Guy Kawasaki and 10/20/30 Rule for PowerPoint Presentations

http://guykawasaki.com/the_102030_rule/

I can’t believe I’ve worked in the software industry for 15 years and I’ve never read this until now.  I am guilty of violating this principal on numerous occasions.

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Been learning Python by tinkering with MSMQ

A friend of mine and I forked the pymsmq project on GitHub and extended it with the ability to search the journal in MSMQ for certain key words/text.  It’s been immensely helpful to me.

https://github.com/azastawski/pymsmq

Currently it it only searches for a single string, but we are adding the ability to supply the path to a CSV file so you can search the journal for multiple values and pipe out the messages in the journal to files.

I’ve not had much need to use Python in my career and as I’ve started learning more about Scala and Apache Spark, I’ve decided I want to learn more Python as well. I hope you find it useful.

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Check out Slack in conjunction with GitHub and Pivotal Tracker

I’ve been working with a team lately that uses a combination of Slack, Pivotal Tracker, and GitHub to make great things happen.  This is a level of collaboration like I’ve not seen before.  The team is international as well.  Slack has this wonderful feature which allows you to see updates to Pivotal Tracker stories/chores in the timeline as well as Pull Requests etc.. from GitHub.

I have to say this combination of tools is great for distributed development teams and it’s been very inspiring.

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SQL Query to search databases for object by name

I didn't write this, as usual I found it on Stack Overflow and other places. I had a need to search a SQL database for tables, views, and columns that contained certain key words.  This has been very helpful.

 Declare @ObjectName VarChar (100)

Set @ObjectName = '%post%'

Select 'QTR_CC_SEA' as DatabaseName, [name] as ObjectName, Type as ObjectType
From QTR_CC_SEA.Sys.Objects
Where 1=1
and [Name] like @ObjectName
and Type in ('U', 'P')

SELECT COLUMN_NAME, TABLE_NAME
FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS
WHERE COLUMN_NAME LIKE @ObjectName
AND COLUMN_NAME not like 'tbl_aud%'

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Nice REST client in Chrome

I don’t think I could abandon SOAP UI yet, but I do like this plugin for Chrome called the ‘Advanced REST Client’ available on the Google web store.

http://restforchrome.blogspot.com/

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View JSON with Notepad++

There is a really nice feature in Notepad++ for viewing and manipulating JSON.

1. Install Notepad++
2. Click Plugins > Plugin Manager > Show Plugin Manager
3. When the list of plugins refreshes fin JSMin
4. Click the Checkbox next to JSMin and click ‘Install’.
5. Allow Notepad++ restart
6. Copy some JSON into your clipboard
7. Open a new document in notepad++ and past your JSON into it
8. click Plugins > JSMin > Json Viewer or Ctrl+Alt+J
9. click Plugins > JSMin > JSFormat or Ctrl+Alt+M

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SOAP UI wasn’t working over VPN

Recently I had the weirdest thing happen when testing services using SOAP UI over VPN.  When I was on the corporate network everything would work fine.  I’d go home, fire up VPN, and it would just stop working.  It was throwing an error like this.

Java.net Socket Exception: Permission denied: connect

I found the problem, via Google.  I needed to add an entry into a config file for SOAP UI to prefer IPv4 stack.

Add this text

-Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true

to the bottom of this file

C:\Program Files (x86)\SmartBear\soapUI-4.5.2\bin\soapUI-4.5.2.vmoptions

This was the secret sauce that allowed SOAP UI to work over VPN.

http://www.soapui.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=13541

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