Mark Richman provides expert advice, strategy, and software solutions to businesses worldwide. His clients range from the Fortune 500 to small businesses to startups seeking dramatic results. Mark creates and improves business-critical web applications, increasing productivity and maximizing profits.

Archive for the ‘Tools’ Category

Tools of the Trade

Posted on October 14, 2009, 9:10 AM, by Mark A. Richman, under General, Tools, guitar, postgresql, rails, ruby.

Many of my colleagues in the Ruby on Rails community have been posting a “tools of the trade” blog post, covering their hardware and software preferences. Now that I am nearly Microsoft-free, I figured I’d update my list.
Hardware

Apple Mac Pro 8-core Xeon, 10GB RAM, 320GB + 500GB 7200rpm SATA drives. This is my main box [...]

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Generating Random Names as Test Data

Posted on September 26, 2007, 1:05 AM, by Mark A. Richman, under Tools.

Ever need to generate thousands of names to use as test data?
I just created an Excel sheet that uses the 1990 US census data to generate random male and female names.
Columns:
A: Male First Name
B: Female First Name
C: Last Name
E: Male Full Name (Proper Case)
F: Female Full (Proper Case)
Columns A,B,C are ordered by descending popularity. It’s [...]

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What tools do you use?

Posted on August 2, 2007, 6:27 PM, by Mark A. Richman, under General, Tools.

I get this question a lot. The short answer, of course, is “it
depends”. That is, I’m a right-tool-for-the-right-job kinda guy. However, since
I make my living in the Microsoft ecosystem, I’m naturally biased. Generally
speaking, I use mostly open source tools, unless there is a compelling reason
to use a commercial one. Here’s my list (subject to frequent [...]

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