The Johnson Blog

Ramblings of a geek with a few hobbies…

Author: eajhnsn1

  • FireFox

    I’ve used FireFox for a few years now and have been quite happy with it.  It was always faster, had better features than IE, and was very stable.

    I’m about this close (forming a gap about an inch wide with my index finger and thumb) to dropping FireFox and going back to IE. Why?  FireFox has been crashing left and right on me and it’s really pissing me off.  I realize I’m running Vista on 2/3 of the machines I use daily, but it’s even crashing once a day or two on my XP machine at work.

    Take last night, for instance.  I was filling out a form online (a Google one) and I hit Enter on the keyboard.  BOOM.  FireFox died and took 3 or 4 wizard pages of data entry with it.  Nobody should have to think about their browser before entering data into forms online, but that’s exactly what I’ve been doing lately.

    Now that IE7 has the tabs and seems to be pretty fast, I’m wondering why I’m still sticking with FireFox.  It may not be that way for long…

  • Dear Microsoft,

    Today I needed to locate some very specific information on your plans with IIS 7, and found myself at www.iis.net.  From the few minutes I spent there, it looks like you have put together a lot of information.  But I have one very large problem.  So much of that content is in VIDEOS!  Do you know how much longer it takes for me to watch some guy fumble through a presentation instead of just scanning through dozens of articles to find the exact information I need?

    This doesn’t even touch the fact that the valuable content in these videos isn’t searchable. Come on, videos are cool and all but just too darned inefficient to consume.

  • Chef 1.0

    It has been a lot of work, but tonight I finished updating the website and released Version 1 of Chef Kitchen Management System. Give it a whirl and then tell others to try it too!

    Chef 1.0 Boxshot

    Now it’s on to the world of Google Analytics and AdWords 🙂

  • 256MB.

    I suck.  Today I went to add 1GB of RAM to my webserver that I just happened to have laying around.  I opened the case to find a single 256MB stick of RAM running the machine.  No wonder it has been slower than molasses!

    I apologize for being a software guy and forgetting that I apparently stole its RAM a while back.

  • Domains

    Ok, so I have a question.  Which of the following domain names should I use as the main domain for Chef?

    EjiChef.com

    EjiChef.net

    MyRecipeSoftware.com

    TheRecipeSoftware.com

    EjiSoftware.com

    I own all of the above, and will point them to whichever is the best to use as the main domain.

  • Chef and Vista

    As I mentioned last night, I made the 1.0.0 build of Chef and started doing some installation testing on Vista.

    It’s official – Vista’s UAC is kicking my ass.   It’s during the database setup that I’m having the problem.  Sql Server gets installed OK, it’s for some reason the database restore that times out.

    Kinda tired of running the sql express install at this point.

  • A welcome to M. Wilson

    Mr. Wilson has finally started a blog.  Be kind to him, he’s a good guy.

  • Vi

    Any Vi fans out there like myself that spend their days in Visual Studio?  A couple years ago I looked around for a way to get Vi behavior in the Visual Studio editor, but came up empty handed.

     

    Then I was browsing around this morning and ViEmu for Visual Studio appeared.  Finally!  I just installed the 30 day trial and so far it’s exactly what I wanted: vi functionality tightly integrated with Visual Studio without losing VS’s other great features.  I’ll be trying it out for a few days and see if I run into any issues – I’m not an advanced vi user so I don’t expect I’ll find any.  But if I do, the author seems to have excellent response times to issues and feature suggestions so I’m not too worried about it.

    Check it out, I think this guy’s got a great product.

  • Week Roundup

    It has been a busy week.
    I’m sitting here waiting on the 1.0.0 build of Chef to complete so I can begin testing. 5 months ago I targeted April 1 as the release date, but I feel very good about have the code complete and starting thorough/final testing on that date. I’ve worked on the last few features and bug fixes for about 5 hours today and it’s looking good. I’ll just need to do some end-to-end testing on the various platforms, polish up the release website and I’ll be all done.

    Yesterday Ana and I spent a couple hours digging up our side yard. Last year’s grubs were terrible to it, killing all of the grass and paving the way for dense weeds. We’ll be tilling it up and replanting grass in the next week or so. It sucked, and I hoped we don’t have to do that again.

    The work week went well, but started off rough with Ana having to take Neo (one of our cats) to the emergency vet at 3:30am Monday. A month or so ago he had a urinary problem that we treated, but it apparently didn’t go away completely so he got blocked and couldn’t go to the bathroom. He woke us up in the middle of the night howling, and he couldn’t move without pain. He spent 3 days at the vet and is back home now, in a pseudo-solitary confinement so we can monitor his bathroom usage. His medication will last a couple weeks but we should be able to let him out of solitary in a day or two.

    There’s great weather outside.

    The Cardinals are starting their season.

    That’s all I’ve got.

  • StarUML

    Last night I conducted a little research into free/opensource UML diagramming tools for Windows.  I’ve done this search a few times during the past several years and have tried a variety of the top-dogs.  The best one I can recall was ArgoUML but it’s UI behaved so annoyingly unpredictable that I ended up ditching it after just a short amount of time.  A runner-up was Dia, but it was a more general purpose diagramming tool that, again, had a pretty clumsy interface.

     

    I didn’t expect to run across anything new in this search.  I actually came close to just buying Visio – it’s general purpose, obviously, but its interface is far from clumsy.  Then I ran across StarUML.  From the 30,000ft view, it appears to be a good tool.  It’s definitely worth putting into use and seeing how it handles under real usage scenarios.  Has anyone reading this ever used it?

    It’s a responsive win32 app, which pleases me because I’m sick of the crappy Java UML tool UIs I keep finding.   

    So I think I’ll give this one a shot for future development.  I’ll report back my findings.