PH7 - Articles

Getting Started with DTrace Rails , Ruby , Unix

Pointers and material to get started with DTrace, a revolutionary dynamic tracing tool.

In UNIX Everything is a File Unix

The UNIX operating system crystallizes a couple of unifying ideas and concepts that shaped its design, user interface, culture and evolution. One of the most important of these is probably the mantra: “everything is a file”, widely regarded as one of the defining points of UNIX. This article provides extensive background on this fundamental UNIX metaphor.

Introduction to UNIX Signals and System Calls Unix

When using a computer it is always good to have some kind of understanding of the software stack that you are using. Otherwise when the system does not behave as expected you are lacking the appropriate mental model and metaphor that will help you come up with a way to resolve the problem. In particular it is important to get a good understanding of your operating system’s fundamental mechanisms, even if you concentrate on a higher level of the stack (e.g. developing web applications).

So whether you are creating applications for Mac OS X, Linux, BSD or Solaris, I would recommend that you develop a good mental model of UNIX signals and system calls. This can be challenging as most material on this topic is way too in-depth and specific to capture casual readers whose objective is not to become system programmers or UNIX gurus, but rather to get more familiar with the platform that they are using. These casual readers are the main audience for this article: keep reading if you want to get a good overall understanding of signals and system calls without diving too deeply into UNIX internals and operating system theory.

Getting started with Autotest - Continuous Testing Rails , Ruby , Agile

Why manually run your tests, when the computer can do it for you! Autotest is a great tool to speed up test-driven development with Ruby or Ruby on Rails. Autotest makes your coding session even more productive as it automatically runs a subset of your test suite each time you change a file. Autotest is smart – it figures out which subset to run based on the files you’ve changed. Think of it as Continuous Testing.

Autotest source code is well-documented (rdoc) but finding a high level overview online is a little more challenging. This article will get you up and running in no time, so that you may concentrate on writing code. Let’s get Started!