The Johnson Blog

Ramblings of a geek with a few hobbies…

Tag: Development

  • Day of code

    Today I probably spent a good 6-8 hours working on Chef.  I was able to get a lot done and move it to the point where the recipe management side has a functional, basic object model.  You know what that means??  Time to move on to the UI!

    I already started to play around with the basic look and feel of the UI, and I’m excited about it.  Its unlike anything I’ve done before; I look forward to being able to give a sneak-preview in the coming weeks.

    Today also saw me beginning to hunt for a good, cheap Help Authoring tool.   I ran across a promising, free product shipped with the Visual Studio SDK called HelpStudio Lite but upon installation discovered the license prohibits it being used for anything other than Visual Studio-integrated help solutions.  That was mentioned nowhere, but was bright and shiny in the EULA.  WTF!  The next candidate is WinCHM.  It appears to be basic and with a good price tag ($50), so I’ll try and dig up some reviews on it.

  • ejichef.com

    The past two nights I have been working up a prototype for the new Chef website.  I think it’s the best looking site I’ve done, if I say so myself.  Taking the advice of a coworker, I mocked up the layout in photoshop before touching html/css.  It sure made the process go much faster, and if I hadn’t done it this way I know I wouldn’t have ended up with these results.  Worked great.

    Now that the general layout is done, I’ll slowly move it over to ASP.NET and really work on it.  But that’ll be a while because I have to finish the Chef rewrite first.

  • ejichef.com

    Just registered it last night, will be the home of Chef when it gets rewritten.  Stay tuned.

  • Sql Server Express Edition

    I’ve been keeping my eye on this for a while now.  A couple months ago I installed it on my desktop at home to start developing my dad’s new website PBJ Unlimited and also installed a technology preview of the SQL Management Studio Express, which looks to be just as featureful as the non-express version.

    A couple days ago I checked to see if they had released a new version of the management studio and was greeted with the download for the Advanced Services  – which includes full text indexing.   All Free.  Free to use, free to redistribute.  Fantastic.

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  • Amazon S3

    Amazon just released a new web service, S3, this week.  I’ll admit that I have the urge to write something that makes use of it.  There are quite a few people bitching about it on various forums, saying that the price a too steep if you’re going to store hundreds of GB; that may be true, but how many people are really going to do that??  I could see myself using a couple GB, and at $0.15/GB per month it seems quite cheap.  The fact that there are no startup fees and you pay only for what you store/transfer make it very appealing.