Laptops can be useful for day-to-day development, but a more powerful machine is required when it comes to working with Very Large Databases (VLDBs) and Big Data. Having some background in building PCs, I recently put together a powerful desktop for my own needs that could handle my current project and any future projects involving large scale databases. I learned quite a bit about the current generation of hardware available, mostly by sifting through forums and blog posts from gamers that build high performance gaming machines.
Simon Yorke, who builds record players in his shop in Spain, on why he doesn’t use machines to create his record players: “We make everything by hand. Yes, we have machines; we have test operators. But, we make everything by hand. Why? If you manufacture everything, in a factory, using computers, everything comes out exactly [...]
Nick Bradbury had a blog series some time ago called “Simplicity Ain’t So Simple”, where he covered tips for simple software feature design. Here are the posts in case you missed them, as they have been a great reminder for me while designing for a new startup: Part I: Decide What to Hide Part II: [...]
I read an interesting thread on The Business of Software about switching from C# to Ruby on Rails. Here are some of my favorites: I tried Rails before and it felt like php (editing in Notepad and using command-line tools). When Rails comes up with an IDE like Visual Studio + Intellisense, I’ll consider it. [...]
I can recall when I first picked up a Palm Vx how excited I was to start writing code for it. I had one of the early versions of Java on it (from JavaOne ’99), but found most of what I needed to write a complete Palm application was missing. So, I picked up one [...]
InfoQ is a new service by Floyd Marinescu that provides news feeds about all that is happening across Java, Ruby, .Net, Agile, and SOA (Think of TSS for multiple platforms). This is great for technical leads that have to deal with multiple technologies on their projects (like myself) or those that want to keep up [...]
I was on the hunt for a Rails cheatsheet and found a blog posting with links to quite a few cheatsheets, done by Dave Child. Others that I’ve found along the way: Blaine Kendall’s Rails PDF Sheet (14 pages) Scriptaculous PDF Sheet from Slash7 Rails Forms from Slash 7 Rails Migration PDF from Garrett Snider [...]
I stumbled across a great resource for using regular expressions to validate different types of data. Here is a subset of the list that I found most useful: EMAIL: ^[\w\-\+\&\*]+(?:\.[\w\-\+\&\*]+)*@(?:[\w-]+\.)+[a-zA-Z]{2,7}$ CREDIT CARD: ^((4\d{3})|(5[1-5]\d{2})|(6011))-?\d{4}-?\d{4}-?\d{4}|3[4,7]\d{13}$ MAC ADDRESS : ^([0-9a-fA-F][0-9a-fA-F]:){5}([0-9a-fA-F][0-9a-fA-F])$ IP ADDRESS : ^\b((25[0-5]|2[0-4]\d|[01]\d\d|\d?\d)\.){3}(25[0-5]|2[0-4]\d|[01]\d\d|\d?\d)\b$ REASONABLE DOMAIN NAME: ^([a-zA-Z0-9]([a-zA-Z0-9\-]{0,61}[a-zA-Z0-9])?\.)+[a-zA-Z]{2,6}$ For Ruby, you can use String::match method to determine if [...]
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