Agile Business Word

26.09.08

Filed Under: agile, thoughts with 0 Comments

Is a fact that one of the greatest buzzwords at the moment is “Agile”. Is amazing how many companies starts trainning services without any earlier experience and another ones adopt “Agile” term without know anything about. And it just to say “I´m Agile, we are the top on delivery software”.

Some companies believe that working with a Task Board plus teams having daily meeting will solve all the problems or becomes the company as a “Agile Company”. Agile is about culture, it isn´t just about taking some practices and becomes a Agile firm, more than this “Agile” is about values. The practices are changing and evoluting everytime, but the values still there.

Start a Agile initiative in smalls or new companies is easier comparing to conservative or big companies. I guess when you have less people to treat and less root culture involved it´ll become easy, but try to do it in a bank. Can you imagine how difficult is to implement Agile practices in this kind of company?

There aren´t anything wrong with methodologies or practices, they are there to support you in a better way. The greatest problem is called people. As who sell services as who are start a agile initiative just behind a buzzword.

Working with M$-Excel Data using Ruby with ParseExcel

05.09.08

Filed Under: programming, ruby with 1 Comment

Did you face anytime with a job that you must get information from M$-Excel or any WorkSheet files?

If your answer is yes, ParseExcel is an easy way to do it. ParseExcel is a translation of a Perl package with the same name for Ruby.

Let´s suppose you have a Contact Sheet which contains all your contacts. A day you wake up totally boring to manage your contacts in that worksheet and decide import it to a System. This worksheet has two columns, the first one contains the “Name” of contact and the second one has the “Phone Number”. To proceed the import we must read the Sheet data and put it on the new repository.

To start you should download the resource file on http://download.ywesee.com/parseexcel/parseexcel-0.5.1.1.tar.bz2. After that decompress the file on your File system and then install the package as follow :

  $ruby install.rb config
  $ruby install.rb setup
  $ruby install.rb install

Once you install the package without errors, create a class here i named it as GetExcel(get_excel.rb).

To use ParseExcel you must declare in the beginning the file require 'parseexcel'.

For the next step, we´ll start open the file.

  workbook = Spreadsheet::ParseExcel.parse(/path/of/file/Contacts.xls)

The chunk above start to read the file and return into an object related information data. It may be either one or more worksheets. In our case we´ll work with only one.

After we get the worksheet data, let´s choose a worksheet to work.

  worksheet = workbook.worksheet(0)

Now you can iterate over all rows and get the data we are expecting.


 worksheet.each do |line|
  column_name = line[0].to_s
  column_phone = line[1].to_s
 end

Our final code will seems some like that :


#Some details was hidden....
require 'parseexcel'
require 'my_model'

class GetExcel

 def initialize(path_file)
  @workbook = Spreadsheet::ParseExcel.parse(path_file)
  @worksheet = @workbook.worksheet(0)
 end

 def import_and_insert
  @worksheet.each do |line|
   column_name = line[0].to_s
   column_phone = line[1].to_s

   my_model = MyModel.create(
    :name => column_name,
    :phone => column_phone
   )
  end
 end
end

ParseExcel is an easy way to work with worksheets. As everything in the Ruby World, it´s so Sexy.

I hope it helps you.

Keep rocking.

Erlang as a Ruby Virtual Machine.

13.08.08

Filed Under: erlang, programming, ruby with 0 Comments

In the Antares Trader´s blog there is an interesting article about a supposed Ruby Virtual Machine implementation build in Erlang. Of course, it´s a thought from the author about this possibility and it still not a reality.

Erlang is a powerfull programming language focused in concurrent proccessing common used on telecommunications market. Nowadays it has been used like a middleware in web applications, some like Delicious, Twitter , Facebook and many more.


Particularly i liked pretty much this idea, once Ruby running inside the Java Virtual Machine has been a good purpose joining the best stuffs about that platforms.

Article´s link : http://blog.antarestrader.com/?p=77

Keep rocking, learning and coding.

Open your Mind

11.08.08

Filed Under: thoughts with 0 Comments

The behavior of Software profissional, not all but someone smells funny. All the time you may face to posts like that :

Dev1 : “Rails is better.”

Dev2 : “But Rails doesn´t scale, Java is better.”

Dev1 : “Your application design is stupid. There are a lot of DTO´s, VO´s, Service Locators, Why ?”



I guess that Software professionals must be up-to-date with good pratices, new technologies and how it can help themselves day-by-day. As techonology as proccess development evolutes each day, or better each moment. We like professionals must be able to decide what tool, language, practices is much appropriate for each situation.

Who can say for us if Rails, Seaside, Merb, anything else are the right answer for all the doubts.

The question is, are you enough pragmatic to open your eyes about your behavior??

Think about it!!! Keep rocking, learning and coding.

Package Management like apt-get for Mac OS

28.07.08

Filed Under: mac with 0 Comments

Hi fellas,

I’m a Linux user for a long time, mainly Debian/Ubuntu distros. One of things which i was missing is apt-get. But like a new Mac OS user, i must use to new funcionalities..

Surfing on the web, i found a package manager called Fink. It’s easier to install and start, you should download the package and follow the instructions in the same section.

Keep rocking and coding.

Java ME emulator plugin for Netbeans on Mac OS

20.07.08

Filed Under: mac, mobile with 0 Comments


Recently i’m developing some applications for mobile devices. I bought a Macbook Air and to configure all environement i suffered a litle bit… LOL…

I found out a excelent plugin called Microemulator. If you are looking for a plugin, you can find it on http://www.microemu.org .

That’s it. Keep coding and Rocking.

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