Category: Geeky/Programming

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Geeky/Programming Product Reviews

How 20$ Saved Me 100$ + A Month – HDTV Antenna

I really hate TV. I don’t even watch it. It is something that you should be able to pay for what you use, not pay for everything and use a little bit of it, so here is what I did.

I went to Best Buy and picked up and HDTV Antenna.

It rocks. I just plug it in to the coax, do a search and it finds the local channels. ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, WB, PBS, and Weather Plus. Picks up the regular versions and HD versions. Since that is all that Emily wants, to see weather alerts and crap, it’s good enough for me.

I have PlayOn setup on my Vista box so I can get Hulu, YouTube and Netflix streaming to my PS3. I can rent movies, buy movies and TV shows on the PS3, Xbox 360, and AppleTV, and I can get podcasts and YoutTube on the AppleTV. What else do I need? And if I really want something, I can get it using rapidshare or whatever, or stream it on my laptop.

So, yeah, “Hello, Charter? Cancel my cable, I don’t need you anymore, kthxbye”

It’s liberating, and adds more $$ to my bottom line every month.

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Geeky/Programming

Password Generation – Online

I have had to set up some windows users recently, and needed to come up with some way to generate random passwords. I have found this online app has tons of options, and it works well

http://www.pctools.com/guides/password/

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Geeky/Programming Ramblings Random

Why isn't there a Web 2.0 Ajax Visual Studio?

Was thinking about this today. You can now write Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, Powerpoint presentations and the like all online (Google Docs, Zoho, etc, etc). You can record video straight to websites through your webcam, you can video conference directly through the web.

Visual Studio in the Cloud:

Why can’t you code directly into the web?

I would like to see an app that lets you create a new .NET project through a web interface, reference dll’s if you need to (upload them to your “space”) and then go about creating code, Intellisense through Ajax, you hit compile, it sends it off to the server, compiles, and gives you a result. You can then browse to your exe or your new website and view the results.

No need for a bulky IDE installed on your computer, no worries about dependencies, etc. You could code C#/VB.NET on linux and a mac with no need for mono (although you couldn’t run the exe’s – it would be the most beneficial for web apps)

You could target different versions of the framework, use new features if you wanted, all that. Heck why not have the same thing for your database. mySQL already has it with phpadmin and all the other tools, you can query and do whatever you need to through the web. Where are the offerings like this for MSFT products? Maybe I just don’t know about them.

There is CodeIDE – http://www.codeide.com/ but it is limited in languages and options. I want to see more of a full fledged Visual Studio IDE in the browser. Why? Because I want to be able to fire up a computer and just go to work, no installing, no waiting, no upgrading.

I can already see it now, Adobe Air IDE’s you can run on your desktop and sync up source code to the online IDE.

One feature built right in to this “online IDE” would be source control, revision history, etc.

I might not be possible right now, but I say give it a few years, and we will see a product like this come out, and I can’t wait.

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Geeky/Programming Product Reviews

Browser Wars 08

Now that Google has released its browser, Chrome, that leaves us 4-5 big players in the browser wars.

1) Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (download)
2) Mozilla’s Firefox (download)
3) Apple’s Safari (download)
4) Opera’s Opera (Weird – their company name is the same as the browser name) (download)
5) Google’s Chrome (download)

Pretty much everyone has used IE, unless you are a main frame unix guy or something, you at least have probably used it to get Windows Updates. I think I started using it around IE3, then IE4, IE5, IE5.5, IE6, now IE7, and actually I am using IE8 Beta2 at work. IE works, but it has been plagued by security vulnerabilities, and stagnated from lack of innovation from the IE4 days till now, where they are finally picking up steam again. Although, you are kind of stuck to Windows if you want to use IE, one of the major factors I don’t use it as my main browser. IE has somewhere between 70% and 80% of the market share, so your site better work in IE. I do say death to IE6 though. MSFT should push IE7 as a mandatory update.

Firefox is multi-platform, a good thing. It also seems to have major releases more often, better auto update support, and of course, extensions, which really extend the browser to something way better than ever imagined. Firefox has security issues sometimes, but they are usually quick to fix, and they are also pushing the competition with every new release.

