Software, Business, and Life
This Thursday (May 26, 2011), I will give a talk at the St. Louis Mobile Dev group on cross-mobile-platform development with Lua. There are various ways to do this (including rolling your own), but for simplicity I’m using Ansca’s Corona product.
As usual, I’ll zoom through some slides, and concentrate instead on the code. For some background on Lua, you may want to watch the video of my 20-minute Lua talk from last year’s Strange Loop.
Update: slides are available here.
Coming this fall, Alex Miller is putting on the third year of his Strange Loop conference, Strange Loop 2011. It’s not in “The Loop” this time, because The Loop isn’t big enough to hold it!
I heartily recommend Strange Loop for any software developer interested in learning more about a wide variety of technical topics. Unlike many other events, this one stays close to the technology all the way through – you might see a higher ratio of code-to-text on the slides here, than at any other conference.
(Again this year, my firm Oasis Digital is a sponsor, and I’ll probably submit a talk. I hesitate a bit though, because if I give a talk, I have to miss someone else’s talk in that timeslot.)
Some years ago, the Java IDE marketplace looked quite different than it does today. VisualAge was very popular. Borland’s JBuilder was another top contender. Since then, many of the good ideas from VisualAge ended up in Eclipse, while the JBuilder of that era was replaced by a newer, Eclipse-based JBuilder. Not everything ended up on Eclipse, though: NetBeans matured to a slick IDE (with its own plugin ecosystem), as did IDEA.
But this post isn’t about today, it’s about a leftover bit of history. Back in that era, I had a section of this web site dedicated to the numerous JBuilder “Open Tools” (plugins) then available. That content is long obsolete and I removed it years ago. Remarkably, this site still gets hits every day from people (or perhaps bots) looking for it.
I agree strongly that Cool URIs don’t change, but that’s OK, because my old JBuilder Open Tools content just wasn’t very cool anyway.
On the off chance you landed on this page looking for it, here is a Google link for your convenience, or you can take a look at web.archive.org’s snapshot of my old list.
Recently I reached a level of excessive frustration with NetNewsWire (Mac) and decided it was time to move on. Problems with NetNewsWire include:
But to get rid of NetNewsWire, I needed to verify that I had all my feeds in Google Reader. This was easy:
The commands are:
perl -ne '/xmlUrl="([^"]*)"/ && print "$1\n"' <google-reader-subscriptions.xml | sort >gr.urls perl -ne '/xmlUrl="([^"]*)"/ && print "$1\n"' <nn.opml | sort >nn.urls diff gr.urls nn.urls
… which took much less time and far fewer keypresses than writing this post.
Offline reading is still very useful; at the moment I’m trying a combination of Google Reader, Gruml, and Reeder (iPad). Those work very well – so well that the risk of time-wasting feeds must be managed agressively: drop all but the most important, and don’t look every day.
I recently transferred a few thousand files, totalling gigabytes, from one computer to another over a slowish internet connection. At the end of the transfer, I realized the process I used had lost all the original file timestamps. Rather, all the files on the destination machine had a create/modify date of when the transfer occurred. In this particular case I had uploaded files to Amazon S3 from end then downloaded them from another, but there are numerous other ways to transfer files that lose the timestamps; for example, many FTP clients do so by default.
This file transfer took many hours, so I wasn’t inclined to delete and try again with a better (timestamp-preserving) transfer process. Rather, it shouldn’t be very hard to fix them in-place.
Both machines were Windows servers; neither had a broad set of Unix tools installed. If I had those present, the most obvious solution would be a simple rsync command, which would fix the timestamps without retransferring the data. But without those tools present, and with an unrelated desire to keep these machines as “clean” as possible, plus a firewall obstacle to SSH, I looked elsewhere for a fix.
I did, however, happen to have a partial set of Unix tools (in the form of the MSYS tools that come with MSYSGIT) on the source machine. After a few minutes of puzzling, I came up with this approach:
Here is the source machine command, executed at the top of the file tree to be fixed:
find . -print0 | xargs -0 stat -t "%d-%m-%Y %T" -f 'nircmd.exe setfilefoldertime "%N" "%Sc" "%Sm"' | tr '/' '\\' >~/fix_dates.bat
I broken it up to several lines here, but it’s intended as one long command.
As far as I can tell, the traditional set of Windows built in command line tools does not include a way to set a file or directory’s timestamps. I haven’t spent much time with Powershell yet, so I used the (very helpful) NIRCMD command line utilities, specifically the setfilefoldertime subcommand. The batch file generated by the above process is simply a very long list of lines like this:
nircmd.exe setfilefoldertime "path\filename" "19-01-2000 04:50:26" "19-01-2000 04:50:26"
I copied this batch file to the destination machine and executed it; it corrected the timestamps, the problem was solved.
Over the last few days I put together Learn-Clojure.com, a web site to help people get started with Clojure. Please take a look, and send feedback.
I also have several other ideas for informational sites and simple applications, which I’ll launch as time allows. In the past I’ve been inclined to just post new things here on my blog, but I think certain kinds of more “evergreen” information are more useful on standalone sites. Certainly the hosting/domain economics are such that it’s not a big deal to put them there.