Ted Naleid

Out of the box, groovy gives you a number of powerful methods to iterate over lists and maps:

def fibList = [1, 1, 2, 3, 5]
 
fibList.each { println it }  // prints all of the numbers in the list
assert fibList.any { it == 3 }
assert fibList.every { it > 0 }
assert fibList.collect { it - 1 } == [0, 0, 1, 2, 4]
assert fibList.findAll { it > 1 && it < 5 } == [2, 3]
assert fibList.find { it > 1 } == 2
assert fibList.inject("fib: ") { str, val -> str << val }.toString() == "fib: 11235"

That’s really nice if you’re working with raw lists and maps, but what if you have a class that doesn’t extend list or map? How hard is it to empower that class with the groovy iteration methods? If this were Java, you’d likely need to implement an interface with these methods (and throw a “not implemented” exception for those you didn’t feel like taking the time to implement).

Since it’s not Java, but groovy (and you’ve read the title of this blog post :), you know it’s easy!
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7 Comments » Posted by tednaleid / grails and groovy and shortcut

In his book, The Productive Programmer, Neal Ford talks about using shims or jigs to help productivity. Jigs and shims are quickly created little snippets of code that automate repetitive tasks or make them easy enough that they’re worth doing. They’re little tools that help make your job easier and let you avoid using brute force to solve all of your problems.

My home directory has a bin folder in it that’s continually getting new jigs added to it, and my zshrc file is an ever-expanding list of quick shell functions.

Recently, I’ve been doing a lot more work with Mercurial as the team that I’m on switched from Subversion a couple of months ago on our Grails project. The initial transition was a little difficult for some people, but I think just about everyone is pretty happy with the transition now that we’ve made it.

Something that has helped everyone get comfortable with more complex Distributed Version Control System like Mercurial has been the distribution of shims and jigs amongst the team. I thought these tips might be useful to others as well.
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1 Comment » Posted by tednaleid / command line and mercurial and osx and shortcut

Have you ever needed to test your website as if you were a dialup user? According to a Pew research study earlier this year 55% of Americans have broadband at home, and 10% still have dialup (with the remainder having no connectivity at home). This means that almost 20% of home browsers are on dialup. If you want to make sure that you’re app isn’t completely unusable for this population it could be useful to know how to slow your fat pipe down to dialup speeds.

Under the covers, Mac OSX uses a tool called “ipfw” (IP firewall) that allows for all kinds of fancy traffic shaping and piping. It’s a very unix tool though and it’s not the easiest thing to use if you’re not familiar with parsing through man pages.

There is a GUI called WaterRoof (http://www.hanynet.com/waterroof/) that makes things a little better, though it still isn’t the most intuitive thing.

Here are the steps to slow your connection down using WaterRoof.
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No Comments » Posted by tednaleid / command line and osx

I’m pretty impressed with the community that’s forming over at StackOverflow.com (Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolksy’s new developer focused Q&A startup).

I just asked a fairly detailed question about working with mercurial. Something that wasn’t (obviously) covered on the mercurial wiki, through googling, or in the mercurial handbook, and got a quality answer back in only 8 minutes. That’s fantastic for a general purpose development website and is a great start after only being open for a couple of weeks.

They’ve started up an interesting reward/karma system over there where they award badges (similar to achievements on Xbox360) for a bunch of different positive behaviors. A nice little token system that’s paired with “power-ups” at different point levels. It’s easy to get the first few badges with just a little participation on the website, and I can see how certain personality types that are common in engineers would get big rewards out of collecting these.

No Comments » Posted by tednaleid / Uncategorized

Just ran across Ubiquity over on on waxy.

It’s an alpha Firefox plugin that’s attempting to be a command line for the internet. It reminds me a little of yubnub, but quite a bit more powerful as it’s available on every page and is context sensitive.

Essentially, it has a set of built in commands (that you can add to an extend) and it’s aware of the current browser context, so if you have something highlighted, it can act on that subset of the current page.

Previously, I’ve been a heavy user of Firefox smart keywords, which allow you to assign aliases to bookmarks and type the aliases in the location bar. I’ve created smart keywords that allow me to search wikipedia, amazon, imdb and the dictionary. Ubiquity has all of these, plus a lot more built-in.

I’ve only been using it for a little bit, and there are some rough edges, but I think that there is quite a bit of promise here as well and thought that there might be a few other keyboard jockeys out there that would appreciate what Ubiquity is trying to do.

1 Comment » Posted by tednaleid / Uncategorized and command line and osx and shortcut

I ran into a couple of issues trying to clone a mercurial repository over ssh tonight. I’m documenting the solutions here in case they’re useful for anyone else (or me when I forget what I did in 6 months :).

The first issue was that I’m running ssh on a non-standard port and the repository does not reside in my home directory.
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No Comments » Posted by tednaleid / Uncategorized

I gave a presentation at work today on Distributed Version Control Systems and Mercurial. We’re currently using Subversion, and I’m nudging my co-workers into getting interested in the benefits of distributed version control over a centralized system.

5 Comments » Posted by tednaleid / command line and grails and mercurial and osx

Over on the RailsEnvy blog (the guys who made the “Rails vs. X commercials” last year), there’s an article that highlights some of the nice syntactic sugar that Groovy has that’s currently not available in Ruby.

I actually came to Groovy/Grails after working with Ruby/Rails for about a year. Both languages and framworks have their strengths and it’s nice to see cross-pollination of good ideas going both ways. From the comments, it sounds like Ruby 1.9 is getting some of the features that we’ve had in Groovy for a while.
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4 Comments » Posted by tednaleid / grails and groovy

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions!”
Now they have two problems. — Jaime Zawinski

There is a common and well-earned aversion in the Java world to regular expressions. Prior to Java 1.4, regular expressions weren’t even part of the core language. Post 1.4, using regular expressions is still a painful task of working with Pattern and Matcher objects. Lots of typing is involved to make anything happen. It’s difficult enough that most Java devs don’t end up using them enough to actually remember how to read a regular expression, and they need to dig up the JavaDocs (or cut and paste an old example), every time they want to use them.

This aversion has persisted into the Groovy community to a level that I haven’t seen in other dynamic scripting languages like Ruby, Python, and (obviously) Perl.

The current regexp docs that pop up when doing a google search are all outdated and don’t use any of the best techniques that are available in the groovy 1.5.X and 1.6-beta code that is now available. The recent Groovy Recipes book doesn’t have an entry for regular expressions in the index, and I was unable to find a single example of a regular expression in the entire book.

This is unfortunate because Groovy makes using regular expressions much easier than in Java. Under the covers, you’re still working with the same old Java Pattern and Matcher objects, but the Groovy syntax and additions to those classes are pleasant to work with.
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10 Comments » Posted by tednaleid / grails and groovy and unit testing

As my coworkers know, I’m a keyboard shortcut junkie. It’s a problem (and I need help), but I’d rather give you a taste of what I’ve been smoking and drag you down with me :).

Why only 3? Because people don’t learn a couple of pages of keystroke combinations at a time. But with only the 3 of the best keystrokes, there’s a good chance I’ll get you hooked and you’ll seek out some more.
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1 Comment » Posted by tednaleid / command line and osx and shortcut