Well the subject goes without saying. I’ve been working on WinXP again lately and when I’m not around my favourite text editor on the mac (TextMate) I opt for SCiTE on windows. The following settings I find useful for this simple but powerful text editor. YMMV.

I’ve been thinking about some promotional material for the company I work for. What inspired me was seeing a vi coffee mug… Unfortunately only available in the US. I’ve been endeavouring to wean myself off textmate and the like so thought this was a brilliant idea. But with limited space, what essential commands should go [...]

“Sparklines: Intense, Simple, Word-Sized Graphics”

If you’ve been reading this blog for sometime, you will know I’ve got a certain penchant for sparklines, a term coined by Edward Tufte and referred to in his book titled “Beautiful Evidence”

True sparklines are meant to be word-like graphics, such that they fit inline with the body of the text, [...]

This might help you out when analyzing time series data.

In this particular situation I’m looking at a bunch of SOA web services that get called synchronously in the backend infrastructure. The logs have entries with a unix timestamp, service description and duration. What I want to do is view the data in a Gantt Chart [...]

I hate to say it… but Microsoft really have produced an excellent tool for sysadmins and performance testers alike. That tool is called LogParser. I’ve mentioned it before but that was more IIS specific. LogParser can be pointed at just about any type of log file. So with a bit of Perl (or equivalent) to [...]

I’ve recently been playing around with AutoIt in an effort to steer clear of QTP and the like. AutoIt is a simple but effective way in which to automate pretty much any Windows GUI application. To that end I needed a simple data driven framework to include in the script. AutoIt comes with some handy [...]