biais.org

ack is a grep like for programmers. I'm used to run grep -R and find ... -exec grep to search for something in my code or in others code. But since I found ack, I definitely switched to ack when I code. ack website.

My favourites features:

• Color highlighting of search results
• Searches recursively through directories by default, while ignoring .svn, CVS and other VCS directories
• Many command-line switches are the same as in GNU grep, so the transition is nothing

ack 1.78 is out

A really well explained post about 2 database mistakes

Mistake #1: treating a database as a dumb object store. This is a really popular idea right now- Hibernate does this, as does Ruby on Rails, and a number of other ORM packages take this effective approach. On the other hand, dynamically typed languages are also really popular.

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Mistake #2: file formats (and this includes marshalled data structures), are wire protocols, and need to be designed to be as abstract as possible- to reveal as little about the internal structure of the program as possible (preferrably none at all).

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