Posted by Richard
Mon, Oct 01 2007 22:32
I have run across this a few times in my career, but with a slightly different twist. With my current team, it doesn't really happen with the developers (we are pretty conscious about seeing things from each other's point of view), but it occurs more often with the people in the analysis/support role. They sometimes overreact to something just to be "firefighting" instead of maintaining a stable environment and understanding what is important to the larger set of users.
Still a very good article from the developer perspective.
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Posted by Richard
Mon, Sep 03 2007 22:17
Recently, I have tried several other version control systems to see what they were like as opposed to the normal one. After trying these, I have come to like Mercurial (or "hg" from the command line). It is a distributed revision control application. Why would I be interested especially when there is subversion? Let's take a quick look.
I have a scripts directory that is in "~/.bin". I wanted to version all the files in that directory and back them up somewhere. Here is what I did:
$ cd ~/.bin
$ hg init # initialize the repository
$ hg add . # add all of the files in the current directory
$ hg commit # commit the file to hg
Now if I change any file, I can run hg status or hg diff with similar results as svn. Once I am done, I just run hg commit to update the local repository.
What about backing up the files?
$ hg push ssh://someothercomputer.cam/backup_bin # push the repository to a server
Pretty easy. No svn import and then checkout. Visit the site or read the book to see the other powerful features.
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Posted by Richard
Sat, Aug 18 2007 13:34
I thought I should post on what has been going on with me. It has been a busy summer. I attended two great conferences: Research Triangle Software Symposium and Ruby Hoedown. I got some good information from both of these.
Read more...
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Posted by Richard
Sun, Jul 15 2007 21:50
I am giving the Dvorak keyboard a try. I have read about it a few times, but I didn't realize how easy it is to try. The latest article I read said go "cold turkey" for a month. I will give it a try.
My goals: improve my accuracy and speed
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Posted by Richard
Sat, May 26 2007 06:39
Recently, I setup openvpn so I could connect to a network remotely. I wanted to route traffic to that network via openvpn even through the machines on the remote network were public IP addresses. Here is what I did.
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Posted by Richard
Tue, Apr 17 2007 18:45
I ran across the Better Gmail extension for Firefox today when I saw this video. I was very impressed and it made me take a brief look at Greesemonkey. I have definitely heard of Greesemonkey, but I didn't think I knew of a real application for it. This was until today when I saw Better Gmail. I started thinking about all of the web apps that I use daily and how I could improve them with Greesemonkey. There are several that need improvements especially in navigation.
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Posted by Richard
Mon, Mar 12 2007 21:24
I have been using Think lately (handy tool for focusing on a Mac). Today when I was leaving work, it made me laugh to think that I quit Thinking.
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Posted by Richard
Thu, Feb 01 2007 22:29
I ran across MacFUSE a few weeks ago. I read the instructions for compiling it and I didn't think it was worth the effort. I recently found out that there are compiled versions and the instructions are in the Quicker Start Guide. The sshfs application comes in extremely handy especially when used with my favorite editor. I know this has been blogged about already, but I just ran across it. Make sure you checkout the video with some interesting ideas on how to use MacFUSE.
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Posted by Richard
Fri, Jan 05 2007 22:05
I have been using GNU Screen for a couple of years. It comes in very handy when accessing multiple terminal windows. Yesterday, I found this tip page in the Gentoo wiki. I was actually trying to figure out how to do something else when I stumbled onto changing the escape sequence section.
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Posted by Richard
Sun, Dec 31 2006 16:30
I am trying out a new picture gallery site called SmugMug. I was pretty impressed with their service and the features they offered. One of my main reasons for using them, the pictures will be backed up in 3 states (see first paragraph). As we take more and more digital pictures, I saw the need growing. Photo sharing, keywords and cost were also high on the list of things that helped me make my decision.
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