two firsts

One, I wrote code with GOTOs. I'm setting up a highly constrained dev environment for my current contract. It has to be Windows XP, and it can't use cygwin. There are at least two different builds I have to run: one uses ant 1.6.5 and a vendor-specific implementation of jdk 1.4.2; the other uses Sun's jdk 1.4.2 and ant 1.7.0. In bash land, I'd just write a setup-foo.sh script and be done with it. In pure-windows windows, that's not going to fly. (Even if I could use cygwin or mingw, ant command-line parameters in cmd.exe get really messy when invoked from bash. You can only do backtick cygpath -w so many times before going insane.) So, finally, a generation after it was released, I had to learn a little bit of dos scripting. I started with a book called "Microsoft Windows Shell Script Programming for the Absolute Beginner" and I felt like an absolute beginner. How do I express conditional logic? [if cond ( ... ) else ( ... ) actually kind of easier than bash] How do I accept command-line parameters? [%1%, %2%, not unlike bash]. How do I call procedures? OMFG. CALL :SetupFoo. How do I return from procedures? Aiee! GOTO. I got to experience the joy of debugging code with GOTOs without an interactive debugger. Thanks, but no. Props to all of you who lived through that (hi, Pop) but I'm way happier with structured programming. Object-oriented programming, now, that's for the young kids... (Just kidding -- people my age can handle OOP; aspect-oriented programming is for the young kids.)
Two, I spontaneously generated a really nice roast chicken recipe. Occasional post-workout brunches at Boulette's Larder have encouraged me to experiment with embarassing amounts of butter and carmelized onions. Spud has been delivering a frozen organic bone-in chicken breast each week, and they were stacking up in my freezer; plus Trader Joe's had some really cute multicolor pearl onions. And there are insane cranberry sauces everywhere these days; I went with one from Bi-Rite that included apples and ginger. Combine that with my housemate's well-seasoned cast iron pan and a gas oven... Mmm. Yummies.

aptana studio upgrades the IDE paradigm

Aptana Studio is a sweet little IDE, but it gets even sweeter now that they've added in Jaxer and Cloud.
My development life has been veering away from Java and towards JavaScript lately. I'd been coding in IntelliJ IDEA 7.04. It's got intense suites of features for java web development. IntelliJ IDEA 7 is pretty darn nice for javascript, css, and html; until Wednesday, it was my editor of choice. (Version 8 has added some promising javascript support, but I haven't upgraded yet.)

But Aptana Studio has delivered a game-changer: the IDE provides integrated deployment to cloud servers. This is sick, sick, sick. Usually, in order to make a web site available publicly, a developer has to sign up with a hosting provider, register a domain, point DNS to the right name servers, configure Apache, and upload files to the right place, configure Apache some more, etc. That's not rocket science, but it's not what I want to spend my time doing. I want to sit down in the morning and have a proof-of-concept site running by midnight. (Registering a domain and provisioning a site usually takes at least 24 hours.)

Aptana Studio delivered my one-day web 2.0 proof-of-concept deployment goal. Here's how!

1. Aptana provides a virtual hosting service, Aptana Cloud.
2. I can sign up for and provision a cloud server from within Aptana Studio; they've got a brilliant 21-day-free-trial for a cloud server.
   
3. Standard stuff I'd expect from a virtual hosting provider: Aptana gives me a subdomain, name of my choice, and handles routing. At install time, I can choose which servers I wan to install.
4. I write some javascript and html code -- pretty standard stuff.
   
5. In one operation, inside the IDE, I deploy my site to the cloud. Boom. There it is.
6. I edit the code. Another cloud sync, and my modified code is running on the remote site.
   
7. I can monitor my cloud's logs within the IDE.
   

Really, that's more like ten minutes -- so I got to spend the rest of the day actually writing code. Which is what I'm going to do now -- my review of Jaxer will have to wait.

a lovely error message

I'm playing with hudson, an extensible continuous integration engine. One of its optional tasks is to archive build artifacts. Using the ant syntax, I told it to archive everything named *.war in the dist directory. When I entered that string into its lovely ajax configuration page, Hudson immediately informed me of a problem:
'dist/**/*.war' doesn't match anything: even 'dist' doesn't exist
The best part of this error message is "even 'dist' doesn't exist."
I could explain what's so cool about this, but if you don't know now, you'll never care, even if I do explain it. If you do see what's cool about it, go check out hudson.

gowebtop calendar: my current project

gowebtop.com (free registration required) is now live with a preview of my current project, a calendar application within the gowebtop framework. For the highlights, see the gowebtop blog. I worked on this project as a freelancer through Elastic Process, a San Francisco software consultancy, for our client, Laszlo Systems.

give them what they (say they) want

I feel guilty about walking past a hungry person and not helping them get some food, but I find it hard to believe that everyone claiming to be hungry in downtown San Francisco is only craving nutritional sustenance. An easy solution: when approached by a "hungry" person, I hand them some actual food! I usually carry a snack with a long shelf life in my backpack: a baggie of nuts, a chocolate bar, some dried fruit. So when I'm approached by someone who says they're hungry, I offer them an actual treat looking just as yummy and nutritious as it was on the shelves of Whole Foods.
The reaction I get to such offers is illuminating. An aggressive beggar in the big Westfield mall downtown literally recoiled at the offer of a bag of grape Clif Blox.. Sorry, buddy, but you need detox, not glucose. And yeah: the homeless community knows exactly where to go for free detox services, and they talk about it with more respect and dread than prison. (How do I know? Because I've talked to people who got sober for good after their 15th or 20th time through Ozanam.)
I'm not saying that I can cure poverty or drug addiction or homelessness with a 300 calorie snack. I'm just saying, here's an ethical way to cope with pleas from which our society should not ignore. Give them what they say they want.