It'd be nice if this were a general purpose, helpful page on the Internet. I'd have information about various OSes, IDEs, languages, databases. That'd be nice but that's not this page. This page is specific to me, how I set up a development environment, what I like to use, how and where I use it. So if you use Emacs on a Mac to write Ruby code against your Postgres database, this is not your page.

Throughout this document if you see apt <something> it means you can sudo apt-get install <something>. The links should also automatically do the install if you're running Ubuntu.

Ubuntu Linux

http://www.ubuntu.com

Ubuntu is my preferred development operating system. Stuff just works and you have all the benefits of Linux.

Restricted Drivers

By default Ubuntu doesn't have support for formats that are in legal gray areas. I couldn't rip a (legal) audio CD to MP3s unless I got the restricted drivers.

apt ubuntu-restricted-extras

Run Apps on Start-up or Shut down services you don't need

Desktop

Backgrounds

I like to use simple, small non-distracting backgrounds. No sense in having a nice picture because you should be covering up your screen with windows doing actual work. I went to stripe generator to create some simple ones. Here are a couple of patterns, the vertical is more slimming.

Fonts

Red Hat released some good fonts under the GPL. I use them for my consoles, vim, Eclipse, everywhere. https://www.redhat.com/promo/fonts/

Make them look better on LCD screens.

Install a GDM theme

Install a GTK theme

Synaptic / APT

First thing after an Ubuntu install you should select a repository that is geographically closer to you. This should be part of the setup in my opinion. System -> Administration -> Synaptic -> Settings -> Repositories -> Ubuntu Software -> Download from

Open Office

Now you can get sweet 3D transitions for Open Office just like Keynote has. apt openoffice.org-ogltrans

Other

Bash

The Prompt

  export PS1="____________________\n\t \h:\w>"

...gives me... 

  ____________________
  12:27:16 m60e3:~/.vim/syntax>ls
  plan.vim  txt2tags.vim

CDPATH

CDPATH allows you to go to any directory just like it were a directory in your current directory. 

  CDPATH='.:~:~/code'
  export CDPATH

Change Priority of a Running Process

-20 best, 19 worst sudo renice -10 -p <pid>

FIGNORE

  export FIGNORE='.svn'

webshare

Add this to your .bashrc to create a little on-demand web-server. This is great when you want to give someone access to a directory or file momentarily. 

  alias webshare='python -c "import SimpleHTTPServer;SimpleHTTPServer.test()"'

simpleproxy

A simple proxy for debugging requests/ responses. apt simpleproxy 

  simpleproxy -L <local port to listen on> -R <remote host>:<remote port> -t <log file to write to> -v

ssh

This is how you create a public key and send it to a remote server such that you don't have to send your password when you ssh or scp to the box.

Accept defaults for the filenames. 

  cd .ssh
  ssh-keygen -t rsa
  cp id_rsa.pub id_rsa_<local host>.pub
  scp id_rsa.pub <user>@<remote host>:~/.ssh/id_rsa_<local host>.pub
  ssh <user>@<remote host>
  cd .ssh
  cat id_rsa_<local host>.pub >> authorized_keys

Firefox

URL Shortcuts

If you have a page you frequently go to you can create a url shortcut to it. For example, to get to my RSS feeds I don't have to type in http://www.google.com/reader/view/, I can just type rss.

Plugins

MySQL

http://www.mysql.com

MySQL is incredibly easy to work with. Compared to the proprietary databases it's a joy to work with. Compared to Postgres it's just better, albeit with fewer features.

If you're going to use mysql on the command line for any extended period of time it's worth creating a ~/.my.cnf. refer to. 

  [client]
  user     = demian 
  password = secret 
  
  [mysql]
  database = my_db

Open up privileges to another computer: 

  mysql> grant all on <database>.* to '<user>'@'<ip address>' identified by '<password>';
  Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.11 sec)
  
  mysql> flush privileges;
  Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec)

MySQL Query Browser is a great tool by the MySQL folks. It makes it real easy to try queries, look at tables, etc... To install on Ubuntu: apt mysql-query-browser

DB Visualizer

http://www.minq.se/products/dbvis/

DB Visualizer is a Java tool for visualizing your database. It ships with lots of JDBC drivers, including MySQL.

If you want to create a PDF of your graph.

Generate Diagrams from the command line with SQL Fairy

This is an alternative way to generate diagrams via a shell script. The layout managers that sqlt-graph uses don't scale as well as DB Visualizer if you have more than 20 tables or so this might not be usable for you. First you need to install SQL Fairy.

apt sqlfairy

Using SQL Fairy you could then create a graph (this is against MySQL). 

  #!/bin/sh
  mysqldump <database> --no-data > dump.sql
  sqlt-graph --show-datatypes --show-sizes --show-constraints --from=MySQL -o=db-graph.png dump.sql

Tomcat Servlet Container

http://tomcat.apache.org

Java

http://java.sun.com/

To install Sun Java5 on your Ubuntu box apt [sun-java5* apt:sun-java5*]

Since the man uses Macs then I'm kept back with Java 1.5.

fjar.sh is a script that's useful for finding jar files that contain a specific class. It saves my bacon every few months.

Python

http://python.org

documentation

Eclipse

http://eclipse.org

Eclipse is my preferred Java IDE.

Spring IDE

If you're doing Spring development with Eclipse Spring IDE is very handy. Here's the install site

XPath Explorer

I'm no XML stud but XPath can be a convenient way to get data out of a hunk of XML. There are plug-ins for Eclipse but I like to dump plug-ins into Eclipse conservatively. This is something I rarely need but it's nice to have in your bag of tricks.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/xpe/

It's an executable jar: java -jar xpe.jar

SOAP UI

http://www.soapui.org/

This comes in real handy for testing SOAP interfaces. Ideally you'd have unit tests for your entire API but if you want to quickly prove our your security and verify an installation of web-services, this is a good tool.

