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While I’m still a die-hard vim fan, gvim on OS X isn’t pretty and it was giving me headaches whenever I tried to edit Python scripts. So, I downloaded the free Text Wrangler from Bare Bones Software.

Firstly, it is very much an Mac application. So, A+ on that count. Even better, it’s surprisingly powerful. Some BBEdit plugins work, too (including one that adds Ruby support).

I’ve been using it to edit some Ruby code and have found it to be an entirely enjoyable experience… of course, after I realized you could disable¹ mapping shift-backspace to forward delete. Gawd, that was annoying.

¹ Preferences -> Editing: Keyboard -> uncheck “Enable Shift-Delete…”

Deleting duplicate data in a database is a very common endeavor, especially when dealing with legacy databases and applications. I found this little gem and wanted to share:

<pre><code>
delete from employee
where (rowid, empssn) not in
    (select min(rowid), empssn from employee group by empssn);
</code>

It’s simple and generally applicable and - even better - doesn’t require a CURSOR.

I was talking about Wikis with someone the other day and decided I’d set one up to demonstrate their power and ease-of-use. I’ve used MoinMoin before, but I was looking for something much simpler. I wanted to use Instiki because of my on-going infatuation with Ruby. However, my hosting provider doesn’t have a very up-to-date version of Ruby and Instiki doesn’t appear to integrate with Apache (as opposed to running standalone).

I was looking for a couple of things: easy setup, no database and (hopefully) Textile support. I found PmWiki a PHP wiki that meets all my criteria except Textile support. It couldn’t be easier to setup and comes with a very straightforward Theme configuration. So far, it appears to be very robust and featureful. I certainly recommend it!

As it stands, there isn’t much on the wiki ; just some notes about a MUD book I’m reading. Another infatuation…

If you are visiting mrchucho.net, you will see that I have updated my WordPress theme. I’ve tried to minimize the customization in order to make upgrades and site maintenance even less involved. Plus also: I, too, was getting a little tired of Kubrick…

Let me know if you find anything missing or otherwise awry!

I know, I know: I haven’t posed in months, but this article at Joel Spolsky’s site inspired me… unfortunately it also made me hang my head with sadness…

Joel hit the nail on the head denouncing the “conventional wisdom” that says “the most important thing is reducing the cost of programmers.” I have certainly seen my fair share of failed attempts at commoditizing programmers.

I had one minor disagreement with Joel:

Sadly, this doesn’t really apply in non-product software development. Internal, in-house software is rarely important enough to justify hiring rock stars. Nobody hires Dolly Parton to sing at weddings. That’s why the most satisfying careers, if you’re a software developer, are at actual software companies, not doing IT for some bank.

While there’s certainly less glory working in the IT shop of a non-software company, Good developers are still important. No one would disagree that the reverse of Joel’s statement is true: poor programmers can still sink a business.

Lastly, I think there is a corollary to the statement:

Or, roughly speaking, if you try to skimp on programmers, you’ll make crappy software, and you won’t even save that much money.

If you don’t properly utilize the programmers you do have (i.e. overburdening them, mis-applying their skills, putting them in roles better suited for other people), you will “make crappy software”. Where, in this case, “make crappy software” means incurring undue costs either in development, maintenance or support. And I think this phenomena is much more common in a non-software company where developers usually just get lumped into “IT”.

One big annoyance with Java is the lack of any way to use multi-line strings like a HERE document. No doubt Java is often used to query a database, yet a developer has to take a SQL statement and re-write it with “s and +s, like so:

<pre><code>
select sysdate
from dual
</code>

becomes

<pre><code>
String sql =
"select sysdate "+
"from dual";
</code>

Don’t forget the extra spaces! This is fine until your SQL statement becomes larger (which it will). While searching for a better way to handle this, I came upon the bug report at Sun for this issue. Here is Sun’s response to this issue:

This is yet another request for a syntactic sugar to save some user from typing. It’s not worth it.

Wow. Thanks for the understanding… No wonder people are looking for alternatives. Even Groovy supports Python-style multi-line strings! One possibility I found is Java+, a pre-processor. It integrates well with Ant and does its job, but source-code management becomes complicated—especially if you’re using an IDE.

If Sun finally broke down and added printf, the least it could do is consider adding multi-line strings.

I’ve developed a small application for integrating Spotlight and iChat called Buddy Spotlight. O’Reilly has more on the power of Spotlight in another article in their series on Tiger.

The focus is mostly on searching with Spotlight. While, this is certainly where Spotlight excels, I find myself using it day-to-day as a launcher.

Though I use the Weather widget everyday, I’ve generally been underwhelmed by Dashboard. Spotlight on the other hand is pretty amazing.

Announcing Buddy Spotlight the first iChat Spotlight integration! Use Buddy Spotlight to find and chat with your iChat buddies via Spotlight. When a buddy comes online, his or her screen name will become available in Spotlight. As buddies become unavailable or go away, their screen names will disappear from Spotlight. Selecting a buddy from Spotlight will start a conversation in iChat with that buddy.

Currently, Buddy Spotlight is a stand-alone application. In the next version it will most likely be an automatic “background” process ala Growl and accessible via System Preferences or perhaps a plugin (if I can manage it).

For more info and the download, check the project page.

Buddy Spotlight integrates iChat and Spotlight allowing you to search for online iChat buddies with Spotlight. Simply run Buddy Spotlight and when iChat is online, your buddies will show up in Spotlight. Selecting a buddy in Spotlight will immediately start a new conversation. That means you can start conversations with them from the Spotlight menu, perform queries on which buddies are online or integrate iChat into your workflow!

Download: BuddySpotlight-0.1.dmg

With the initial release, Buddy Spotlight is a stand-alone application. It will run in your dock, but has no real user interface. In the future, I hope to make it a “background” application or some sort of plugin.