Like many other people my collection of digital files include a large amount of data. The problem I have at the moment came around when I had about 50k digital images taken with various cameras and/or phones. First of all – this needs to be organized. Secondly – there is a problem with stuff just piling up and taking up expensive space.

Images and video along with large downloads has a tendency to get stuffed away in a folder far away never to be thought of again. To address this problem and identify these files I have made the Java Filesystem Scanner.

The program will scan through a given location and output a CSV file with information of all the files found along with a hash (SHA1) of the file content.

Personally I pull this data through ABC Analyzer and organize files by size and inactivity period – but a simple spreadsheet should do for most people.

The program can be found on GitHub.

Two weeks ago I had never read any Ruby code. I had mostly cast Ruby (and especially Rails) away as a hipster programming language/framework.

But my opinion has changed. I actually really like Ruby as a programming language. There are many nice features – but the fact that it is an actual scripting language where classes and functions are very easy to use and a natural part of the environment. There seems to be endless possibilities – console data crunching, web development, web service development, interfacing with other environments, e.g.

I am currently doing some Rails development and wanted to use my Macbook Air. It seems that this wasn’t really that easy. I am not sure if Ruby and gem are installed on default or if it is because I have XCode installed – anyway – having them installed didn’t really help. When I tried to install Rails it still failed. It turned out that all that was needed to make it running was installing “Command Line Tools” in XCode. Go to XCode -> Preferences -> Downloads

After that I still had some issues with different gems and this led me to Jeweltrybox which let me install the 1.9.3 version of Ruby and gems to go with it which made all my example projects run perfectly!

WordPress… !

WordPress is one of the most used CMS’s out there. After spending some time looking at templates/themes and plugins – the verdict is clear: It is a mess!

No right-thinking software developer would come up with this in a modern world! Every time I stumble upon something clever in WP I am almost instantly ripped into a new nightmare of obscure function names and magical doing!

That being said – WP works! And it works damn well!

My thoughts on the complexity and spaghetti-like coding style is that over time many developers and many design strategies has been explored – which naturally leads to the current state of WP. But WP is also very very good at what it does. As a blogging platform there you need to put very little effort into tweaking an already existing design to your desires and you are up and running in no time – totally separating the blog-writing and letting the non-techies take care of that. When dealing with more traditional websites WP also seems kind of limitless and both blogging and traditional web delivery can be tweaked into delivering a very high performance web experience both soothing the end user and the server resources.

My conclusion is that many will no doubt try and make new and smarter systems to take WP’s place on the web – especially to clarify design and maybe even cut the learning curve – but they will most likely end up right where they wanted to leave – looking like WP, feeling like WP – a feature cut would most likely result in a less complex system but that will probably cost a lot of users. Raising the level of abstraction – clarifying code and maybe even making it OO would most likely be at the cost of performance. Also – considering the development effort put into WP I can’t imagine any non-opensource project trying to compete – the amount of work hours needed to simply catch up is enough to make the pricetag sky-rocket – and WP is still free.

Finally realizing that WP actually works leads to the never dying saying: If it works – don’t fix it!

My native tongue is danish. Being a software developer has naturally forced english upon me and in my daily work I prefer using software/websites running english only (with a few exceptions).

For a couple of years I have been using Excel on both my home computer (english setup) and on my work computer (danish setup) and a couple of times I’ve had Excel files shared between them. I am surely admiring the fact that every part of Excel seems to have been localized! It is amazing!

When a number or formula is typed into a field in Excel it is typed using the current locale. The files saved containing localized numbers and formulas is opened on a different computer running Excel under a different locale with absolutely no problem.

Consider the following example:

This example uses the “FLOOR” function on a decimal – both localized – the function is called “AFRUND.GULV” and the decimal is using the regular danish separator (comma). When this file saved it can be shared with every (compatible) version of Excel running any locale imaginable and it just works!

All the new Office formats are just ZIP files containing (primarily) XML files. So I took a look inside the one just saved – and this is what it contained:

The content of the cells is actually the non-localized version of numbers and/or functions – which leads to the conclusion that the localization is simply a layer of abstraction inside the UI and all typed localized strings are converted back and forth all the time.

In my opinion this is actually quite amazing. The complexity of localized elements the user is able to throw together inside an Excel document makes this localization task a big one – very big! In ABC Analyzer we let the user create new columns in their data using formulas – much the same way as Excel – but the level of customization isn’t nearly as high as in Excel. Making our formulas and functions appear localized would be a nightmare – I am quite sure I will never (willingly) go down that road!