VS

Many switches are different, output is different and it is very frustrating to experienced users.

I ran into netstat command recently. I needed to find out pid of memcached server on my mac. Spend few mins but no luck. Mac based netstat command won't understand -p switch. Aaargh! I had to use lsof to get my job done.

Here is how I did it -

sudo lsof -i -P|grep memcache

Worked great!

• Browsers don't send any timezone information
• You can send offset in headers / parameters but its only reliable for dynamic requests

After trying a failing multiple times, I resorted to a browser-based JavaScript solution. This works great!

1. Convert all the server side timestamps to UTC. This makes server side code life way easier!
2. Send the dates to browser in iso8601 format which JavaScript can parse easily.
3. I used very good jQuery library (Localtime)  to convert iso8601 formatted dates to format required by application.

You can also tag your date spans with a special class. This way you can convert all timestamps to different formats unobtrusively. Very simple and elegant solution.

ruby warning: Insecure world writable dir /usr/local/bin, mode 040777

Little research and I found, Ruby warns you about any world writeable directory in your PATH. Not only writeable directories but parents as well.

Fix is super quick.

chmod o-w /usr/local/bin

You can replace /usr/local/bin with any directory which ruby complains about. This fixes the issue.

cmap w!! %!sudo tee > /dev/null %

You can save this to your ~/.vimrc file to persist it.

Now every time you want to override the read-only status and save changes as sudo, just hit 'w!!' and you'll be good.

Love the power of VIM!

• Lots of distractions - @home usually my PS3 is in my sight, there is no pair to pull me back from reading a relatively long blog post (and then catching up on xkcd).
• Plenty of things to do - I have plenty of things to do in my new house. So my home tasks list is never-ending. That somehow gets higher priority than my personal project or gets mixed up!

Initially, my reaction to all these things was simple. I need to do better time management! Easy!

Attempt 1 - ToDo lists and Time Tracking

I decided to get a time tracking tool and then plan 10 hours for a weekend strictly for personal work. Seemed very simple and achievable.

I used following set of tools for this -

• RescueTime - To track and improve my time spent on computer
• Toggl - Timer for tracking time spent on work
• Pen and Paper - To make list of tasks and track them.

How did that go?

Well, not great. I was having very high hopes from this simple system. Then I analyzed where did I go wrong?

• I made a good list of things to do. This was just a list! I will explain why this is an issue.
• RescueTime allowed me to understand how I spent time on computer, and nothing beyond. It improved my productivity by recovering some lost time but not much.
• Toggl was a complete failure for this purpose. Often I just forgot to start/stop timers!

Attempt 2 - GTD

This time I decided to go better prepared and  with better tools. Yes, I know what you're thinking! You are thinking, that tools can't improve productivity loss and self-control is more important than anything else. I agree, and will add that better tools will help you to get better results. If your will power is strong and you're very disciplined, with better tools you might be able to use your time even more optimally.

This time I decided to go with -

• Things - This is a very powerful task management application. It is very simple to use and good at managing your tasks properly. I got inspiration from Akshay Dhavle to use this tool. Expensive but great tool!
• Pomodoro - This is a free tool for mac. For folks who want to know more about pomodoro, head over here.

How did it go?

Well I have tried this for past 3 weeks and great so far! I will keep updating about this in coming days. I achieved most of the things I planned without serious lag and I am getting better at it.

So what improved this time?

As I mentioned earlier that pen and paper to-do list was great to begin with, but it was just a list! That was the only issue with it. It told me that I have these 100 things in my pipeline and I need to do them. Well yes, but how? How should I pick a certain thing in my list and not other. Depends on how you make your list and I am sure you have a better way to manage your tasks using pen and paper. I wasn't!

Time tracking is not very useful! I tracked time and realized that I wasted time! I knew that already! It didn't push me in the right direction to do more out of my time. Pomodoro is nothing but time tracking, you might say. I felt that it was more powerful technique than just tracking time. You should carry out one task in a pomodoro sprint. So when you're starting a pomodoro sprint, you're committing yourself to finish that task in 25 minutes or less. That is a huge difference in just tracking; I spent 40 minutes on something vs I want to get this done in next 25 minutes!

