tobin harris

Links for 2009-11-06 [del.icio.us]

2009-11-07T00:00:00-08:00

SpecFlow - workflow
Pretty cool .NET testing stuff. Works with Resharper.

Links for 2009-11-04 [del.icio.us]

2009-11-05T00:00:00-08:00

Hans Rosling shows the best stats you've ever seen | Video on TED.com
Cool data visualisation talk showing stuff that Google bought

Links for 2009-10-28 [del.icio.us]

2009-10-29T00:00:00-07:00

10 examples of minimum viable products - Venture Hacks
Minimal Viable Products - really interesting.

Links for 2009-10-26 [del.icio.us]

2009-10-27T00:00:00-07:00

nonspeaking: Google Reader mobile client with Rhodes
Rhodes RSS reader

Links for 2009-10-25 [del.icio.us]

2009-10-26T00:00:00-07:00

The Linux Cookbook: Tips and Techniques for Everyday Use - Analyzing Text
Linux command cook book, pretty awesome.
stateless - Project Hosting on Google Code
Interesting state machine implementation
Styleshout.com | Free CSS Website Templates, Webdesign & CSS Resources
Free CSS templates

Links for 2009-10-21 [del.icio.us]

2009-10-22T00:00:00-07:00

Xero
online accounting solution
Spanning Sync 3 - Sync iCal with Google Calendar, Sync Address Book with Google Contacts
Syncing google with mac.
iPhone App Site Design Trends
Nice
25+ jQuery Plugins that enhance and beautify HTML form elements | Queness
Lots of nice jQuery ui elements

Links for 2009-10-20 [del.icio.us]

2009-10-21T00:00:00-07:00

Virtual Phone System, Toll Free Numbers and Voicemail – Grasshopper
Have a phone number that follows you. 37 Signals are trying it out.

One Liner: Email A Web Page To Yourself On OSX or Linux

2009-09-30T06:36:58-07:00

I found an easy way to email a web page to myself from the OSX command line using echo, curl, and sendmail.

This is handy if:

You have a status page online that you want sending to you every day
You have a business report online that you want sent to you every week/day etc.
You want a quick backup of an online document

Note, this is simple stuff for anyone who’s used Linux for more than a few months I bet!

Here it is on separate lines first…

echo 'Subject: Document Backup' > tmp.txt 
echo 'Content-type: text/html' >> tmp.txt 
curl http://docs.socena.com/document/test/readme >> tmp.txt  
sendmail -v tobin@tobinharris.com < tmp.txt 
rm tmp.txt

Or, I can do it in one line like this:

echo 'Subject: Document Backup' > tmp.txt &&  echo 'Content-type: text/html' >> tmp.txt && curl http://docs.socena.com/document/test/readme >> tmp.txt && sendmail -v tobin@tobinharris.com < tmp.txt && rm tmp.txt

Just copy and paste that into your OSX Terminal (please replace the email address and http:// to your own though!)

You could then create a cron job to have this line executed once a day.

In case your wondering, echo is just like a print statement. The > pipes it to a text file, creating a new file each time. The >> appends to the file.

7 Tips For Perfect Coffee

2009-09-13T03:58:22-07:00

My friends often tell me I make a great coffee. I’m a big coffee fan, so I’ve put quite a bit of research into getting it right. Here’s my tips:

Tip: A Machine With 9 Bars Or More

This is a bit obvious, but you need a machine that has a enough pressure (9 bar minimum, and 19 bar is optimal). We have a Gaggia 16109 Evolution at home. It costs about £150 ($200), so not the most expensive, but it certainly gets the job done.

Tip: Clean The Machine REALLY WELL Before Use

This is essential for getting a great coffee flavour. You don’t want any dull or stale flavours in your coffee, which is what happens when you don’t clean it properly. Think signal vs noise. The signal is the fresh coffee and the milk, you don’t want anything else in there. I’m happy to spend 5-10 minutes cleaning the coffee machine beforehand.

To clean the machine, I just make coffee without coffee! This flushes out old water and any old bits of coffee in the machine.

I clean the milk wand by using it to steam a cup of boiling water.

Tip: Buy Great Coffee

Right now, Illy is my favourite. We get the ready-ground MOKA stuff, it’s awesome. We also have our own bean grinder, but I’m yet to find fresh beans that match the Illy. One thing about the tins of Illy is that you need to use them within 2-3 weeks, I find the quality drops off after that.

Tip: Let The Machine Warm Up

I let the machine and coffee holder warm up before I make the first coffee. This can take 5-10 minutes. If you clean the machine by flushing it through once or twice, you’ll find everything gets hot during that time.

