Gigu’s blog

Everyone know how hard it is to come back from holidays. I’m in the office but my head is all over the place. I’m starting a .NET project next week. It’s good to change a seat after few months of Java chair. I do like to do that. I’m trying to become more of a universal developer then a one platform expert. It might look like I will not be an expert in anything, just know something in all areas. The point is to adjust to new circumstances and learn fast to do the job right. I guess it’s being agile

I was at QCon two weeks ago in London. Only one day but I heard a lot. Most interesting were discussions that we had at ThoughtWorks exhibition stand. Martin Fowler and Kent Back spent some time talking about social skills in software development. Was good enough to listen to those guys plus we got the chance to ask them some questions

I came across gOS last week. Downloaded live CD and I gave it a go. I think I used to much to Gnome or KDE to learn another Desktop environment. gOS is using Enlightenment version DR17. It is a little bit different then Desktops I used to. The whole idea behind gOS is to somehow integrate and make it easy to use Google applications straight from your desktop launchers. I have to say that gOS desktop looks very pretty. Other then that I’m not impressed. Missing button for terminal window is just a crime that can’t be forgiven. When booted from Live CD I can’t mount my hard drive too for some reason. Officially it is still beta release. I will wait for proper release to give it a go.

As you can see, holidays still in my head. Thoughts everywhere. Slowly getting there.

Cheerios, Gregsteros

Today first time in my life I decided to write small Ruby script instead of using COPY, PASTE. Does it mean that I’m a geek now?

I needed to get some data from a web site. Because data was nicely formatted in table I could just mark it, copy and then paste in spreadsheet tool. What I did instead was a little script that loaded the page, parsed table rows, extracted the data and saved it to a csv file. There is a nice library for HTML parsing called Hpricot. If anyone is doing some HTML, XHTML parsig in Ruby I do strongly recommend. Very simple parsing based on document tree.

Short example, to get all link elements from this blog I would do something like that:

document = open(’http://blog.gigoo.org’) { |opened_uri| Hpricot(opened_uri) }

link_elements = document.search(”a”)

Voila

So, why addicted

I think I became addicted. Got the Ruby bug on me now. I like it more and more. Still trying to keep away from Rails just play with language and it’s features. I love big number of useful tools and libraries and the fact that community is working hard to make great stuff for it.

What I don’t like is the fact that everything is design and created with Rails on mind. I hope that Ruby is not going to be “the Rails language” and that people are going to remember that it’s not only about WEB (well, almost all the time is).

Cheerios and other cereals, Gregster

I got standard Ubuntu Gutsy installation on my laptop. Some time ago I tried Ubuntu Studio and I always remembered its look. It was probably one of the best looks of Linux desktop I ever seen. It turns out that guys from Studio made they distributions look pre-packaged and you can use apt to install it. It is just one simple command

sudo apt-get install ubuntustudio-look

And results are:

Fancy a little bit of Studio for yourself?

Cheers, Gregii

I got dual boot at my laptop. Most of the time I use Ubuntu (Gutsy Gibbon at the moment). I do occasionally switch to Windows XP to use my digital camera software that is only available for Microsoft’s system. Few weeks ago problems with sound started. When I tried to use Firefox with a Flash it completely nuked the sound in Ubuntu. Not just for a moment but until next restart.

I know at least two people with same problem. Laptop I got is Dell Latitude D620. Have I fixed a problem? Sure I did, Google helped as usual

I got a deb package from Paul Betts, looks like he is fixing stuff If you can’t find it there here is a copy. All you have to do is download it and install. All that is required is a Firefox restart.

I thought I will share this knowledge as solution is fast and simple

Cheers, Gregster

If you are reading this post in feeds reader and it doesn’t support pictures please read original post on my blog.

I had a good laugh when I saw it.

Thanks for that Myro

Greg

I should be painting the office (one room in our house that is working as a storage room at the moment), but I can’t force myself to start. I’m too lazy to paint but I thought I write about my experience with Ruby and Rails, or in other words, my first steps as a ROR developer.

Yada Yada Yada

Let’s start with Ruby, new programming language for me. So, I don’t need to compile anything to run, it’s interpreted. That’s cool, I used to do a lot of PHP programming some days ago and I liked it a lot. On the other hand, syntax, rules and conventions were weird for me. I did have a conversation with some other developers and they shared my feelings on that subject.

Yoda Yoda Yoda

I got this strange way of learning new programming language. I just get tools and IDE for it, do a little bit of reading and off I go. So, I’m a Linux user, I’ve seen a lot of ROR applications development on Macs using TextMate or something similar. I started to look for some tool for other platform. Ruby comes bundle with Scite. It’s great that it has syntax highlighting but nothing more. For me the most important bit is InteliiSense.

There is no strong typing in Ruby so how any IDE will know what kind of object it’s dealing with. As a result completion is just a list of ALL methods and properties you can associate with anything. That’s not really helping. Oh, by the way, refactoring tools boils down to RENAME On the other hand as soon as you know language it keeps you focus as you need to be careful about what your are typing.

Trails of Rails

When I finished with all the setup I kinked off some development. I can’t believe how fast I was able to do things with rails. For a basic web application these framework is just amazing. It comes with generator that creates all single parts of application (model, view, controller, database migration) with skeleton code, inside appropriate folders. I finally selected Netbeans to be my IDE as it seemed to have most reasonable code completion and integrated all script generation.

Book da Book

I can’t use some clever code completion tricks, bottom line: reading books. There are two titles recommended for Ruby and Ruby on Rails by a lot of people (can’t really name a single person at the moment) in Pragmatic Programmers Bookshelf. I can’t say that any of them give me a good kick start. First chapters are dragging for ages and once finished I had impression that I didn’t learn anything. Those books are good language/framework reference though with much better content after first chapter.

Summer (y)

When I started things looked a little bit messy. Strange syntax, no good IDE. After few days of development I started to like it. Language features stopped being annoying and there is more visible results. I will share more experience after few more weeks of development. Stay tuned.

Gregster

Need for XML schema validation.

Why do we need validate XML? Let us say that we have XML document. I need to come out with some sort of example … hm … OK. Here we go. XML document that represents rugby game ( I like rugby, watching it from a safeness of my sofa ).

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I have came across an article on one of a web sites. They suggested that you can run your desktop of everywhere from your web browser. And off course there is a company that is already running a beta testing of this service. The name of a company is Nivio and you can find them at this web address: http://www.nivio.com . So I took a little time to register on their web site and after a link-clicking-from-e-mail-account-creation-confirmation my account was created. 

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Some time ago in one of my posts I have mentioned XP, that is eXtreme Programming. I was asked by one of my colegues about it few days ago. He was asking about tools for .NET for XP practice mentioned in title. Well, as an exercise I’m going to present you tools for Continuous Integration for Java and for .NET platforms.

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Today at work, I have seen one of my colleagues and mentors Cleve (his blog is on my Blogroll list) publishing new post to his blog. I was surprised seeing that he is not doing this through web interface. Huh, interesting. I thought it’s faster and that you have better control over post look and it’s content. I couldn’t be more wrong.

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