Mike's Musing

One of the things I enjoy most about being a programmer is the fact that when you can’t find a tool to do what you want you can write it yourself. Generally I’ve found that these applications tend to be quite simple and stick to the unix philosophy of ‘do one thing and do it well’ which as a software developer I think is a good philosophy to live by. The most recent occurrence of this happening to me was at work not to long ago where we are currently writing a REST API I needed an application to make a HTTP call to a URL. After about 5 minutes of looking around the web I couldn’t find anything, at that point I had the choice of either continuing to search for an appropriate tool or I could write my own. As you might have guessed I wrote my own, it took about 10 minutes to implement the basics of what was needed.

Over the next couple of weeks the tool continued to evolve to better fit the specifics of the project we we’re working on, but in the back of my mind I kept going back to how other people must have this problem as well. Eventually I decided to re-implement the core of my tool. Having finished the re-implementation a couple of weeks ago I’m finally getting around to releasing it to the public under the GPL, below are the links to download the 0.1 release.

• Rest Application Test Utiltity v0.1
• Rest Application Test Utiltity Source v0.1

For those of you who would like to grab the latest source and stay current with any updates (which may be buggy broken code) you can check out the subversion repository which is available at the following URL:

• http://mlowen.com/svn/ratu/trunk

In other news I have signed on to be a contributor to lounge media a blog about digital media in the home, hopefully I should have a post up there soon – once I figure out a good subject to start on.

So I think I’m becoming addicted to statistics, for those of you who have either been reading my blog for a while or have gone back through the archives you will have noticed that it wasn’t until recently that I started posting frequently.  I’m going to come out and say that I think that this is because I’m now collecting statistics about visitors to this site.  I recently installed StatPress Reloaded largely out of curiosity to see what sort of data I could get from it.  I made a couple of posts here and there to see what sort of traffic I got, from there it has turned almost into a craving to see the graph peek after each post like a junkie seeking their next hit.

I find it odd that my motivation to blog wasn’t triggered by the urge to show off the work which I have been doing, but instead it’s by a group of coloured boxes that vary in height and I wonder slightly what that says about me.  Whatever that does say about the kind of person I am it has the good side effect of I’m now doing more work on my personal projects, due to the more work I do the more material I have to blog about. It has thrown up a couple of interesting facts that I wasn’t expecting as well such as – currently I get over 4 times more referrals from Windows Live search than what I get from Google (which was perhaps the biggest surprise), that some of the most requested pages don’t actually exist and it’s mostly Canadians that are requesting them (I’ll let you draw your own conclusions there).