First I imported (typed) all my tasks on paper into 'Things' application. Added few more tasks which were not listed on paper as well. Later, I organized my tasks in various projects and responsibilities. This built nice context around my tasks. I spent about 10 minutes for around 100 tasks to think about and put dates on them. Many tasks were immediate once. I knew it is impossible to do them. I rearranged my tasks and priorities. No false promises to self!

"Things" really helped me in getting tasks in perspective. Pomodoro really helped me in getting those tasks beyond finish line.

It helped.

I have used many text editors in more than a decade long programmer life. As I am working on Ruby on Rails my obvious choice was TextMate. I used it for a while and thought to give RubyMine a spin. Since I was a Java developer for most of my career, I extensively used IntelliJ IDEA. No doubt it is the best IDE for Java developers out there! Eclipse and Netbeans are good but they have no upper hand when it comes to extensive features which IDEA provides. That is not the point of this post so I will skip writing about it.

RubyMine has the most of the key-bindings same as InteliJ IDEA and it was very natural for me. I didn't need to learn anything new to get productive in RubyMine. I loved it. Very soon I realized, all the features which made IDEA so great, are not very important in Ruby on Rails! e.g. refactorings, type checking, name changes etc. Since Ruby is dynamic language, type checking is not required. When it comes to refactoring variable names, you can't trust an IDE to make those changes by itself! Properties hidden behind meta-programmed methods are tricky to find and rename accurately. So in short all the great powers which IDEA boasts, are not required.

Did I mention RubyMine is resource heavy?

So I went back to TextMate tried it for second run. TextMate is great editor. Period. I enjoyed working in that software a lot. It has almost all the features any developer will need. It got its popularity in Rails community but it is useful for anybody for any text-editing needs.

When it came to searching full project or loading large files, TextMate isn't the king of the land. It often shows you pretty spinning wheel and lets you wait for long times. Sometimes it just refuses to load large files which you accidentally open. e.g log files.

So I thought, let's try VIM. I used VIM for last 10 years as my terminal editor of choice. My usage was very limited and not VIM specific. I could have done all the editing using pico without a doubt. So I wouldn't call myself a power user of VIM for 10 years.

I met a guy on my last project (Selvakumar Natesan) who introduced me to MacVim as Rails IDE. I used it for a while and loved it a lot. Although, I was fairly naïve in terms of its usage. After a while the enthusiasm to use VIM faded away and I was back to TextMate. On my current gig, I met two guys who were using VIM regularly (Priyank Gupta and Carl Leiby). This gave me another reason to start using it, and I did it this time!

I realized that I can't just depend on my pair to drive most power from VIM where I just stare at them and appreciate VIM. I needed to learn it and get used to that style. So I did spend some time reading cheat-sheet (more time in practicing!) and watching few screencasts where people showed few cool tricks.

After spending couple of weeks working daily on VIM, now I am fully productive and don't have any reasons to switch to TextMate or Rubymine anytime soon. I think I found my soul-editor.

If you're interested in switching to VIM as well, here are few links which helped me a lot during this transition:

• A Starting Guide to VIM from Textmate: This guide will get you rolling pretty quickly on VIM if you are on Mac.
• Janus VIM Configuration Bundle: Undoubtfully most comprehensive set of tools for RoR development using VIM. I use non-customized version of this currently.
• PLAY BY PLAY: GARY BERNHARDT  : Very good screencast if you want to see a pro using VIM in 100 min video. I paid $12 for that and it was totally worth it! There are bunch screencasts available for free as well. Look for them.

On Github you'll find all the help needed to bootstrap to your new development environment.

After learning this, all I can say, "It is easier than you think!"

• Secret knock detecting door (link)
• High speed photography using Arduino (link)
• Arduino project>

I didn't know that micro-controller programming is this fun. All these years, I wrote software in higher level languages and thought micro-controllers are for only electronics engineers. I was obviously wrong!

Arduino is fully open-source and community supported. Arduino programming happens in C++ and all the software required for programming is available for free from its website. You can develop for Arduino on all popular platforms and its very fun to use. All the Arduino libraries are well documented and it won't take long before you build something cool in the world of physical computing.

I have created a simple LCD display library as well. I am still learning my way around this and expecting to do better in coming days. You can find all my Arduino projects code on github.

Want to do more hacking in coming days.