Safari, oh Safari. I did try to use this as my main browser when I picked up my MacBook Pro, but after about 2 weeks I had to switch to Firefox. It just lacks some key features that make me want to switch back to Firefox, little quirks. It does render fast and nice, and yeah, the iPhone version is much better than PocketIE – its not even a comparison. Safari works now on Windows and Mac, which is also a good thing, cross platform is always nice.

Opera – well, it has 1% or less of the market share, but it just won’t die. I only use it when I need to test a site that has to work on everything, other than that, not much. Seems that stuff renders different in Opera. They have made some strides in features, like mouse gesturing, and other things that other browsers have “stolen” if you will, but I just don’t see Opera being a big contender in the space. It is cross platform which is nice, but it just doesn’t have the steam the other browsers do.

And then the new player, Chrome. Some are saying it already has 1, 2 maybe eve 3% of the market share. I installed it and used it for about a week as my main browser. It uses WebKit, the same rendering engine as Safari, so sites that work in Safari for the most part work in Chrome. (Firefox uses Gecko by the way). Chrome is the fastest out of the bunch, at least from my experience. The new concept of tabs on top is different. The process model is different, where each tab is a process (IE8 Beta2 has this as well), and there are other “new” features in Chrome – most of which are in IE8, FF 3.1, or available as extensions on FF 3.1. It isn’t cross platform yet, but they say it will be in time, fair enough.

So from the list above, you have Firefox and Opera (which is not used by many) being cross platform. Which means, if you want to use Windows flavors 2000, XP, Vista, or Mac 10.4, or 10.5, or many flavors of Linux, Firefox is pretty much the way to go, to get the consistent experience from OS to OS.

Most companies and corporations are STUCK on Internet Explorer 6. This just makes me cringe. At least get to IE7, it has been out for two years, IE8 is coming out next month!!

I see chrome gaining market share, but Google is walking a fine line on privacy it seems, they have already backpeddled a few of their policies since they released Chrome.

Safari is good for Apple users, or someone who wants the “Apple Experience”. I suppose IE gives you the “Microsoft Experience” the best. Chrome will give you the “Google Experience” the best. Firefox just gives you the “Best Experience” 🙂

I would recommend every once in a while switching to a new browser for a week or two, just to keep up with the changes. I guess you should switch not just browsers, but everything if you can (OS, Media Players, etc, etc) – Try It!

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Geeky/Programming

When To Code To an Interface

When to code to interfaces? In my opinion only when you have to “INTERFACE” with a 3rd party component, or some external piece you might have to interact with. Writing an interface for every concrete class seems way to redundant. It is probably easier to convert a concrete class to an interface when you need to instead of coding and Interface and Class or every entity object you want to created. What you end up doing is just duplicating code that you will never use.

Oh yeah, your UML (who even uses UML?) will look good, but its usefulness is lacking. I say write interfaces for things like File System interaction, Database interaction, some other 3rd party or external thing you need to interact with. Then you can easily swap out the backend later
if you need to.

I just don’t get writing say, and IPerson interface for a Person object. They are just going to be exactly the same. Down the road I don’t see you swapping it out for a new “Person”. Maybe but at that point, you might as well just create your IPerson and then create your APerson, BPerson that use the IPerson interface.

I guess what I am saying is follow YAGNI (You aren’t gonna need it) principle, and you will see the benefits in your code.

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Geeky/Programming

Maximum Length of a URL

Working on some ASP.NET, and making an email list that prints to the screen. Easy enough. But they want to click on a URL and have it auto email (BCC specifically). so..

<a href="mailto:?bcc=list of emails">Click here to Email</a>

but some email lists were huge, some small. By trial and error and searching around Google, I figure around 2000 characters is the optimal length for the “list of emails” I tested in IE6 and Firefox 3.01 and the same result for both. If it is longer, the link just doesn’t work at all. If you are close the boundry in IE 6 you sometimes will get a “Mail client” error, but I am guessing that is because of the mailto: in the link.

