knock.on_wood

Subversion (SVN) has been a staple of my development process since I ran kicking and screaming out of the Visual SourceSafe (VSS) dungeon many years old. It has served me very well. I used the basic edit-commit-merge life-cycle and all was good. Here’s the strange thing.

Given the rage over XML and web services over the past decade or so, I was shocked at how common it is to still exchange data using a fixed-width file format over FTP. I guess it’s all about those mainframes and backward compatibility, but “WOW”.

Many Rails app need to make use of cron in some form or fashion. Whenever is a great little DSL for creating, organizing, managing, and deploying your app related cron jobs.

I’ve been trying to find a simple way to find out the commit differences in two git branches for while now. I resorted to using git show-branch which works pretty well, but can get cumbersome when you have a lot of branches. I just discovered git cherry is just want I’ve been looking for.

For you mac users, check out the MacUpdate Spring Bundle. It’s similar to the rockin’ MacHeist Bundle that was offered a month or so ago. For $49 you get 11+ great apps including Parallels and TechTool Pro. Sold.

I am using git for all new projects. For the active ones that are still on subversion I’m using git-svn. It is true– git-svn is a gateway drug. While git provides a number of advantages over subversion, there are a number of hurdles to overcome if you decide to switch.

For some reason I googled myself tonight. Of interest, I found that I am:

• a rapper
• an artist
Continue reading »

Speaking of gems, Ruby Inside has a great post on the Ruby ToolBox.

Every 6 months or so I do a head’s down exploration of new gems out there in the Ruby world. The speed of progress int he open source world amazes me. For those that are interested, here are some of my recent findings:

Colin Alstad gave a very nice presentation on CouchDB today at the Upstate.rb User Group. Being a new technology and such a vast departure from the industry standard (RDBMS), it has a lot of proving to do. It doesn’t claim to be a replacement for the relational model, but for a developer, or a company for that matter, to leave SQL behind and use a document oriented database will take some convincing.