. Unfortunately the answer depends on the combination of the IDE and Version control tool being used
2. How to handle re-factoring? (re-factoring is a good BTW) Again the final answer depends on the combination of your IDE and version control tool.
3. Is there an effective interface to your change management (ticket management) application/repository from your IDE?
4. Depending on the tools and technology used IDE integrations to Change Management and Version Control systems can be fragile. It’s an extra dependency to manage and support and not everyone wants to run a single solution from a single vendor.

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When ’standard’ goes bad

IDEs are not a panacea, but neither are they all bad « The Wandering Glitch 2

Standardisation of tools is not generally a bad thing either

Andrew makes a point that having everyone using the same tool set in the same fashion is a “good thing”.

This appears to be obviously true, however I think a couple of observations can be made specifically when discussing IDE’s:

1. When recruiting new members to the team there is a tendency by “the management” to insist on only recruiting staff with experience in the current specific IDE tool, which seems a little too limiting to me and could lead to unnecessary expense bringing the team up to strength
2. The fact that everyone is wedded to a mandated IDE means that change is inhibited, even when change would be useful. Modern IDE’s are behemoths and getting everyone to change can feel like turning the Queen Mary (i.e. very hard and slow)

As a purely personal observation, I think the word standard should be applied to those things that enable multiple teams and systems to work together. Teams adopt their own conventions however, and these are generally not visible to outsiders (e.g. which IDE they use).

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I want to attend this

Thoughtstream | Courses | The Productive Programmer

This course explores how Dr Damian Conway — one of the most prolific contributers to the Perl community and to the CPAN — manages to be so productive

Having seen Damian present some of his ideas about productivity, both in person and in books, I have a strong suspision this would be a very thought provoking and useful course.

Damian gave a presentation at OSDC 2005 that showed some of his techniques, including which CPAN modules he used and how to present the writing of Perl code by using IO::Prompt (which he wrote of course), I believe there was also a more substantial presentation at OSCON. I think he uses the Vim editor so I would even more out of it.

Generally Damian is very a) knowledgeable and b) amusing presenter so if you ever have the opportunity to hear him speak don’t miss it, even if you are not a Perl programmer.

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All IDE’s are crap

My arch nemesis erh good chum, Andrew, thinks Open Source IDEs are Crap! . Well I have to say that he’s rather behind the times. Industry commentators (well mainly me actually) have been decrying the use of IDE’s for some time, both open source and commercial. Although I have to recognise the reality that they are here to stay, using IDE’s does present come challenges for modern teams — and the more in-experienced the practitioner then the more serious the problems that can be introduced (which is the same with most things).

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