"move a little, do a lot"

Have just stumbled across a very cool productivity app for OSX. I’m already a big fan of Quicksilver, and FlyGesture builds on that style of functionality albeit from your trackpad.

FlyGesture is activated like Exposé or Dashboard, bringing up a transparent window of “guides” to move your mouse through. Moving your mouse through the guides lets [...]

Quick tip: split a large file into smaller files

Needed to break a large file containing many messages, each message separated on a new line into many new small files containing only one message per file … Started thinking in perl, but almost looked past the Unix split command:

split -l 1 -a 3 bigfile.txt smallfile_

-l ‘n’ will put ‘n’ lines per file
-a ‘n’ defines [...]

Use of dashboards for performance tuning

Jason Gorman describes in his article 6 requirements for the practical use of dashboards in performance related testing.

As a performance tester, I find that I often need to provide snapshot summaries of systems performance ala dashboards. The key requirement imposed is normally timeliness and relevance of data being presented.

So sticking with Jason’s requirements, how do [...]

Sharing data safely between Java threads

Am really starting to enjoy the power and portability of using Java in my load testing efforts, especially when the environments in which you work are often limited in terms of tool sets you’re allowed to use. For example the current Solaris environment I work in doesn’t have a C compiler native to the OS, [...]

Humour that only cat lovers can appreciate

I don’t normally blog on the personal side of things, but this video I certainly identify with. Absolute classic!

65 thousand rows, the end of the Excel universe

It has long since annoyed me and no doubt numerous others, the inability of Excel to get beyond 65,536 rows of data or more simply 2^16 …

A deft upgrade to Office 2007 sees an improvement in this limitation and am now able to have at least 1M rows of data. This is good news for [...]

Turning off Mac OSX text anti aliasing selectively

I’ve been experimenting with a couple of different IDEs lately for Java development, and the two at the top of my list are NetBeans and Eclipse. A frustrating thing is that Mac OSX tends to ignore anti aliasing rules for text in these applications. I think it has something to do with the way the [...]

Installing the CVS bundle for TextMate for Mac OSX

More for my own reference than anything else, here is how you install the CVS bundle for TextMate using a subversion client.

1. If you don’t already have a subversion, try the precompiled version here.

2. Set the LC_CTYPE variable to use UTF-8
export LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8

3. Make a bundles directory if you have not already installed others
mkdir -p /Library/Application\ [...]

Custom TextMate commands for ruby and scp

If you’re a Mac user and you’re not using TextMate, then hurry up and join the bandwagon. This is a powerful text editor for Mac OSX, which I use for just about any type of project be it C#, Java, PHP, Perl or even COBOL. What makes this tool so powerful is your ability to [...]