Self As Team

I’m setting up a new MacBook Pro and everything is going so much better than on a previous configuration (with a vendor supplied mac ports, etc…) but that is another story. I was setting up autotest and growl and ran into the same issues that I discovered with Leopard and growlnotify (see here, here and here). Anyway, none of the suggested configs worked at all this time around.

So I played around with the settings and ended up with this config which (knock on wood) seems to work pretty well.

I started with the following versions:

1. Leopard 10.5.8
2. ZenTest 4.1.4
3. Growl 1.1.6
4. autotest-growl gem 0.1.6
5. autotest-fsevent 0.1.1
6. autotest-rails 4.1.0

I didn’t need to make any adjustments to the growl configuration (via System Preferences) as reported in some solutions.

I added the following to the ~/.autotest file

require 'autotest/growl'
require 'autotest/fsevent'
Autotest::Growl::show_modified_files = true
Autotest::Growl::remote_notification = false
Autotest.add_hook :initialize do |at|
%w{.git .svn .hg .DS_Store ._* log}.each {|exception|at.add_exception(exception)}
end


I added some appropriately named images to the suggested ~/.autotest-growl directory per the really good (don’t skip over them, lots to learn if you have used an older config) instructions.

I then renamed the growlnotify app in /usr/local/bin to /usr/local/bin/growlnotify.wrapper (make sure it is executable with chmod if needed) and added the following wrapper (taken from Craig P Jolicoeu’s suggestion) as /usr/local/bin/growlnotify


#!/bin/bash
exec /usr/local/bin/growlnotify.wrapped -w "$@" &


That was it, autotest (and other apps) growl everytime now. Pretty easy (after I tried three or four other things that didn’t work). It seems the networked approaches with -H and other configs didn’t really work for me. The simplified wrapper seems to be all that is needed.

The other reported issues about growl not working if configured near the dock didn’t seem to cause me any issues (dock is on the bottom, growl is lower left).

Now my little robot friend (autotest) keeps me honest without fail.

Hope this helps.

I am sure I have my annoying ways of working but there is one thing that drives me nuts about some of the teams I’ve worked with.

Showing up to a meeting late.

The thing I like about scrum is even though we meet daily, we end up with fewer planned meetings (lots of ad-hoc white board sessions but they are very focused and productive). The thing I don’t like about scrum is having to wait for 5 or 10 minutes for the team to assemble. Sure there are things you can try and do to stop this behavior. I hate the idea of a ‘late jar’ where you contribute $1/minute you are late (donated to charity or food for the sprint review, etc) because if you agreed to attend a meeting at a certain time, then get there on time. On high performing teams, this isn’t as much of an issue. In some of the dysfunctional teams I’ve worked on, this is chronic.

I suggest that if you have 10AM meeting, then at 9:58, head over to the meeting rather than wait until 10:05 to go. Sure, you’ll wait around for 30 seconds or so but at least your team won’t be waiting on you.

Should be low-hanging fruit but is never seems to get picked.

Have spent the last few days working in Vista rather than OS X and it was looking fairly bleak until I spent some time updating my favorite editor. I have never liked full blown IDE’s (like Eclipse) for rails work. My first editor and still favorite is emacs. Textmate keeps my fingers humming on OS X but emacs is also running somewhere too. On windows, emacs is the main tool but I never really invested the time to update it (was running 21.x and 22.x versions which is quite old). So I spent some time this weekend to update it to 23.1.50 and add the ruby and rails modes. After some missteps, I finally have a fairly nice environment with pretty nice rails support. It even has snippets and quick navigation and refactoring (quickly create partials or helpers for example). I even have the ‘railscast’ theme so it looks pretty nice (at least what I’m used to on my Mac).

I can’t wait to go back to the Mac but at least I can be more productive while I’m slumming in Vista. The LONG delay on starting ruby processes (like tests, console, etc…) is sapping my will to live tho…

The info on rails and emacs on the web was pretty good but if someone wants my formula, I’ll be glad to post it.