Unbeknownst to me I was part of a tone of groups that included some complicated long names with backslashes (\) in them.

I thought it would be quick to grep for the particular group name if all the output was on separate lines instead of space separated on one line.

First I thought I can use cut command to do that but it turns out cut is not idea for this. It is more suitable if you have multiple lines of data and wanted to get the same column out of each of these. Something like output from ps.

Finally I achieved it really easily with with tr command. Here is how the solution looks like:

groups | tr ' ' '\n' | grep group_i_was_looking_for

I often want to see the progress of output to a file over time using the following linux command line:

$ date; wc -l output.txt

On windows date does not print time (you have to do ‘date \t’ to get output from it otherwise it used for changing the system date).

I finally found what I was looking for:

> echo %DATE% & echo %TIME% & wc -l output.txt

Output:

Thu 07/21/2011
13:44:55.70
375 output.txt

The wc command and bunch of other unix commands come from the free UnixUtils opensource package for windows. I consider UnixUtils a must have for windows and among the first thing I install on my windows machine.

The above assertion raises some questions:

What is collaboration?

Collaboration is the act of working together, caring about the common product and each other. Collaboration is often confused with cooperation which is different. I found the distinction cited here very well done:

Dillenbourg et al. (1995) make a distinction between cooperation and collaboration.

They define cooperative work as “... accomplished by the division of labor
among participants, as an activity where each person is responsible for a
portion of the problem solving...” They define collaboration as “…mutual
engagement of participants in a coordinated effort to solve the problem
together“. They further note that work often is split also in
collaboration. But the difference is that in cooperation the task is split
(hierarchically) into independent subtasks, and in collaboration the
cognitive processes may be (heterarchically) divided into intertwined
layers.

Another concept that is similar and confusable is contribution. Which is doing your part towards the goal but not necessarily as part of a team or together.

What is the opposite of collaboration?

Sometimes helps to identify and understand the opposite of a concept to appreciate the concept itself. So what is the opposite of collaboration. Some would say Coercion but I think it is Competition.

I have seen it many times in my 10+ years of software development experience where individuals would get in a competitive mode due to internal reason like personality types or external reason like management’s scarcity mentality where people are stack ranked on basis of individual contributions.

How does competition looks like in a Software team?

• My code is better than yours.  There should be a joint ownership of all of the code in team.
• I don’t have time for your problem. If this is a team they should be working towards a common goal hence any problem is our problem.
• Common use of hand waving help where you don’t really get engaged in the problem solving just try to give an idea to try to get back to “your” project/piece.
• Rubber stamp code reviews
• No passionate disagreement or challenging of individual assumption. This is passive competition or lack of care.
• Criticism without owning the problem or offering a solution.

I will address the next two question in a follow up post soon:

What does collaboration look like in a software development team?

If collaborative is a personality type then what are some other types of personalities?

Here is a nice getting started tutorial for treetop: http://po-ru.com/diary/getting-started-with-treetop/

I could have used some configuration in my .vimrc file to associate this file extension with ruby filetype but I want to try the embedded configuration which I have seen other used but never used myself.

After some search I found the reference article below and was by just adding the following file in the .treetop file I was able to desired functionality:

# vim:filetype=ruby

Ref:Embedding vim Settings in the File You’re Editing

Thanks to Arnab Deka

# Quick script to bulk prepend prefix to filenames to all files in a directory
# Also strips any spaces in the filename
# Example usage : ruby prepend_rename.rb Disc1_ C:\AudioBook\Disc1\

raise "Prefix and Directory are required" if ARGV.size < 2

prefix = ARGV[0]
dir = ARGV[1]

raise "Non-word character prefix #{prefix}" unless prefix =~ /^\w+$/
raise "No such directory: #{dir}" unless Dir.exists?(dir)

Dir.chdir(dir)
Dir.entries(dir).each do |file|
 next if File.directory?(file)
 new_name = prefix + file.gsub(/\s+/, '')
 File.rename(file, new_name)
end

” FuzzyFinder
” http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1984

" FufFileRecursive
" http://intraspirit.net/scratchpad/a-simple-fuzzyfinder-improvement/

" MatchIt for multi-character match on % (def and end)
“  REF: http://awesomeful.net/posts/57-small-collection-of-useful-vim-tricks
“  http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=39

” Rails.vim
” http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1567

" Ali Rizvi's Vim Settings

set number
set shiftwidth=4

set incsearch
set hlsearch
set textwidth=80

” from lindes:
syntax on
hi Comment term=bold ctermfg=Cyan guifg=Cyan
set autoindent

” from benji fisher to turn on the matchit plugin automatically and more
filetype plugin on

” explicity map file extension .t to perl syntax instead of tads
” which is autodetected by filetype plugin on
” This line should always be after filetype plugin
autocmd BufNewFile,BufRead *.t set syntax=perl

” to show real tabs and spaces in file
set list
set listchars=tab:>-,trail:^,eol:$
“set listchars=tab:>-,trail:-

“to add spaces instead of tabs
set expandtab

” evil, bad! — hard tabs should be 8 chars… –lindes
” set tabstop=4
” _but_ we can use this:
set smarttab

“make the background light
set background=light

“show matching parens
set showmatch

“show row and column number
set ruler

” allow backspacing over everything in insert mode
set backspace=indent,eol,start

filetype plugin indent on

“set shiftwidth to 2 for ruby only
autocmd FileType ruby setlocal sw=2

“shortcuts inspired by http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/2008/11/17/vim-follow-up

let g:fuzzy_ignore = “*.log”
let g:fuzzy_matching_limit = 70
map fb :FufBuffer
map fd :FufDir<CR>
map ff :FufFile<CR>
” addition based on http://intraspirit.net/scratchpad/a-simple-fuzzyfinder-improvement/
map ff :FufFileRecursive<CR>
map fm :FufMruFile<CR>

silent execute '!mkdir -p ~/.vim_backups'
set backupdir=~/.vim_backups//
set directory=~/.vim_backups//

map <F2> :mksession! ~/vim_session <cr> " Quick write session with F2
map <F3> :source ~/vim_session <cr>     " And load session with F3

From: Joe Van Dyk
Date: Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 10:20 AM
Subject: Re: [Ruby] += vs <<
To: Seattle Ruby Brigade!

$ cat t.rb
require 'benchmark'

long_string = 's' * 100000000
another_long_string = 'y ' * 1000

Benchmark.bm do |b|
b.report("<<") { long_string << another_long_string }
b.report("+=") { long_string += another_long_string }
end

$ ruby t.rb
user system total real
<< 0.000000 0.020000 0.020000 ( 0.022544)
+= 0.110000 0.130000 0.240000 ( 0.250046)

Update: Later in this thread mentioned a comprehensive blog entry about this topic : The Fastest Way to Concatenate Strings and Arrays in Ruby