Technology Being Helpful
Like many, I've been caught up recently in the news cycle of Katrina,
the Supreme Court and the war in Iraq. Check out my co-worker Steve's
blog posting Katrina Volunteer Project for a story about a great way that technology is being used to help the survivors of Katrina.
I will get back to Ruby soon, but for now, I just wanted to point out a
helfpul tool I have found myself using in a variety of contexts. Anyway
who is used to Unix/Linux environments is used to a wealth of built in
tools designed to give the user information about running processes,
such as which processes are accessing which files. This ability is
somewhat lacking in Windows XP. A tool that neatly covers this gap is,
Process Explorer, freely available at Sysinternals
which has a wealth of excellent tools available. In fact this tool is
popular enough to be recommended by Microsoft for the case of
determining which process has a lock on a file (the link to which I
have lost).
Process Explorer is in the fine class of software that just works.
By that I mean it does what it promises, without surprising you in the
process. It seems like this type of software is rare. More frequently
seen is the type of software that promises a lot and doesn't deliver
much beyond totally unexpected behavior. On a micro level look at
Microsoft Word's auto correct and auto formatting features. Is there
anything more frustrating than knowing exactly how you want to lay out
a document and being unable to because Word has a better idea? Another
example of "just works" would be Google Mail which is amazingly
effective due to its simplicity and focus on delivering the best email
experience, not just the best way to lure you into a web portal style
site.