Peter Mac

I’ve worked on a bundle of web based applications over the years and time and time again I’ve seen the recurring problem of the slash. Yes, we’ve probably all seen it in one or more forums where the apostrophe some user entered, probably with the name O’Brein ends up as O\Brein.

I’ve just finished reading a little gem of a book. It’s called ‘The Martian Principles for Successful Enterprise Systems’ with a subtitle of ’20 Lessons Learned from NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Mission’. The author is Ronald Mak.

If you are a remote worker or, like me get some work done on the train on the way to/from your office, you’ll appreciate the need for set up of a local and remote source code repository, This allows you to develop using your laptop/netbook, check in your changes locally and when you arrive at the mothership later, you can synchronise your local repository with the remote one ensuring all your changes are available for other developers. This article shows how to set up git for both a mothership type repository (let’s call it the remote repository) and a local version on your own laptop.

I’ve been working on a project that requires a good deal of test data to verify functionality. It involves train timetables with many lines, trains, stations etc. To help in uploading data for testing and development I’ve been using the rake db:seed command.

I have a database that is populated based on events that happen in real-time. I wanted to view the output of reports from that database on a regular basis (every 30 seconds). I found a lovely little gem called ‘rufus-scheduler’ that does the trick nice and neatly. Here’s how it worked for me.

I have been using subversion for a number of years and it wasn’t until I had seen and sampled the simplicity and power of git that I decided once and for all to bite the bullet and migrate all my subversion repositories to git.

1. Return back to the local machine and add reference to the new ‘remote’ repository from the base directory of the project.

   $ git remote add remote ssh://git at git.petermac.com/usr/local/share/gitrepos/myprojectname].git

Given a user with sudo (but not root) access on a remote box, the following deploy.rb script will perform a capistrano deploy of a ruby application:

Assumptions:

1. You’re using ‘git’. Although svn can be used, the script targets a git setup.