From the productivity improvement department...

As a software developer, one of the things I rely upon to get the job done is autocomplete.  It is a feature I use every day whether that be in the bash shell or Eclipse.   The bottom line is that autocomplete saves keystrokes, and, therefore helps me get the job done just a little bit faster.  Autocomplete is a close second to sliced bread.

Now, something that is actually better than sliced bread is Capistrano.  If you've followed our blog, you know that we use Capistrano to deploy our code to EC2 and for other system administration tasks.

So, what if we could take the utility of autocomplete and marry it with the power of Capistrano?  Well, I came across a site that provides a ruby script that does just this.  The script supports Capistrano namespaces and utilizes a bash capability know as programmable completion.  The result?  Pure joy for yours truly.  

Here's an example of the autocomplete capability in action:

In the terminal window, I typed cap common:s[TAB] and was shown a list of possible completions.

If you are a Capistrano user you should definitely check it out.  I highly recommended it.

Open Source Simple DB Firefox Plugin: SDB Tool

We are huge fans of Amazon Web Services here at Bizo. We run our entire infrastructure on EC2, S3, SQS and SimpleDB.

We are also fans of some of the Firefox Plugin tools that make it easier to work with AWS: ElasticFox and S3 Organaizer.

So when we needed a GUI tool that would let us work better with SimpleDB and figured we'd extend the "Firefox Plugin Suite" and build a Firefox Plugin of our own. Today we've officially released our Simple DB Firefox plugin called "SDB Tool". You can install it by clicking here on your Firefox 3.0+ browser.

The code is release under the Apache2 license and available on GitHub. We are using Google Code for issue management.

We hope you find it useful and would love to hear how you are using it.

-Donnie (email me)