mike.mainguy

My one sentence evaluation: If you MUST use Internet Exploder then Gliffy is your solution, otherwise download Chrome (or other html5 capable browser) and use use Lucid Charts. The long Version: As a long time Visio user, it used to be one of two microsoft tools I missed when working on linux/Mac. Beyond not really working on linux, it's just too damn expensive for the amount of time I spent using it. I'm an occasional user who needs to slap something together that is only slightly more professional than a napkin (although I've used napkins on occasion) or ascii art for illustrating network diagrams or software architectural components. In the last 5 years or so, a couple of online tools have emerged that let you do this inside your web browser. I've used and been a paying customer of both Gliffy and Lucidcharts and will say they are both pretty good tools and if you're someone like me who like me, they can meet your needs. Lucidcharts is a better put...

There are two deployment models: push and pull. In a "Pull" deployment model, the individual servers contact a master server, download their configuration and software, and configure themselves. In a "Push" model, a master server pushes the configuration and software to the individual servers and runs commands remotely. While neither technique is right or wrong, they both have some specific advantages and disadvantages that you should understand when making a decision. In the ruby hosting world, an example of a "push" deployment is heroku , while Engine Yard is an example of a "pull" type deployment. In the Pull model, each server has information about how to obtain it's configuration, when it boots (or whatever the configuration triggering event happens to be) it can continue to proceed without intervention from the master server. In the Push model, because the master server is orchestrating things, it will typically need to have a c...

I read a blog post a while back comparing groupon to a ponzi scheme, but I think it's more accurately Tulip Mania . I discount the value Groupon can have for a business who is missing traffic to their store and struggling to figure out how a business gets a loyal customer from this tactic. As a business, it seems to me Groupon will only create disloyal customers and as a business, the best I can hope for from is a sort of ebay-like place to either dump excess inventory or fill in slow periods where I have trouble getting customers into my place of business. When looking at the fundamentals, Groupon has only overhead. The only arguable asset is their consumer base and I think it provides no intrinsic value as these customers represent a pool of people who will buy something for 50% or more off. I hate to break the bad news, but those people aren't hard to find. Worse yet, the switching cost from groupon to "whatever else" is almost zero. For Groupon to survi...

For folks employed in "traditional" jobs, there is a common event in the modern age that raises collective blood pressure. It's know as "annual enrollment" and it is a period of time where most employees change/adjust various benefits offered by their company. In particular, medical insurance is a common thing to adjust. While this is normal a cost of doing business, I think many folks underestimate the real costs of switching. Sure, there's the cost for the HR department to go out to 20 different brokers and try to get the "cheapest/best" plan for their employees, but there're also a number of hidden costs. For example, every year my health plan changes, I spend at least 5-10 hours futzing around with various billing changes as well as filling out forms etc. When I quote 10 hours, many folks say "you're crazy, it only took me 15 minutes". I think these folks, greatly underestimate the amount of time spent because they...

Engineyard and heroku are two widely used ruby on rails hosting providers. A common question is: Which one should I use? The answer everyone gives: It depends! Having deployed the same application in both environments, I thought I'd highlight some of the important differences. #1 "Ease of Use" Heroku blows engineyard away. you install the gem and can deploy your application in minutes. There are also commands you can run on your local machine to get information about your application. Engineyard is moving forward, but it is still pretty technical. It's really easy if you have a public github repo, but anything other than that starts to get "more complicated" quickly. #2 "Architecture" Engineyard gives you a "real" virtual machine. This means you've actually got a single CPU virutal host that you ssh into and effectively do whatever you want. Heroku gives you a sandbox with walls around it, and I think it's a...

One common theme in the development world is the vast difference in productivity between individual practitioners. Among folks with similar backgrounds, some are easily 10x more productive at delivering functional software. Software development is obviously not alone in having to deal with this, but I there are some particular attributes of software development that make dealing with this mismatch particularly difficult. The first problem is that many people seem to have the mistaken impression that if one has developers who produce output, then the output is simply the sum of the individual outputs. This is just not true by any reasonable measure and is a contributing factor to the reason many outsourcing projects end up a smoldering mess. Mathematically, each developer adds a cumulative amount of drag if the software they are writing needs to communicate with software other folks on the team are writing. As an example, suppose we have 1 developer working on a project, and he h...

We recently noticed some pretty interesting changes in ruby 1.9.2. It appears that require no longer allows relative paths and ruby is now more unicody. This means if you are in a directory with two files "foo.rb" and "bar.rb", you can no longer simply type "require 'foo'" inside bar.rb to use foo. Now, you need to either do "require './foo'" or "require_relative 'foo'". A potentially more difficult change is in how ruby handles character encodings. For the most part, this isn't a problem inside "normal" code and strings, but things get dicey if you start reading text files off a filesystem. This is especially dicey if you're doing this and you're on a mac AND you work with western european data AND it involves money. If you save a file with a currency symbol on a mac, then subsequently read the file on a machine (or a tool) that uses/assumes utf-8, you will not see €, you will see...

