Rick's Tech Talk

In the world of Java development, you're bound to throw some projects into Eclipse that fill up the Problems View with so many issues that this view becomes unusable. That happened to me, and it quickly reduced my productivity. This view lets you find compilation and build issues that require fixing. The team leader on my project said "you've got a lot of errors there; let's filter them." He showed me how, and I was amazed. Apparently, this great and obvious piece of functionality was available, seemingly right under my nose!

I spend a lot of time in the DOS Command Window. And I spend a lot of time being curious about my Windows PATH. Examining the directories in your PATH can be a demoralizing exercise, but a Perl one-liner makes reading it very manageable.

My electronic notebook saved me today. I had a technical problem here at work, involving some old internal software. I vaguely remember using this software, but instead of rummaging through old e-mails or polling my co-workers I grepped my electronic notebook. I was able to find notes from the first time I used this software nearly two years ago. Rereading these put enough details into my head to be back "up to speed." I felt pretty smug. Electronic notebooks are my personal "best practice."

Shakespeare asked "What's in a name? A rose by any another name would smell just as sweet." But he never worked in XML.

A co-worker asked me how my current project was going, and I said it was a slog. He apparently hadn't heard of this word, but a few days later he asked me how the slog was going. I had to smile.

I am headed "on the road" soon. Part of my job involves doing "onsite client work". This means I do installations, configurations, development, even training. It's part of the typical technical consultant's life: visiting the corporate back offices and IT departments across the nation (and for some, around the globe).

Today I was in RPM Hell, a punishing landscape even when you know what you're doing. And unfortunately for me, I only barely know what I'm doing.

A few nights ago, I tried to upgrade the CMS that powers this BLOG (Drupal). A Drupal upgrade involves an intricate but manageable series of steps, and since I have UNIX shell access with my hosting provider, it should have been straight-forward. Instead, after finishing the upgrade, my site produced a blank screen with this message: "Zero Sized Reply."

Over the past few weeks I had some simple text transformations that had me reaching for Perl, but ended up doing directly in Vim. These were very small exercises in Regular Expression (RE) matching/replacing, and what struck me was how small differences in dialect can sometimes prevent you from making progress.

If you're in front of UNIX system, you should have access to sed, the UNIX "stream editor", which has a lot of utility to it. Here's a little idiom that comes in handy every now and then.