PragDave

CVS Log Messages to RSS

I’m increasingly finding RSS the best way to organize all the various streams of data that I have to digest every day. I already talked about converting my ToDo list to RSS. Mike Clark finally shamed me into simplifying another thing that was bugging me.

I manage a fair number of CVS repositories, and I like to track the activity in each. At the same time, I really don’t want to receive yet more e-mail. The answer was 50 lines of Ruby that take CVS loginfo messages and publish them back as an RSS file. Now I get a summary of all CVS activity in one place, and NetNewsWire updates it hourly. More details are over on Mike’s Project Automation site.

The Word DJ

This is trivial, but actualy seems to work surprisingly well. Bring up iTunes (or your audio player du jour), and type a random word into the search box. Then play all the matching tunes that it finds. For example, in my (somewhat boring) playlist, I just entered "river" and listened to three versions of Take me To the River, Somewhere Down the Crazy River, and Renée Fleming singing River Songs. Color names, animals, cities—just as long as you get a handful of matches, it doesn’t matter.

Want to Work for Amazon?

Then apparently we’re required reading! (And number one, no less…) Obviously a company with taste.

Weeding out Bugs

If programming is like gardening, then weeding has much to teach us about debugging.

Fueling Development

Laptops need power. Fuel cells generate power. Fuel cells burn organic fuels. Many developers have excess body mass. Seems like a perfect fit…

The New LaTeX Companion

I love the output produced by TeX, and I love the flexibility I get typesetting from plain text input. However, TeX isn’t trivial. The new edition of The Latex Companion is a godsend.