When I don’t do this the coffee seems to come out bitter and watery. So it’s well worth the wait.

Tip: Aim For A Crema Layer

The crema layer is that lovely layer of oil that floats on top of an espresso coffee. You need to have a good crema layer on your coffee, to me this is a signal that everything has gone right. This usually means buying great coffee and getting the temperature right.

Tip: Warm The Milk Before Frothing

I find that scorching hot milk ruins coffee. I usually warm the milk in the microwave, and then use the steam wand quickly to add a little extra heat and get the desired amount of froth.

Tip: Consider An External Frother

Our machine has a steam wand built in for frothing milk, but I’d prefer a separate unit. Basically, with a built in steam wand you risk getting the machine to hot that it scorches the coffee. I haven’t bought a separate frother, but I will soon. Something like this looks good.

Bean To Cup Or Not?

I enjoy the ritual of preparing the machine and making the coffee, so I stay away from bean-to-cup machines.

In all fairness, those machines do make great coffee, and they’re really convenient. On the down-side, they’re as big as a laser printer, and there’s plenty to go wrong.

Keep it simple and use traditional a espresso machine with separate frother. Next time I’ve got £1500 ($2000) to spare I’ll be looking at the Gaggia TS or similar.

iPhone: 1, NASA Phoenix Mars Lander: 0

2009-09-03T16:14:35-07:00

I’m reading a book called Beautiful Data, where there are various people talking about how they’ve worked with data sets. These include interesting stories from NASA, Yahoo!, the guys that made a RadioHead video, and tons more.

The book is very interesting, in fact, I think it should be called Interesting Data since it’s not all about how the data is displayed.

I’m still reading, but the NASA Phoenix Mars Lander story is particularly interesting; It talks in depth about the hardware and software of the lander craft.

I expected some pretty hefty hardware in a ultra-high-tech, 2008 mars lander. Wouldn’t you? But no no no. Apparently the Phoenix has only 10MB or RAM, and a lowly 20Mhz CPU. WTF!?!? This is a craft sent to Mars to help us understand if the planet might have been capable of sustaining life, and all NASA could do was send up something with less processing grunt than a shitty mobile phone!

Apple iPhone:
- 400Mhz CPU
- 128MB RAM
Phoenix High Tech Mars Lander
- 20Mhz CPU
- 10MB RAM

In all fairness, the Phoenix RAM and CPU components have the edge when it comes to coping with high energy cosmic rays, crazy levels of heat, and radiation. I wouldn’t bank on my iPhone making it out of the earth’s atmosphere and surviving on a freezing planet surface whilst collecting and beaming data for months.

Jokes aside, the book is a really interesting read. Enjoy.

Want to be involved with yUML?

2009-09-01T12:25:00-07:00

I’ve had a bit of a rest from yUML recently, but by no means has the project stalled. Whilst I’ve been focusing on earning cash to pay bills, it’s been great to see a small ecosystem grow around yUML, and soon I’ll be looking to spend time on the project again for phase 2.

Someone got in touch recently about getting commercially involved with yUML. Whilst I was responding, I thought I’d share my response where more people can see it. It would be great if anyone has any ideas or would consider getting involved with the project.

=== Email ===

Hi Mr X

Thanks for the enquiry and information.

About your question, yUML isn’t actually making me any money right now. My plan was to build something cool, and then think of ways of getting it to cover it’s own costs, or even generate an income.

I think the first part of the plan is working: yUML get’s several tweets a day and all are very positive. It also serves 500-1000 visitors a day, which is great for such a niche product. All in all, the site is dishing up half a million requests a month, and 10’s of thousands of UML diagrams! Analog report is here: http://yuml.me/analog/Report.html

I plan to keep yUML alive and kicking although right now I’m focusing on paying bills. I’m very interested in hearing from people who could help me satisfy the second “money” part of the plan.

=== END ===

Would be nice to hear from people who’ve been-there-done-that. Anyone ready to share the challenge of forging a new direction for yUML?

Why Downloading Pirate eBooks Isn't That Useful

2009-09-01T12:00:58-07:00

I’m sad to say that I’ve been guilty of downloading and reading illegal eBooks from torrent sites. I know for a fact that many software developers do this. At each place I’ve consulted, I’ve met developers with literally an entire Borders collection on their hard drives (excuse the pun).

Being an author and a generally honest guy, so I’m not very proud of this. But, it has made me realise one thing:

IT’S NOT WORTH IT!

It’s not worth downloading dodgy eBooks from torrent sites because you don’t get the real value from the book. I believe the real value of a book lies partly in it’s physical form.

