Ben Allfree :: Painless Programming

TDD says: Do the simplest thing next.
NDD says: Do the thing you need next the simplest way you can.

I’ve had a need lately to detect duplicate text files, or strings, using any means possible. It turns out that Ruby was the best answer. Here’s a review of what finally worked.

I run a lot of Ruby daemons and web servers for them. Managing all those init.d scripts was harder until I realized that I didn’t have to learn bash/sh to do it. I could write my init.d scripts in Ruby. Well that improved things, but now I’m caught once again in the middle of rolling [...]

I’m building PrestoScript in Ruby and the more I get into it, the less I am in anyone’s framework but my own. Why is that? Is there a certain class of problems that are frameworkless? I’ve been thinking lately that generalized frameworks could be a farce. I always explain to clients that Ruby on Rails [...]

ActiveRecord is one of the hidden treasures of the Rails framework from which Rails derives so much of its productivity. It features beautiful uses of the Ruby language, especially Ruby’s dynamic programming features.
ActiveRecord also makes it easy to be inefficient though. Efficient data access is not something that happens magically, and if ActiveRecord is left [...]

I’ve been talking with more clients lately about Joomla. The Content Management System (CMS) is not dead, oh no, not dead at all. I’m not sure how PHP’s Joomla compares with a CMS like DotNetNuke, but my suspicion is that Joomla is far more widely used and probably has more modules and plugins too simply [...]

Today I was working with trying to map MIME types to file extensions. You can probably guess that the meaning of file extensions overlaps. The MIME type system was an attempt to fix that by providing more specific information about the data format. Unfortunately we couldn’t get that right either.

I was talking to a client today who has business plans that revolve around harvesting data from web sites. How do you do it? Here’s my step-by-step process:
1) Crawl for links
2) Fetch link content
3) Index link content
4) Transform link content
If you design your system that way, you end up with something that can be scaled [...]