productive.dk

Atlantic Dominion Solutions has posted a JRuby on Rails screencast. It is based on their excellent first JRuby tutorial, Get JRuby onto the Rails on Mac OS X.

Someone told me that watching a video is more fun that reading something. So much for the library I have sitting here then. However, in that spirit, we are happy to release the first in a series of screencast tutorials.

Also, while you’re there make sure you check out part two of their JRuby tutorial: Deploy Your First JRuby on Rails App to Glassfish.

I just found gqlplus today when looking for a way to enable command-line history in the SQL*Plus command that comes with Oracle’s Instant Client:

gqlplus is a drop-in replacement for sqlplus, an Oracle SQL client, for UNIX and UNIX-like platforms. The difference between gqlplus and sqlplus is command-line editing and history, plus table-name and column-name completion. As you know if you have used sqlplus, it is notoriously difficult to correct typing errors and other mistakes in your SQL statements. sqlplus does give you ability to use external editor to edit a statement, but only the last statement you typed. gqlplus solves this problem by providing the familiar command-line editing and history as in tcsh or bash shells, and table/column-name completion, while otherwise retaining compatibility with sqlplus.

To install on OS X, simply download, untar and do the usual configure/make ritual, with --disable-shared passed to configure (see this page for details but note that it’s no longer necessary to patch gqlplus):

$ ./configure --disable-shared
$ make

and then move the binary to /usr/local/bin. You may want to pass -d to gqlplus, to disable column-name completion, as it can take quite a while to load the meta data required, but otherwise gqlplus is truly a joy to use.

Update 2009-03-10:
If you want to substitute all calls to sqlplus with gqlplus, add an alias to your .profile (or .bash_profile):

alias sqlplus='gqlplus'    # with auto-completion 
alias sqlplus='gqlplus -d' # without auto-completion

Reading In Praise of the Zune? over at MacUser, the last paragraph really cracked me up:

That’s right, the Cult of Mac is advocating a product that Mac users can’t even use. I hear next week they’re doing a special on anti-virus apps. I hear that OS X version of Norton AntiVirus is really the pits. It never finds anything.

My new MacBook Pro finally arrived last Friday. Here are my first experiences from life on the other side:

• Last Friday: Unpacking, installing essential software. Everything just works?!
• Saturday and Sunday: Installing more software, moving all my work-related files over. Had some great laughs with the famliy while playing with iSight and Photo Booth. Front Row rocks. No troubles yet—it just freakin’ works! I’m slowly realizing how much I’ve gotten used to software not working.
• Monday: First day working with the MBP. Had the old Windows laptop in the bag, just in case. Didn’t need it, though. OS X found the office network-printer all by itself, it just showed in the list of printers. Way to go!
• Tuesday: Left the Windows laptop at home. The co-workers might be a little tired by now of me showing something oh-so-cool, every 10 minutes. Frederik mentioned the MBP looks awfully nice together with the Fritz Hansen table and the Arne Jacobsen chairs in the conference room.
• Wednesday: I decided to retire my almost new and very buggy Windows Mobile powered Qtek phone, and replace it with a Sony Ericsson from Apple’s list of supported Bluetooth phones. Need I mention that Bluetooth syncing just works perfectly? Also today Apple released Boot Camp. I installed Windows XP and in an odd way it feelt like I did something terribly wrong, so I decided to only set aside 5 gigs of diskspace for Windows. I’d still prefer VMware or something similar, over dual booting.
• Thursday: I migrated over my Outlook calendar and contacts in preparations for completely retiring the Windows laptop. Finally figured out that there’s a prerelease build of Firefox 1.5.0.2 available as a universal binary know as Deer Park and it’s way faster than the PPC build of Firefox 1.5.0.1. I was actually a bit disappointed by the speed of the MBP, as I spend a great deal of time in Firefox, but not after installing Deer Park, yay!

• This Friday: Blogging about the past week…