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Notifications for Long Processes
Tired of manually monitoring long processes during your daily grind at work? How many times have you launched a build and headed off to the water-cooler, only to find that it stopped a minute into the one hour build _after_ you came back? Ever forget about a big job because you were so caught up in lots of other little jobs? These types of things can really stall progress on big tasks.
Check out a tool called jnotify if you want help with these types of issues. In short, it notifies you when a process completes. Notifications can be SMS messages from your Google Voice account, Email messages via SMTP, or a Growl Notification. You can start your jobs using jnotify, or point the tool at any existing process for monitoring. It can even monitor processes on remote hosts using SSH. Visit the bitbucket page for more info or to get a copy. If you spend much time at a terminal you’ll thank yourself.
Jnotify is a work in progress. Watch it for updates or contribute if it doesn’t do everything you need. It’s OpenSource! Find the jnotify repository in this link.
Tidier Tables in “C” via Macros
Great article titled Reduce C-language coding errors with X macros outlines a way to use the C Preprocessor to create tidier tables. Highly recommended reading for those of you who like data-driven solutions.
How many times have you used a “table” in C code? Data-driven approaches are great, but often require you to manually keep table data in sync in multiple places in your code. It’s a common maintenance issue in “C”. This article describes ways to make the Preprocessor to do more of the work for you. The result is fewer bugs and reduced workload when you update your tables. The cost may be slightly lower readability for less experienced programmers.
Whether you chose to use this technique or not, you owe it to yourself to at least check it out.
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