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Geeky/Programming

Source Control – Visual Source Safe Sucks

Over the years I have went from using no source control whatsoever (from around 2000 to 2004-2005) – mostly because, I was a lone developer, and also you really don’t learn about it in college, and I just never looked into it. Another reason is that there weren’t many good source control apps for Windows NT/98/2000, or at least I didn’t know about them. CVS or VSS.

CVS is ok, but clunky. SVN the supposed replacement to CVS is pretty awesome, works well, and is easy to use. On the other hand, VSS, VSS 2005, and then TFS source control paths are different. VSS 2005 is OK, but still has issues with locking, you can tell they don’t use it at Microsoft. The version before that is even worse. File open dialogs from Windows 3.1 era. Just a mess.

I have seen places use VSS in a way where they would be better off just taking a zip file snapshot every hour and copying it off. Instead you have crazy directory structures and a hard to use “tool” that causes you more headaches than anything. Hard to see the status of the files in Windows Explorer, etc.

About a year ago I wrote about using source control at home, SVN to be specific.

I guess just from my experience steer clear of VSS if you can, and use SVN, get TortoiseSVN and/or VisualSVN or whatever you need, even CMD Line, just please don’t use VSS, it just makes life harder than it needs to be.

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Blogging Geeky/Programming

Switching Hosting – Moving to Media Temple (MT)

A few months ago I decided to consolidate my hosting and sites to one server, and I went to Server Beach, and got my own Windows 2003 server. I needed ASP.net and PHP for some things I had so it was kind of a unique situation.

Server Beach is awesome, and if I needed more control I would definitely go back, but I decided it was too money for what I was doing, so I found Media Temple (MT). They have one click WordPress install which was nice, and you can host like up to 100 sites on one account on their “grid” service, for like 20 dollars a month.

What this did leave me with though, was I needed to convert the services I had in ASP.NET to PHP, so a week or so ago I decided to make the switch and converted those services over. PHP just reminds me too much of ASP Classic, very hacky and you have the ability to just put anything anywhere. Oh well, it works now and all my sites are over there for now (except a couple that I will move when their hosting expires). I am liking MT so far and hopefully it goes well, its cheap enough and allows me to do what I need.

I do like that they have the MySQL admin available so you can manage the DB’s directly. In one of my sites, I had to update all the posts at once, and I just wrote a query to do it, saved a ton of time.

Now if I can just get all my DNS and domain registrations in one place, I will be set 🙂

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Geeky/Programming

Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron – Second Chance, Wireless Works and was Easy!

So, last night I decided to give Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron another try. I blogged previously about setting it up and getting wireless to work, and what a nightmare it was

What I did this time was this. First off, I have computers everywhere, a MacBook, MacBook Pro, Dell Desktop and Dell Laptop. I have Vista on the desktop, and the Dell laptop I wasn’t doing much with, so I decided to load up Ubuntu on it. After installing, I connected it to a wired connection, downloaded the OS updates and let is sit for a while. After a few minutes it popped up with an alert telling my that there were updated drivers for the BroadCom wireless nic card. Wha?!? I open the alert, hit enable, and it downloads new drivers and fwcutter and lo and behold, wireless starts working with no hassles. I am on Ubuntu right now dinking around. So what is the first thing I do? Well make it look like a Mac of course.

So now I have Mac OS 10.5, Vista, and Ubuntu 8.04 all running on different machines. I would say right now though I do like the Mac the best. I use Vista for anything that really needs Windows. I will probably setup VMWare Fusion again on the MBP, but a smaller partition. I moved all my music there (80+ GB) and had to free up some space, my Vista partition was 60 GB.

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Geeky/Programming

Toad (Oracle) – Too Many Options

Toad is a tool to let you connect to Oracle with a GUI and browse the tables, run sql, write procedures. It is kind of like Query Analyzer/Enterprise Manager for SQL 2000 or SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) for SQL 2005/2008. Except it’s not, it sucks. 🙂

Toad Options

As you can see from the options screen, there are hundreds of options. Tons of tabs, menu items, and tons of settings per tab. If you need a “search” on your options screen, you probably have too many options, or you need to redesign something. I don’t like it.