Seb's weblog » Rants

Dear google reader staff

Sebastien Tanguy — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 09:03:13 +0000

Using the color yellow for the title of the current open article is a no-go. ‘kthxbye.

Rails 3.1 assets

Sebastien Tanguy — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 23:32:10 +0000

I’m generating Javascript from some CoffeeScript that has been “generated” by some ERB, because that’s the only way to get the path to assets. .js.coffee.erb ? What is wrong with you, people ?

Reading excel files in ruby: FAIL.

Sebastien Tanguy — Mon, 30 May 2011 11:51:26 +0000

So, I was given a set of Excel files that I need to transform in some way or the other. Given the target use, I want to write the script that will handle this in Ruby, but it fails in so many ways:

Parseexcel: Not sure if it is still maintained. Reads data sort of ok while looping rows with an iterator but not in random-access mode;
Roo: More pain than anything just to get is installed. Didn’t even bothered to try to make it work to access the data;

Jruby-poi: Apparently, the formulas that I need are not correctly (if at all) handled by this one.

Ok, thanks everyone, I think I’ll go back to CSV parsing.

Git at Breizhjug

Sebastien Tanguy — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 20:43:53 +0000

Earlier tonight, I went to a conference about Git given at the local JUG and I have to say that I do not fully agree with this presentation. One of the point was that the Build Manager role is over and that people having this kind of job should start to look for something different and all power to the developers. Maybe I have a different understanding of what a Build Manager is entitled to. To me, it is the management of branches, releases, build process and the overall good wealth of a software repository. And in my opinion, unlike what was said, I think Git is a great push and revival of the Build Manager and Integration role. Notwithstanding the fact that the usage pattern he described, a central repository with almost no branching, is, I think, very un-git-y.

Think about it. What is the main example of Git usage? The Linux kernel. What is the role of Linus Torvalds? Build Manager. He doesn’t code a line (almost) but just get patches from others to integrate them in the official tree. What is the other main usage of Git? Github: You can create (or fork) a project, have people develop features and create pull requests that you integrate if you wish to, picking whatever suits you.

Git (and other DCVS probably) is the best Build/Integration Manager tool: Developers can work however they want on their own repository and be empowered by fast versioning tools while a central role can coordinate and pick whatever features are available, in order to have the best resulting software (and eliminating the risk of a developer committing and pushing everything (for backup reasons) to the master server on a friday night, including unfinished and/or broken features).

Having a central repository where everybody pushes features without any control is just a bastardized (un) distributed revision control.

Compared to my real life usage of SVN in an enterprisey usage, the main selling point of Git (and probably other DCVS) is the ability to have local branches at a nearly zero cost (for either creation or switching), not only for a feature-branching workflow but simply to have at hand the various points of the life of a software (development version, latest/current release, maintenance releases…).

Add to that his stance regarding the DevOps movement and against system administrators, and people knowing me will understand why I hardly agree with him.

make money fast

Sebastien Tanguy — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 12:47:12 +0000

Create a page with 3-4 screenful of content and that takes 3-4 minutes to browse, add a timer to reload the page every minute. Instant Ad/page viewing multiplication!

For the fun, let the timer run even if there are videos on the page.

Breaking news! Somebody’s alive at Apple!

Sebastien Tanguy — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 17:36:15 +0000

... and can compile applications to PPC correctly. Thanks!

Until the latest 9.2.1 release, iTunes on my PPC mac used to be more sluggish than one can accept, and now it feels fine, I don’t have to wait 5-10 secs to navigate between views of my library anymore.
(or maybe that’s just the library index that went bad, and the installation corrected this. Time will tell)

Floating point not allowed

Sebastien Tanguy — Sun, 02 May 2010 11:00:35 +0000

This is the error that pops up when editing the (obviously) floating point value of the character or line spacing in the Mac OS Terminal.app preferences.

safari 4 and…

Sebastien Tanguy — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 20:27:40 +0000

I preferred when Safari was chewing up tons of memory. At least then it didn’t crash every 10 minutes on random web sites.

Sure, the usual culprit is most of time the flash plugin. Ok, that’s an external thing, that could be an excuse. But my guess is more on the thread management (which was already the subject of my previous post). Sometimes it would freeze loading a page when moving the mouse around. (I would bet on some kind of race condition between the cookies handling and the javascript interpreter).
If somebody wanted to bad mouth apple, one could say that they send out buggy software, crashing, being slow as molasses (I’m looking at you, iTunes), but mostly on older operating system releases, to push people to the upgrade way.
Bleh!

dear php, about array declaration

Sebastien Tanguy — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 21:41:33 +0000

So, the following is legal:

$foo = array(
  "bar" => 2*2
);
var_dump($foo);

But this is not:

class Foo {
  public static $foo = array(
    "bar" => 2*2
  );
}
var_dump(Foo::$foo);

I’m sure there is a reasonable explanation for this behavior, but I’m not sure I really want to hear about it.

safari 4 and threads

Sebastien Tanguy — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 23:10:49 +0000

Dear Lazyweb, why does Safari 4 takes up to 500 threads after a few days running? Not that I mind much the 5.6GB of virtual memory it takes or the almost 700 MB of real memory, but I’m just curious.