How to open Finder from the Terminal in OSX

 open .  

This came in handy this morning.

How to find a Java class file in your Maven repository (or any other directory full of jar files)

find . -name "*.jar" | xargs grep -r [CLASS NAME]

In case you are ever wondering why your builds aren't working.

Rails 4 MiniTest error

I got the following cryptic error on a new project:

~/…/unit.rb:1037:in `block in process_args’: invalid option: —use-color (OptionParser::InvalidOption)

Thanks to this blog for pointing the way.

I did not copy/paste the suggested code though.  I just ran :

guard init minitest

Strange Bundler error, noexec.rb:5:in `pwd'

I got the following after running "bundle install" :

rubygems-bundler-1.4.2/lib/rubygems-bundler/noexec.rb:5:in `pwd': No such file or directory - getcwd (Errno::ENOENT)

Thanks to stackoverflow and this blog I cd'd into the parent directory and then back into my working directory and bundler worked.

DevNation Day One

I'm in San Francisco for Red Hat's new developer conference, DevNation  It was a great foggy San Francisco morning and then a beautiful day for the first day of the conference.

I caught several good presentations.  Neal Ford's talk was up first, and he was as insightful as usual.  I've seen Neal speak many times.  Any talk that begins with the "poetry of Donald Rumsfeld" is going to get my attention.  Known unknowns...

Scott Cranton presented Camel recipes from his recent book, Apache Camel Cookbook  There is some really useful stuff in the book.  I have already ordered it from Amazon.

They middleware keynote was great  Burr Sutter led a team through "Bare metal to BPM" deploying Openshift on a bunch of old laptops (using OpenStack) and pushing Tweets through a jBPM process.

Can't wait for day two

Sublime Text key bindings to jump out of parans, quotes and brackets like in Eclipse

One of the best features of Eclipse is having the "Enter" key move you outside of the parentheses, ticks, or brackets of a method.  That shortcut is so ingrained in me after a decade of Eclipse usage that I doubt I will ever be able to forget it.

Sublime Text is a great editor, but it doesn't have that shortcut.  I added it to Preferencs -> Key Bindings -> User

{ "keys": ["enter"], "command": "move", "args": {"by": "characters", "forward": true}, "context": 
 [
  { "key": "following_text", "operator": "regex_match", "operand": "[\"')}](.|$)", "match_all": true  } 
 ]
}

DevNexus 2014

Earlier this week I attended AJUG's DevNexus conference.

I get the impression that JavaScript is hot again. There were many  sessions on JavaScript testing, frameworks and especially Node.js.  Atlanta is heavy in the web development space so maybe that is just regional, but there was talk of one Fortune 50 company having moved their online backend to Node.js.

I caught several really good presentations (in alphabetical order by speaker's last name):

• Aaron Bedra's talk on Web Security was something everyone writing webapps should attend
• Ted Neward's introduction to Node.js
• Grant Shipley made me want to try out Titanium (I already use OpenShift, the other thing he talked about)
• Burr Sutter's presentation on Vert.x was eye opening.  I work for Red Hat, but I don't get to spend much time with the community projects
• Stephen Thomas' presentation on testing JavaScript
• Andrew Trice gave a great overview of PhoneGap

The DevNexus site should be updated with slides and recordings soon.


If you are in the Southeast keep this conference in mind next year.  The sessions are high quality and the price is an absolute bargain.