In a real case scenario (where I work as a contractor) the team was implementing a new document naming convention, meaning that we needed to rename all the existing documents. And I don’t take “manually” as an answer.

Solution:

Excel is the corporate user’s best friend and in this example we’ll be using it to solve our problem.

1) Similar to this screenshot, in a spreadsheet list the documents you need to rename.

Each row represents an existing document file. First column contains the current filename and the 2nd column is the new filename.

2) In the Macros window (in Excel) insert the following code:

3.1) Change the paths in lines 10 and 11 to match yours. You can use network addresses like"\\network\path\" too.

3.2) Change the cell range in line 15. The code currently copies and renames 10 files.

3.3) Make sure the source and destination paths in lines 10 and 11 of the code exist. Create them if they don’t.

4) Run the macro. depending on the number of rows included in the range it make take a few minutes for the macro to finish. You may want to remove/move the original files now.

Note: If Excel crashed or stayed unresponsive for a long time, try smaller ranges.

I have to admit there is much to like about it, but it will need impressive Metro apps to become actually worth buying is what makes the next year or so quite interesting for Microsoft. Remember Blackberry Playbook?

Thinking positively, there are tribes of superstar .NET developers and Microsoft might be able to take back what Apple stole in the enterprise market with the recent iPad fever among executives. Office, Sharepoint, Dynamics, and other Microsoft flagship business software could really help Surface to get momentum. The enterprise deserves a nice and fully functional tablet that offers more than merely glits.

On the other hand, with the radically new Metro UI and having already both users and developers scared enough, we should just wait and see if this whole new “Cool Microsoft” revolution will steal the show or will be another Vista fiasco.

Speaking of fiasco, Microsoft competing with other vendors, could become an itchy situation between old friends who were buying the expensive and mostly underwhelming Windows OS for years.

At end of the day, I think the big dinosaur will survive. Microsoft looks at RIM as a cautionary tale (I hope). You can fail from trying too hard as much as you can fail from not trying at all (read RIM). I really hope that Microsoft pulls this one off successfully and get creative in their marketing department, who I suspect were hired from another galaxy.

“Global Unsubscribe” shouldn’t be grouped with the others.

Here is to not making it clear for the user if you’re hiding an option on purpose or you’re just being lazy.

Based on the title, by checking “Global Unsubscribe” I actually want to receive “Global Unsubscribe”.

There is a tree mapping platform, OpenTreeMap, to start with. It seems to be a well maintained code, it’s on Python and needs Tomcat for the starters.

Now I have see if we can use it as the base or it’s cheaper to get something started from scratch in-house. We don’t need anything complicated for the first phase, but as usual we enjoy (very) limited resources including time.

David had good insight and useful suggestions that I need to consider too.

We’ll see.

I’ve been trying to sort a mixed array in Ruby the shortest way. Each element of the array by itself is a mixed array of a number and and a hash:

a = [
  [0, {:a=>"31", :b=>"21"}],
  [1, {:a=>"32", :b=>"11"}],
  [1, {:a=>"25", :b=>"19"}],
  [0, {:a=>"12", :b=>"10"}]
]
 
#sort by first item of each row (number)
a.sort{|x,y| x[0]  y[0]}
 
#sort by the first item in the hash
a.sort{|x,y| x[1][:a]  y[1][:a]}

Note: I initially posted this as a question on Stackoverflow and got different but correct answers.

Finding common elements

To find common elements between a number of arrays, simply add them to a hash and use the & operator, which creates a new array from two existing arrays containing only elements that are common to both arrays, omitting duplication. (See Techtopia)

a1 = [[1, 2, 3], [1, 2, 2], [2, 2, 3], [3, 2, 1]]
a2 = [[1, 2, 1], [1, 2, 2], [2, 2, 4], [3, 2, 1], [1, 2, 3]]
a3 = [[1, 2, 3], [1, 2, 2], [2, 2, 3], [3, 2, 1], [2, 2, 2]]
hash = {i1: a1, i2: a2, i3: a3}
common = hash.values.inject{|x, y| x & y}

What I can do with Ruby in just one line fascinates me.

Stay tuned for more details.

Let me save you a few minutes (and perhaps hours of suffering on your Mac) and tell you the end of the story in the beginning. Upgrading has been always a tricky way of installing a new operating system. Granted it is smooth enough on a Mac but it comes with its own cons, like wasted disk space and unused files here and there.

So backup your files, which you need to do anyway, and go for a fresh install. Don’t be lazy, it just needs one more hour of your time.

