Ramblings of a geek with a few hobbies…
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.
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.
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.
Can someone please tell me why on earth I was just asked if I wanted to install Google Desktop when installing Java’s new runtime? I don’t enjoy using Java apps, and this sure doesn’t help its case with me.
Seriously, it’s a runtime platform. Don’t ask if I want to install 3rd party helper applications! Just so we’re clear, I’d be just as mad if Microsoft prompted to install other apps with the .NET Framework. There’s just no excuse. ‘
Damn you, Sun. What’s next, QuickTime? RealPlayer?
Ok folks, you can all stop your typing and/or compiling. Mr. Scott Fenstermacher has heeded the call (unexpectedly, I might add since it was a wish-list item type of thing) and delivered a perfect little utility for this very thing.
In summary, or in case you are too lazy to scroll down 2 posts and read, I wanted an application that would allow me to stop/start groups of services without having to do them manually. Scott’s solution involves a piece of Windows/ IE technology that I’ve never knowingly used and definitely never written before: the HTML Application. It just goes to show there’s always more than one way to skin a cat – I was imagining hopping into Visual Studio for a little while to create a little C#/WinForms app.
Thanks Scott, it’s much appreciated.
For those interested, I present ServiceProfiles.zip
Next, I would really like a little application that obfuscates .NET code, that can be run from command line, provides control flow obfuscation, renaming, stack trace interpretation, string encryption,… 😉 Scott?
I am reading Code Complete, 2nd Edition (great Valentine’s Day gift Ana! 😉 and must say that it’s much better and far more interesting than I expected it to be. I thought of it as being one of those books that you just have to read, but would probably be a chore to do so. Boy was I wrong.
If you’re in the business of writing software, you DO have to read this. It isn’t a high-level, software design book. Instead, it’s all about the small things you do and decisions you make at the mundane levels of coding – the naming of methods, size of methods, general formatting, comments, etc.
It’s great to see this stuff written down. In the time I’ve been coding, I’ve noticed myself continually refining my style and gradually honing in on many of the techniques and suggestions recommended in this book. Now that I’ve seen it written down, I can have more confidence in my style – that it isn’t just my gut feeling about how the code should be written.
I think that if I were running my own shop, I’d put this on a mandatory reading list for all of my developers. It would fit in nicely with The Pragmatic Programmer and result in better code by better developers.
As mentioned I installed Vista on my new desktop, since I have been running it on my laptop with Visual Studio for a month now without any real problems. Go figure, I ran into an issue that has been bugging me for the past couple days.
The symptoms are as follows:
The problem?
It turns out that VS didn’t like the fact that I changed the Location of my Documents folder to point to a network share. Pretty odd behavior though, glad I remembered I made that change.
As a follow up, my new computer is together and running. We didn’t really run into any issues, other than Microsoft’s phone activation for XP being “down for maintenance” on Friday night.
The plan was to use my new video card alongside a rather old one of mine (MX440) so I could continue using 3 monitors at home. That hit a snag when Vista wouldn’t run on the old card – so I had to go buy another (albeit much cheaper) video card at Computer Deli in town. So now I’m back up and running with 3 monitors – whew, crisis averted.
I have run into an odd problem with Visual Studio, however. Every single time I start it, it prompts me for what type of environment I’d like to start out with (configuration settings for c#, c++, etc.). For some reason after it writes the settings file to disk, it has trouble reading it again so it asks. Over and over and over. I think I’ll uninstall, reinstall and see if that takes care of it. I’ve been running vista on my laptop for a month now and never had this issue…
This evening I started to work on the registration process for Chef. There are so many ways to accept payments that it makes my head spin. A couple months ago I signed up for a RegNow account and they even waived the $20 setup fee for me. I’ve only recently started setting things up with them, and tonight ran through a Test payment.
Just a little follow-up regarding my issue with Visual Studio 2005 and Vista – I was able to make the problem go away by installing a hotfix for KB912019.
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