Ted Naleid

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.

No Comments » Posted by tednaleid / Uncategorized and command line and osx and shortcut

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.

The presentation starts with the pros and cons of distributed systems and gives a brief overview of the top 3 most popular DVCS systems:

• Git
• Bazaar
• Mercurial

I go into the details of why I chose to use Mercurial and describe some common usage patterns for people used to using Subversion.

I then did a live-coding session where I created a quick grails application, added it to a new repository, cloned the repository and pushed changes back and forth to show how mercurial handles merging and history.

I also suggest how developers can use mercurial as a “super client” to enable much of this power while still working on a team that uses subversion.
Continue Reading »

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

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.
Continue Reading »

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

There’s a blog post by one of the subversion developers talking about the future of subversion in a DVCS world.

I agree with parts of the post (and many of the comments) that subversion will continue to be around for a long time, but that more and more developers will start using tools like mercurial and git as a “super client” for a normal centralized version control repository.

Continue Reading »

3 Comments » Posted by tednaleid / command line and grails and osx and shortcut

I just finished the conversion over from a wordpress.com hosted blog to a wordpress blog that I’m running on a slicehost slice.

I think that it’s good to maintain your own linux server and get your hands dirty from time in Apache rewrite rules and php code.

The biggest reason for the switch is that the wordpress instance on wordpress.com completely mangles pasted grails and groovy code. It tries to make things pretty by changing a double dash to an mdash, single dashes to an ndash and double quotes to “smart” quotes (an oxymoron if there ever was one). Not to mention the manual &gt; and &lt; that you need to enter instead of > and <. These insidious changes make pasted code worthless and painful for readers to use.

After struggling with trying to get the formatting working correctly for a few weeks, I decided to host my own blog and use the great wp-syntax plugin.

I did need to do some reformatting on my old posts (as I don’t need to encode things anymore) and I believe that I have everything fixed now.  Let me know if you run across anything I’ve missed in the conversion.

No Comments » Posted by tednaleid / command line and grails and groovy

I’m often surprised when I run across developers who don’t have a variety of HTTP traffic monitoring apps as an integral part of their toolkit. When doing Grails development (or any web development really), being able to see the actual information that is going over the wire is invaluable.

Firebug

These days, more and more people are familiar with the amazing Firefox plugin Firebug. It allows you to view request and response information along with many other tricks.

Continue Reading »

7 Comments » Posted by tednaleid / command line and grails and osx

In a previous post I showed a script that I had created to allow the execution of a groovy script within a grails application context (including access to domain objects, controllers, services, etc). A couple of people reported a problem with the script where they were getting lazy initialization exceptions. I finally tracked this issue down to one where many-to-many relationships are being used between two domain classes.

Here is an updated script that fixes this issue by setting up the hibernate session in the Gant script.
Continue Reading »

13 Comments » Posted by tednaleid / command line and grails and groovy

Jesse over at Refactr posted a nice tip about using tab completion for the ssh command. It grabs host names and IPs out of the ssh known_hosts file.

That got me to thinking that it would be pretty useful to have tab completion of Grails commands available. At my company, we’ve written about 20 custom Gant scripts and it can sometimes be a problem to remember their names. Running “grails help” often takes too long, so I probably ls scripts once a day or so to remind myself if it’s clean-db or clear-db.

I did a quick google search and found that Scott Davis posted some instructions about a year ago (originally by Doyle@DoyleCentral).

It was a good start, but there were two issues I had with the solution. The first is that it only worked in bash (I prefer zsh) and the second is that it used a static list of script names stored in the GRAILS_HOME directory. Any new scripts, or app specific scripts would need to be manually added to the static list.

Grails Gant scripts can exist in 4 possible locations:

• $GRAILS_HOME/scripts
• $USER_HOME/.grails/scripts
• $PROJECT_HOME/scripts
• $PROJECT_HOME/plugins/*/scripts

After some playing around, I was able to come up with a bash script that allows for real-time completion of all four potential script repositories. $PROJECT_HOME is considered to be the current directory, so if you’re not in a grails app, you’ll only see completion scripts for the first two.

Continue Reading »

6 Comments » Posted by tednaleid / command line and grails and osx