January 30, 2006
January 25, 2006
Tool me up, buttercup
One of the joyous things about working with other developers is finding out how they do things, and how they compare to your methodology. We found some great tools working with Otego (the Maven Cocoon plugin in particular), and now I'm finding some interesting ways of doing things from the guys at Hippo. They are very Windows-centric (only one Mac! The shame!), so for them a highly integrated development environment makes sense - thus, they seem to live in Eclipse.
Now for a bare-bones command-line guy, this is generally an abhorrent way of working (though YMMV). I usually live in the Terminal and TextMate, mainly because on my powerbook, Eclipse is slow. And I mean really slow - like, at times you have to watch the pizza wheel spin for a good few seconds before a file opens. Because of this and a whole list of gripes (Eclipse Sucks post coming real soon), developing in a full-on IDE often seems like a long-winded way to achieve productivity.
Having said all that, some plugins are rocking my world, and have been a real eye-opener for how you can achieve great things quickly, often despite the underlying OS. There are three in particular I'd like to highlight for offering things I've not found better equivalents for: oXygen XML, solex and WebDAVPilot.
The oxygen xml editor is yet another xml editor with syntax highlighting and so on, but it gets bonus points for creating closing tags and managing them nicely (something I've only seen emacs do), and for the visual xsd editor - it makes it much easier to write XML Schemas. Oxygen is a commercial product, but seems to be worth the money.
Solex does nothing you couldn't achieve using raw network dumps, but it wraps it up in a decent GUI and allows you to debug HTTP sessions quickly and effectively. I'm still only just exploring what this tool can do. Solex is released under the Apache Software License.
Finally, a notable mention for s&n's WebDAVPilot, that allows you to mount and explore a WebDAV repository from within Eclipse, including looking at attributes, permissions etc. It's rather rough around the edges, but mounting WebDAV repositories in Eclipse is infinitely preferable to doing so through the Finder, which is rather prone to hanging. Sadly, there doesn't appear to be any source available and there's no license information, so the rough edges can't be fixed. Can you help, Silent Penguin?
January 24, 2006
January 20, 2006
Tripod recommendations?
Now that I've entered the world of expensive digital SLR photography, it's time to start buying lots of expensive gadgets, gizmos, and essential things that I don't know how to use but might need on the third tuesday of the month during the winter solstice. The first purchase will be a tripod.
Unfortunately it seems there are tripods for every day of the week and every kind of weather, so I could really do with some recommendations here. What should I be looking for in a tripod? What makes of tripod are particularly good / reliable? What's a reasonable amount to spend on a tripod?
Help!
January 19, 2006
It's oh so quiet
Not much time to blog. Between the packed working day and the ropey hotel wifi at night, not to mention too much good food and drink, I've not really had the chance.
I'm sequestered in a top-secret location beavering away with some of the brightest minds in Open Source, humbly helping them to change the world and revolutionise the content management marketplace. It's a riot so far, and if I can avoid killing myself on my new wheels, it will hopefully continue to be so.
Maybe you'll hear from me over the weekend, when I intend to sally forth with my camera, getting some snaps of the typical sights of this fine city. Meanwhile, I have some reading to do.
January 18, 2006
January 12, 2006
Growling
After reading drunkenbatman's rampant cheerleading for Growl, I decided to give it another whirl. I'm actually finding various handy uses for it, and my favourite has got to be for reporting on subversion updates.
This is particularly handy if you're updating from large or slow repositories, and want to get on with other work while you wait for the update to complete. Basically, leave the update running and Growl will pop up a bubble to let you know when the update has finished.
Here's the command-line magic to make it work:
svn update && echo "SVN `pwd` is up-to-date" | growlnotify "SVN Complete"
Pretty simple, huh?