Here is how you do it:

1. Go to Mac App Store (Run the application on your Mac)
2. (Purchase and) download Mac OS X Lion. It’s a big file (almost 4GB), so refilling your coffee won’t hurt.
3. Once the download is complete, open the Applications folder on your Mac and find Install Mac OS 10 Lion icon.
4. Right-click on the file and select Show Package Contents.
5. In the folder find Contents/Shared Support/InstallESD.dmg.
6. Right-click on InstallESD.dmg and select Open with > Disk Utility.
7. Insert a blank DVD and click Burn on the toolbar. Another coffee or maybe even dinner will fill the void.
8. Voila! You now have a bootable DVD of Mac OS X Lion.
9. Boot the system with DVD in the drive while holding the Option key (that is, on your keyboard).
10. After a few seconds you’ll be presented with 2 icons on the display, a hard drive and the Mac OS DVD.
11. Select the DVD (click on the arrow key below it) and follow the instructions. The system will start installing the 12. new operating system

Warning: This process will delete all data that existed on the disk prior to install. Backup your files on an external device first.

Now the story

It’s been more or less a month since Mac OS Lion is out in the wild. As with all new releases of operating systems people react to it very differently. From blind love to pure hate, and well, that’s not quite informative.

One of the best reviews I read about Lion was from Ars Technica, written by John Siracusa. I’d be lying if I say I read it all; it’s a friggin’ book. But I enjoyed the unbiased view of the author and learned stuff too. You might be wondering why do I just woke up from the rock I was living under and started writing about installing Lion.

First of all, it’s not that very safe to upgrade to a new OS the moment it is available for download. The irrationale joy and excitement of a hot-from-the-oven product might burn you. The very early adopters usually share invaluable information about their first impressions and sufferings. Then I didn’t think my old (late 2007 , yes 2007!) MacBook Pro seem to be a bonafide candidate for the job. So I waited until I buy a new laptop, which was 2 days ago. A Core i7 MacBook Pro. It’s a descent machine and I quite like it.

About upgrading to Lion; the laptop came with Snow Leopard installed on it and a free download code for Lion. Instead of just upgrading to Lion I chose to run a fresh install on it to have the peace of mind that no old file will be left abandoned on the system and no library will conflict with a new one. Time will tell.

Now if you excuse me I have to go finish installing the apps I need on daily basis. You can refer to conclusion (top) for a quick tutorial on fresh-installing Lion.

Instead there is a convenient method:

reload!

that you can type inside Rails console and it will reload the environment for you. No need to wait extra second to exit and reenter the console.

P.S. There might be a wisdom in not choosing realod! which I might not be aware of. In that case please enlighten me in the comments.

I’m happy with Ruby 1.8.7 for now (comes with Mac OS X Snow Leopard), but I had to update Rails to version 3, which was a painless process. After installing MySQL 5.5.10 (dumping MAMP for now), I installed the ruby gem for MySQL:

$ sudo gem install mysql2

You may want to run this too, although the first one should do the trick:

$ sudo gem install mysql

A quick test got me this piece of error:

LoadError: dlopen(/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/mysql2-0.2.6/lib/mysql2/mysql2.bundle, 9): Library not loaded: libmysqlclient.18.dylib
Referenced from: /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/mysql2-0.2.6/lib/mysql2/mysql2.bundle
Reason: image not found – /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/mysql2-0.2.6/lib/mysql2/mysql2.bundle
from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/mysql2-0.2.6/lib/mysql2/mysql2.bundle
from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `require’
from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/mysql2-0.2.6/lib/mysql2.rb:7
from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:36:in `gem_original_require’
from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:36:in `require’
from (irb):1

You can never have a perfect installation experience. Can you?

A thread on Stack Overflow guided me to this solution:

$ sudo install_name_tool -change libmysqlclient.18.dylib /usr/local/mysql-5.5.10-osx10.6-x86_64/lib/libmysqlclient.18.dylib /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/mysql2-0.2.6/lib/mysql2/mysql2.bundle

Note: As it happened with me, you might have the same problem that MySQL failed to create a link (alias) in the /usr/bin folder. You can fix it with a quick ln command:

$ sudo ln /usr/local/mysql-5.5.10-osx10.6-x86_64/bin/mysql /usr/bin/mysql

PS: This solution is based on the latest versions of the libraries available as of March 2011. You might need to change the versions in the commands or paths according to your machine settings.