I recently stumbled across a problem with git that is going to cause no manner of headache for the uninitiated. Git repositories are fundamentally insecure and the audit trail is dodgy when folks are either #1 intentionally malicious or #2 ignorant to how git works. For the back story, I have a number of github accounts, one is used for code I use while blogging, another is for internal projects at work, and yet another was for a client I was working on. A while back I noticed that I had commits that apparently were done with my "client" github account that showed up in my blog. Confused, I verified my public/private key pairs against what was in github and was truly stumped as to how this was happening. While scratching my head, I remembered that there is the concept of a "global" config in git and ran the following command: git config --global -l Uh oh! it turns out I had a global config set... When I went back and looked, EVERY commit I had done was as...

I just read a great blog post about what it costs to write AAA games and the author used a term I love called " Bowfinger Syndrome ". Bowfinger is a movie starring Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy in which Bobby Bowfinger (Martin) tries to make a movie with only $2000. While a very funny movie, it hits home in the software development world in many ways. Too often, software projects fail because folks grossly underestimate the costs associated and then spend time trying to work around the lack of budget to actually finish the project. There are a number of reasons for this and I'll give a quick list: #1 A prototype of some software was written and someone extrapolates the costs to build the "real software". This is a mistake, prototypes are like hollywood cutout towns... they may LOOK like real software, but they don't necessarily WORK like real software. If you're eyeballing the hours necessary to build a prototype and trying to estimate effort ...

For newcomers to javascript, it might come as a surprise that there is no sleep method. Worse yet, if you search the internet, you'll find all manner of really... really bad ways to simulate this. One of my favorite "rotten tomatoes" is something like this: alert('start'); var date = new Date(); var curDate = null; do { curDate = new Date(); } while(curDate-date Note, I borrowed this horrible example from stack overflow . If you're lucky, that example will not completely crash your browser. A much better solution is something like this: alert('start'); setTimeout(function() {alert('finish')},5000); The obvious problem is that if you truly want to simply pause for 5 seconds in the middle of a really long method, the anonymous function is not going to help you out very much.. unless you do something like this alert('start'); //lots of code var a = 'foo'; setTimeout(function(){ alert(a); ...

OK, the title is a ruse, you can't easily add methods to java classes at runtime. But I'll illustrate how to do it in javascript and ruby. For example, lets supposed we have a javascript object(function) and we want to add a say_hello method to it: var myObj = {}; myObj.say_hello() // doesn't work myObj.say_hello = function() { return "hello"; } myObj.say_hello(); //works This is because javascript treats functions as first class citizens and doesn't even bother with the concept of "classes" as something other than special functions. Same thing in ruby: myObj = Object.new myObj.say_hello # doesn't work def myObj.say_hello "hello" end myObj.say_hello # works There's a subtle difference here. The ruby syntax seems a little strange to me and it wasn't obvious how to do this. In javascript, it's very obvious that you're assigning a new function to the attribute (that you're adding). In ruby, using def in...

Suppose we need to create a counter that starts at zero, increments to 4 and then restarts at 0 (A "you can't count to five" counter). There many ways to do this, but a straightforward way someone might do this in javascript would be: var global_count = 0; function increment() { global_count ++; if (global_count > 4) { global_count = 0; } } This is pretty common for beginners and works until your systems start to get complicated and your global_count gets clobbered or multiple people need to have counters. For multiple counters, one might start with a naming convention and add variables like "global_count2, global_count3" and et cetera. This doesn't solve the problem of the variables getting clobbered in other parts of your system and it likely makes it worse because now there are more permutations to mix up and accidentally change the value of. As an example of what I'm talking about var global_count = 0; function increme...

OK, the title of this post is a lie... git is decidedly NOT for dummies. Git is more for your really smart mentally gifted people OR for people who are working on exceeding complex software projects that have complicate merging and revision history requirements. Neither of these groups should be dummies or you will have a serious problem being effective. For the context of this tutorial, a "dummy" is defined as somebody who knows and understands how to use SVN or CVS in a team environment. So if you're still reading, I will walk you through the simplest workflow I can discover for git that work and doesn't cause too many complications. For the sake of simplicity, we're going to assume you're working on a project hosted at github that already exists. I've created a public repo if you'd like to try along at home. Assuming you already have git installed, you should be able to "clone" the repository to your local machine by issuing the ...