I use this in a shell script to handle lots of updates in one go, which is particularly useful for catching up on multiple projects before going offline (e.g. when hitting the road):
#!/bin/bash
for a in repo1 repo2 repo3 ; do
echo "Updating $a..."
cd $a
svn update && echo "$a is up-to-date" | growlnotify "SVN Complete"
cd ..
done
January 11, 2006
Macbook
Everybody's talking about it ... Ugo, Matthew, Gianugo, Pier, and Auntie. "Just for fun" I priced up a new Macbook to see how it compares to the Powerbooks we bought back in November 2003. The answer: the Macbook compares pretty well.
Back in 2003 we spent £1930 (inc. VAT) for each Powerbook G4 15" 1.25GHz with 1GB of RAM, and Combo drives instead of SuperDrives (because I'm a miser). That included educational discounts since David and I are honorary research fellows of UEA.
Fast-forward to 2006, and a Macbook 1.83GHz with 2GB of RAM, SuperDrive and 120GB SATA drive weighs in at £1750 - that's £180 less than we paid in 2003. Not bad!
MacOS 10.4.4 and other updates
... otherwise known as the upgrade that made me go "argh! It's HORRIBLE!"
Firstly, the new iTunes 6.0.2 update did not work - it hung whilst installing:
I killed Software Update then ran it again without iTunes selected. I suspect the upgrade failed because my iTunes music library is on an external disk and not currently plugged in, but still - not a terribly elegant way to cope with a use case that can't be all that uncommon.
Secondly, Saft needed upgrading. No big deal I suppose - new version of Safari, it's reasonable to have to upgrade Saft too.
The thing that really made me go "argh!!!" though - brushed metal and pinstripes. I've been using Uno to ensure a consistent sunken unified look to all my OS X apps, and I've been loving the coherent interface. Suddenly seeing brushed metal on Safari and pinstripes on windows without focus was a real jolt to the system! I hope there's an update to Uno soon ... or maybe it'll work if I just re-run the Uno installer ... hmm. Got to be worth a try.
January 10, 2006
Drunk
Via Paul Kedrowsky, on the myth of the drinker's bonus:
We conclude that most likely the positive association between drinking and earnings is the result of the fact that ethanol is a normal commodity, the consumption of which increases with income, rather than an elixer that enhances productivity.
That's a relief. One of my New Year's resolutions was to see how long I can go without a tipple ... days? weeks? months? YEARS? Who knows.
January 9, 2006
January 8, 2006
January 4, 2006
That was the year that was
January: Norwich is now about 30 minutes further away from London.February: So now I have Ruby on Rails working.
March: I'd even be moderately satisfied if we can get to the point where you type "cocoon myapp" on the command-line and have a best practice template application automagically generated for you.
April: I wonder what other countries have the ability to send messages to all their citizens, and what countries have used it?
May: companies out there really are paying attention to licensing issues, and are clued-up and concerned about GPL vs. ASL
June: It's funny that in 2005 we still seem to be a long way away from consumer-friendly mobile phone connectivity.
July: This is what linux should be like. This, my friends, is the future.
August: Racoon. All the fun of Rails, on Cocoon.
September: I've found myself using the gorgeous TextMate more and more over the last few weeks
October: I don't think Amsterdam was ready for that ...
November: Ready for prime time? Not without a LOT of pain.
December: generally wondering how I'll cope without the internets for two whole weeks ...
January 3, 2006
Stokesey Castle
I got the Canon EOS 350D in the end, just before Christmas ... which probably accounts for why I have 300+ Christmas photos to process and about the same in New Year photos. So far I'm very impressed with it, and really enjoying the results. I still have a long way to go before I fully understand how to use it, however!
Back
Arrived in Norwich about an hour ago. Fantastic Christmas, and a most excellent New Year. Rather tired. Several hundred photos to upload (this one is of me at Heathrow before flying to Riga for five days of sleep deprivation, but after driving for five hours through the night), a few thousand emails to trawl through, but more importantly some sleep to catch up on. Good night - oh, and Happy New Year!