tools

• Tue, 12 Feb 2013

  Three Sets of Chisels Followup

  Posted: Tue, 12 Feb 2013

  I had a great followup to yesterday’s post that happened over IM today.

  I was wondering what command you’d use to grep through .xls file on linux?

  That’s a moment where my knowledge of my favorite tools helped me to eliminate those tools quickly from consideration. The text processing tools of the unix shell are terrible for searching through binary files like Excel spreadsheets.

  If I had a single Excel spreadsheet with a ton of data to extract, I might convert it to a CSV file to then manipulate it further in my shell, but even then I’d probably just open it with Libre Office or Gnumeric and call it a day.

  What if there were tens or hundreds of spreadsheets to sift through?

  1. I’d talk to one of my Windows + .Net friends to see if PowerShell would work.

  2. or ask them about C# APIs to do the same if PowerShell failed us.

  3. or as a very last resort look to use an open source tool to do the necessary ETL work.

  It’s strange writing open source and last resort in the same sentence. I’m the weirdo that kept my music collection encoded with Ogg Vorbis for most of a decade, and I haven’t played a commercial computer game since Unreal Tournament ran on my old Gentoo desktop. Maybe it’s old age that’s moving me from zealous to pragmatic, but I think I’ve realized that work isn’t about software for the sake of software. It’s about software for the sake of getting shit done.

  Three Sets of Chisels Followup
  • programming
  • tools
• Sun, 10 Feb 2013

  Three Sets of Chisels

  Posted: Sun, 10 Feb 2013

  I was pissed (with myself) that I had three sets of chisels to maintain. Three sets to store. Three sets that would set me back in my efforts to master one set of chisels. —Christopher Schwarz from Tools are a Burden

  We moved from a fairly modern 2000 square foot suburban home to a 900 square foot 1928 bungalow in 2008, and the drastic reduction in square footage quickly cured me of my hardware pack rat habit. My new office didn’t allow for my DEC Alphastation, my SGI Indigo Iris, or my Sun IPX, nor my stack of obsolete x86 carcasses.

  The silliest part? I bought those classics long after they were past their prime. I used the IPX as a router at my parents’ house for a while, but for the most part the systems were there for the sake of coolness or nostalgia for unix years past.

  Another move and easier access to virtualized hardware at home, work, and “in the cloud” further cured me of my desire to hoard hardware. Hardware today is so powerful that I’ve even removed myself from the 6-12 month upgrade treadmill.

  I wish I was equally discerning with my software tools, but I’m prone to excitement over the latest and greatest. The professional cabinet maker can bet that one trunk of quality tools will last a lifetime, but we don’t have that luxury in the quickly changing field of software. Despite this, there are some tools that get called into action more often than others, and they tend to be long lasting cross platform tools that only get faster and more capable with years of practice: unix, emacs, python.

  With a small set of default tools that are nearly ubiquitous, I can solve most problems fairly quickly, and I’ll quickly know if I need to use different tools all together for a given problem.

  If construction (not collecting) is your goal, find some way to limit yourself - a tool chest is one way - so you can be a better builder than you are a consumer. —Christopher Schwarz from Tools are a Burden

  Three Sets of Chisels
  • programming
  • tools