VIM

You love it or you hate it. It's not the prickly vi you used at the university. One of those tools you can use for 10 years and still learn something new about it.

http://vim.sourceforge.net/

Here's how I set my color scheme: 

  demian@shiv:/usr/share/vim/vim71/plugin$ cat setColorscheme.vim 
  colorscheme default

apt vim

Planning

I use Vim to maintain a big honking .plan file. It tracks what tasks I'm doing, what gets done, when, etc... It works great with vanilla Vim but I wrote a quick Vim syntax file that makes it easy to tell what status tasks are in.

Here's the full write-up I did on how to install and use the syntax file: Life in a Text File

Wrangling with VIM & Python

I wrote some Python code to do some handy things in VIM. In vim you can select a portion of your buffer, send it out to an external program and replace that with the output of the program.

To use any of these you have to put the Python scripts in your path. Then you need to add an entry in your .vimrc file so that the Python code maps to a key combination. When you actually need to use it, you have to visually select text to send to your buffer.

Here's how you visually select a portion of your buffer.

multiply.py

This is kinda cool, I haven't seen it anywhere else. Basically you set up a quick template and other text that you have in a tabular format. When you have this in place you can use this to multiply your code. For example you might get a dump of the attributes in a database table, you could use this to generate setters and getters for a bean.

Put this Python script in your path. multiply.py

Add this to your .vimrc.: map M :!multiply.py<cr>

Set up your data with @ symbols in front. The rest of the selected text is your template. 

  @ String FirstName  'first name of the user'
  @ Long   Height     'height (in inches)' 
  @ String LastName   'surname' 
  @ int    Age        'age (in moon cycles)' 
  
  /**
  * @param a@2: @3 
  * */
  public set@2(@1 a@2)
  {
     m@2 = a@2;
  }
  
  /**
  * @return @2: @3
  * */
  public @1 get@2()
  {
     return m@2;
  }

lineUp.py

This lines up text in columns. Makes some code easier to read to me. lineUp.py

Add this to your .vimrc. map L :!lineUp.py<cr>

a2s.py

All the words that are in camelCase are turned into SCHEMA_FRIENDLY. The a stands for attribute as in Java attribute.

a2s.py

Add this to your .vimrc. map S :!a2s.py<cr>

s2a.py

All the words that are SCHEMA_FRIENDLY are turned into camelCase.

s2a.py

Add this to your .vimrc. map A :!s2a.py<cr>

Maven

http://maven.apache.org

I'm a long time Ant user. If you're coming from that world maven will suck for about 6 hours of heavy use. After that it'll be your new best friend.

Maven can be a chore to initially set up correctly. Archetypes create new project layouts. You can get archetype information here

Once you know the archetype you want to use you just run something like this to create the new project. 

  mvn archetype:create  \
     -DgroupId=com.neidetcher \
     -DartifactId=javasandbox \
     -DarchetypeArtifactId=maven-archetype-quickstart

The other alternative is to use ``mvn archetype:generate ``, this walks you through what you want.

Some common maven commands: 

  mvn clean
  mvn test
  mvn compile
  mvn site # create one of those cool maven freebie sites
  mvn eclipse:eclipse # create an eclipse project from this maven pom
  mvn eclipse:eclipse -DdownloadSources=true # download source too
  mvn -Dmaven.test.skip=true site # skip tests and create the site
  mvn install # install this project into the local maven repo for other projects

To pass JVM arguments set an environment variable. 

  export MAVEN_OPTS=-Xmx1024m

Subversion

http://subversion.tigris.org/

Doesn't pass muster with Linus Torvalds but it's my favorite. 

  svn checkout <url to repository>/svn/trunk/ <local dir name>
  cd <local dir name>
  svn update
  svn status
  svn diff pom.xml
  svn log pom.xml

Adding this to your ~/.subversion/config seems to work well for maven projects and an Eclipse IDE. So when you check status and other commands, log files are ignored as well as the target directory. It's a minor thing but it cuts down on the noise when you're trying to figure out what you need to check in. 

  global-ignores = *.classpath *.project target *.jdt.core.prefs *.log

Git

Just learning git right now. 

  git status # nice summary of the state of your repo
  git add <file or directory> # have to explicitly add your changes
  git commit # LOCALLY commit the stuff you just 'added' 
  git push origin master # push your changes up to server

Trac

http://trac.edgewall.org

Trac is has integrated ticketing, wiki and a convenient front end to version control. I didn't use the ticketing capability but I can say that the wiki and version control view is great.

Meld

http://meld.sourceforge.net/

Meld is a GUI diff tool. It's also smart enough to know if you're diffing a subversion file it'll compare it to what's in the repository. apt meld

txt2tags

http://txt2tags.sourceforge.net/

txt2tags lets you write in a friendly, ASCII, wiki-ish syntax. Then you can export it to various formats.

I put this site together with a collection of txt2tags, m4 and make. Sounds like some odd technologies but it works out incredibly well. There's good separation of concerns; when I write I don't have to think about formatting. Deploying it all is a breeze, it's all automated inside of a makefile.

I did a write-up on this.

It's amusing how things have gone full circle. There is a recent trend for writers to use a terminal like program, to remove all the distractions of full-blown word processors. When I write for this website, none of it is WYSIWYG. Formatting is an after thought; as it should be.