I am also using it as media server (UPnP) for streaming video / audio and image content to PS3. The whole setup is very easy and lot of fun! I copied entire catalog of movies / audio and digital image archive and realized the setup is not working properly. I kept getting error while movie streaming on PS3.

"This content cannot be played (800288D8)"

I was very frustrated by the error message. Earlier I thought this is happening due to lack of processing power at DNS-323 end. After careful examination that possibility faded. DNS-323 has Marvell 500 Mhz processor, 64 Mb RAM, 1000 Mbps Ethernet connectivity. There are two Samsung Spinpoint 1 TB each HDD placed inside. I wasn't expecting any bottlenecks for couple of users.

I was about to return the unit and then I came across this fantastic online resource. I installed Mediatomb as UPnP server and disabled in-built application. This allowed me to have seamless access to my video content without any issues! I will recommend you to install this on your DNS-323 so that you can enjoy secure storage and media server.

This setup is good for -

• Archive of all of your files. No more nightmares of hard-drive failure!
• Cheap and abundant storage.
• Media serving capabilities at home.
• Expose firewall-enabled FTP server over internet.

Don't expect miraculous speeds though. 3-4.5 MBps is average transfer speeds for me. This is enough for me to backup and access stored data. For faster access, I prefer firewire or USB 2.0 drive. Figure out yourself about your requirements. Ciao!

• Umm, lets do check-in towards end-of-the day. We are not yet done with the code.
• Let me clean up these things and make them perfect.
• I don't want to check-in as I have some ongoing changes and I can't checkin partial files.
• Lets checkin tomorrow when we complete major functionality.

I am sure you must have heard similar conversation (or had it). Can you give a moment and think about why do are we afraid of checking-in? I have been constantly thinking about this issue and there are many reasons which makes sense on this issue. Few of them are -

Fear of bad code - Developers are afraid of peers criticizing their code. Its GOOD! Believe me, you're never going to write perfect code without receiving feedback about it. Sooner you receive the feedback, better you perform in short time. This is the reason, people don't make their changes public until they are convinced that they can't do any better. It is clearly a false fear.
One of the way to improve and influence your team is to make your work public as it is in progress. This way, you make team aware of your approach. If there is any conflict in approach or disconnect in understanding, it becomes visible sooner and you can resolve it better.

Not sure about impact on other parts of the system - Yes! This is very valid reason. You're in middle of a feature and you're not sure how it will impact rest of the system if you check-in early. Half baked features can take the whole system down. To get over this fear, unit testing your code, running a full build before check-in and having continuous integration makes sure your changes are fail-safe. Make sure that you are providing a working build to the team by writing solid unit tests and more comprehensive integration tests.

Working on multiple parallel streams - It is often a bad practice to work on multiple parallel streams of work. Even worse when you don't commit any of those changes in VCS.
If you're working with DVCS like Git, it is very easy to branch and commit code. If you're working on central VCS like subversion, then it is little tricky to keep your parallel working streams with minimal effort. There are few simple things you can do to make your life little easy -

Use DVCS. This will prove immense value in long run, if you use it properly. There is a learning curve associated with it, but it is definitely worth it.
If you are using SVN, create a branch if it is a big change. If it is small change, evaluate if you can checkin without breaking application. Taking patch is another option too. Use unit testing safety net on your side and make sure you progress smoothly.

In any situation, its not helpful when you're working on parallel streams of work and those changes co-exist. I have often observed people checking in partial or missing content. This happens when they are confused and trying to understand what all files are required to make one of streams live.

Why frequent check in is important?

• Getting feedback from your application and team.
• Never lose any of your changes and hard work. Machines do crash and when they do, its bad!
• Avoid stepping on each others toes, particularly when team is distributed and code churn is faster.
• Making whole team aware of your approach and remove silo operations. This helps bringing everybody on the same page and triggers conversations whenever required.
• You can't explain in 30 minutes of speech what code explains in 10 minutes. It eliminates confusion.
• Discipline of frequent checkin allows you to make sure, changes are not causing any conflicts.
• Smaller changes, encourages you to refactor and improve code quality.

If you want to read more -

Golden principle of development: Check-in-early, check-in-often.
DVCS introduction from the master: Google Video on Git.
Continuous integration: Wikipedia entry.