Ted Naleid

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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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.

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.
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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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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.

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There’s a tip over on lifehacker that shows how to open a new window for an application that has no windows currently open by cmd-tabbing to it and then holding down the option key before releasing command.

This didn’t seem like that great of a tip to me at first, because cmd-N brings up a new window in just about any application that this will work for. Then I noticed the first comment where the poster noted that holding option down will also unminimize any minimized windows for that application. Something that I didn’t previously know how to do in native OSX after many google searches.

The native ways of using the keyboard to get it unminimized that I knew of were either kludgy (ctrl-F3 to select the dock and then using the arrows to find the minimized app and hitting return), or required an external app like Witch.

I’ve gotten into the habit of hiding windows (cmd-H) rather than minimizing, but this might get me to start using minimize again.

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.

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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.

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With Groovy built-in, Grails is one of the best platforms running on the JVM for doing unit testing.

One limitation that it does have is that the current testing scripts seem to be oriented more towards creating test reports rather than giving the user the quick feedback that is helpful when doing Test Driven Development.

Here’s an example of the output that you get on a failed test after running “grails test-app”:

-------------------------------------------------------
Running 1 Integration Test...
Running test BookTests...
testBookHasExpectedTitle...FAILURE
Integration Tests Completed in 622ms
-------------------------------------------------------
[junitreport] Transform time: 944ms
 
Tests failed: 0 errors, 1 failures, 0 compilation errors. View reports in /Users/ted/Documents/workspace/foobar/test/reports

Ok, that’s great…a test failed. But why? Where is the stacktrace and any output generated during the test?

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