An eBook is great for reference or high level scanning, but a paper book is far easier to actually study.

I can leave a paper book around the office or house where I’m likely to pick it up, making me more likely to read it. The book itself can become it’s own bookmark in your life - a visual reminder to continue reading.

e-Ink readers like the Kindle are cool (I have an IREX Illiad), but in many ways a real book still out-performs it. With a real book, the pages fit perfectly and I don’t have to worry about it’s batteries running out, or remembering to charge it up.

I tend to read paper books two or three times, mainly because they occupy shelf space in my study, which is where I look for reading inspiration. I also frequently pull them off the shelf for looking something up. eBooks don’t lure me in this way, so they get read less often.

I can annotate books with a pen or sticky notes easily, without having to worry about losing my annotations or synchronising them across devices.

All in all I’m pretty happy with the decision that, if I want to read about something, I’m happy to pay the money and buy the paper book to get the full value from it’s contents. Time is valuable, and I’d prefer to pay cash to increase my chances of soaking up the authors wisdom.

Automating .NET development (and NHibernate) with IronRuby + Rake

2009-08-17T14:07:47-07:00

Just the other day, I thought I’d try the latest IronRuby to see if I could start using this and Rake in my .NET projects. Low and behold, it’s working great :)

Rake - A Developers Swiss Army Knife

Rake is like a swiss-army knife for developers. I use it to make tedious development tasks repeatable. As we all know, repeatability is king.

Here’s some examples of what I’ve used Rake for during development:

Clearing out log files
Drop/Create development database
Loading up demo before a customer presentation
Listing which NHibernate entities are mapped to which tables
Running a particular batch of unit tests
Running background tasks for a solution, like rebuilding Lucene indexes
Generating reports on code statistics

Remember, the useful thing about Rake is that doing any of these things is usually a matter of simply typing rake logs:clear or similar. This saves your hours of pointing and clicking to do boring tasks.

Rake also has a few tricks up it’s sleeve: you can automatically chain tasks together. For example:

task :test => [:clean, :drop_create_db, :build, :ndepend_report] do #...

Your Rake scripts will also be able to make use of the thousands of Ruby gems out there. Well, actually, not all of them work ported to IronRuby .NET yet, but that’s getting better all the time.

Getting IronRuby + Rake For .NET

This is a doddle.

Download IronRuby and unzip to c:\IronRuby.
Add c:\IronRuby\bin to your Windows PATH. Try to NOT put it in a folder with spaces in the name. Note: We’re using IronRuby on both XP and Windows Server 2008 without problems.
Install the ‘Rake’ gem by opening a command prompt and typing igem install rake. That’s igem not gem.

Creating a Simple Rake Script

Using Rake only requires that you have one file called Rakefile.rb in the root directory of any .NET solution. A simple Rakefile could look like this.

# Rakefile.rb
require 'rubygems'	
require 'ftools'

task :default=>[:say_hi]

desc "Says Hi"
task :say_hi do 
	puts "Hi there. Rake is working."
	puts "Type rake --tasks."
end

desc "Count files of each type in this solution"
task :file_count do
   report = {}
   Dir['./**/**'].each do |f| 
     report[File.extname(f)].nil? ? report[File.extname(f)] = 1 : report[File.extname(f)] += 1 
   end
   report.each do |type, count|
     puts "#{type}: #{count}"
   end	 
end

You can list available tasks in you IronRuby rake script by typing irake --tasks, which would output:

irake say_hi      Says Hi
irake file_count  Count files of each type in this solution

And you then can run an individual task by running rake file_count. Which would run the :file_count task and output the statistics.

This may all seem very simple, but what we now have is a sturdy framework for automating your development tasks and saving you a ton of time. You’ll think very differently about your projects once you’ve used Rake for a while.

As a taster of the kinds of things you might use Rake for, take a look at the standard Rake tasks you get for a Ruby On Rails solution.

Using With Your .NET Solution Code

So far all this is very nice, but you could use standard Ruby rake to do all this stuff without the need for IronRuby. What IronRuby gives us is the ability to easily interoperate with .NET assemblies. And of course, that includes your own assemblies.

What I found very intersting is that I can use Rake to manipulate my NHibernate entities, and run other infrastructure code. So, if I want a script that can instantly bar all users for logging in to an intranet, that’s really easy.

Rather than take you through a massively detailed tutorial, I’m just going to show you the main things I needed to do to get up and running with Rake in my solution.

The Rake File

This is very similar to the Rakefile.rb above. You can see some of the tasks that I’m using on a small intranet project Engine Room are doing.