Thoroughly testing software is a good idea. Yes, that’s a pretty obvious statement; however, it’s one that doesn’t seem to be fully understood all the time. I understand bugs popping up under the most random of circumstances. That’s almost expected; however, when a bug pops up when a program is running through set-up, that’s unacceptable.

We’re working on a project that requires the Drupal platform for a client. The client requires that new stories that are created on Drupal will be posted to Twitter and Facebook. That should be simple enough as there are modules to do this using Drupal. Wrong.

I’ve now spent a good two hours trying to set up Twitter integration with the site. Not only was the module completely unintuitive, that is, I expected it to post immediately after I set up my account and created a story. No, it required more modules that needed to be installed, but weren’t required upon activation as well as setting up a user’s specific twitter account, creating special triggers, and a lot of debugging. This is where my frustration stems from.

Why is it that once I hit publish I’m immediately greeted by that all too reassuring PHP error handler. A Google search quickly turned up multiple users experiencing the same problem with the creator saying he fixed it in the next release. After I fixed the first bug, another came up of the same nature. Luckily, there was another patch on the same page as the original problem.

So is the fun of using open-source, community driven applications

Ever have a lot of windows open at one time? Ever want to lay them all out nicely without having to do a lot of manual dragging and resizing? Then you should take a look at a small utility called GridMove.

On my system, I can press Windows+G at any time and resize and place the current window in the top left corner, or fill the entire right half the screen (or a number of other configurations), or force it to be on top of all other windows by pressing 1-9. You can choose from a number of “templates” (mappings of buttons to screen locations) or create your own.

I find this utility to be helpful when programming (cycling through tutorials, code, output, etc) and grading programs for my TA position, where I have literally seven active windows up at a time.

Gridmove can be found here: http://jgpaiva.dcmembers.com/gridmove.html

A recent project I’ve been working on was built with Ruby on Rails. Anyone who has had the experience of starting to learn RoR by working on another person’s already built project may agree with me – finding how things are generated is difficult. When I wanted to change text or learn where the design was stored, I had a rough time. Then I discovered Windows Grep.

Windows Grep allows users to do in depth file searches. The user can define a string to search (or a regular expression) and specify a directory and file types and the program searches within the file’s contents.

In case you were not aware, Grep comes from a unix command and is an ancronym for Global Regular Expression Print. There are variations of this tool for windows, but I am drawn to Windows Grep because of its GUI layout and informative search results.

I used this tool by looking at a web page on rails, viewing it’s source, copying a small string of text that I thought would be unique, and pasting it into Windows Grep to find results. It certainly helped with the beginning stages of learning my way around the project.

Windows Grep can be found here: http://www.wingrep.com/