Programming
I like the Android OS. There is a foregone conclusion in many circles that it’s the heir apparent to the iPhone OS. Maybe it will happen, maybe it won’t. But after seeing it at last year’s Google I/O conference, a seed has been planted in my mind that I should develop for it. The barrier to entry for developing Android apps is really low. Basically all the tools are free (SDK, Eclipse). The language is Java, which even c# refugees such as myself can easily pick up in an afternoon. Documentation needs to improve, but other than that any question...
And now for something completely irrelevant and totally out of date. I was cleaning out “My Documents” folder today when I ran into something from another lifetime (like around 2000). A co-worker of mine used to refer to VB6’s Run button as the Play button, among other things. That inspired me to write a Top 10 list (i was a fan of Letterman back then) as to why one shouldn’t be a VB programmer. It will only make sense to you if you coded VB5/6 in the 90’s. In fact, for some of the terms, I had to take...
The other day I saw a really cool and to the point post entitled 8 ways to be a better programmer in 6 minutes.SecretGeek was talking about .NET development, of course, and so am I. I thought I’ll come up with my own list, but focus on efficiency and speed. Anyway, here it goes. Make commenting and uncommenting dead easy. Right on the toolbar, click Customize… Drag Comment Block and Uncomment Block onto the toolbar. Using the ampersand, make shortcut keys, respectively, to be Alt+c and Alt+x. How? Just rename the menu items to &Comment...
Recently I was talking to my relative who works at the American Airlines counter at the airport. He was telling me that the kiosk computers, that are in most airports now, haven't made a dent in how busy the counters are. Bottom line, he says, is that people are afraid of using computers. I have a totally different opinion. Just happened to fly a bit ago and used a kiosk to get a boarding pass. My opinion is that the User Interface is ALL wrong and that is what scares people off. Problem #1. The starting page had...
After a couple of months of putting in an hour here and two there, I've finally ported Subtext to MySQL. Note, that this is NOT an official Subtext release. This post is a digital catharsis of sorts. It's an attempt to "out" some of the knowledge I've gained from the port. And someday, when I forget all about the port, this post might serve as a reference for why I did something that seems dumb. But first things first. While we figure out where the source should reside, here are the downloads. !!! UPDATE - March 30, 2008 !!!...
While Mr. Haacked and company fight emergencies, I've been making some progress with Subtext's MySQL port. So here is what is done so far. All SQL has been converted to MySQL. The effort was actually pretty enormous, considering time constraints. There were 7 installation files full of CREATE TABLE scripts. And then there were 90 stored procedures. Two thirds of stored procs converted with minor tweaking. Some, particularly ones that fetch paged data were greatly simplified, thanks to MySQL LIMIT command. And a few had to be basically rewritten. All in all, good learning experience in MySQL. Compared to the original,...
After reading Scott Hanselman's Developer and Power User Tools List, I took inventory of my system and, surprisingly, found very little overlap. Other than the typical stuff, like SysInternals, of course. My list tends toward the developer productivity tools, the things that makes you lazy and make your life convenient. I actually have a lot more utilities, but these are totally essential, awesome and are in use every day. On to the list. Agent Ransack - the built in windows search is basically next to useless (particularly on Windows XP) when looking for some nugget of text. Agent Ransack makes it...
In the old country, before I came to US in 1988, I never saw a VCR. I vaguely heard of the concept, but never seen it nor knew anyone who had it. Given that I didn't know of a VCR, I didn't really have a desire to get one. The reason I mention this, is because I spent most of my professional and hobby programming life in the Microsoft world and have been more or less oblivious to advances in parallel universes like MySQL or Linux or Mac or whatever. As I've been porting Subtext to MySQL, it's...
If you are not using web server compression, you are needlessly paying for bandwidth. Or using bandwidth that could be used for something else. I've seen savings on the order of 50% to 90%. There is ZERO reasons not to use it. For some strange reason, enabling compression in IIS 6.0 is far too difficult. It was damn near impossible in IIS 5.0, so I thought they'd make it really easy in 6.0. So I made a batch file to make it stupid simple. Create a batch file, then copy and paste lines below into it. IISreset.exe /stop cscript...
The prelude Having ported an application from PHP to .NET, I strangely assumed (without looking at the code) that porting Subtext to MySQL will be similarly simple. After all, I reasoned, it's just a database port vs a language port that I've done earlier. I also thought that Subtext is organized along a traditional 3 tier pattern. In fact, Subtext is infinitely more complex. It has a remarkable amount of code for an application, the sole purpose of which is to list articles. But once you think about it, the code must support a ton of features for the engine...
Customize your code snippets. Someone mentioned a couple of months ago that my IDE tweaks are minor and insignificant in the larger view of things. I disagree vehemently. A combination of a lot of small tweaks can achieve very large productivity gains in the same way an ant colony can accomplish miracles. So on to my "minor" tweak. It is not a prescription, but rather an example of and a path to productivity. If you don't use Visual Studio code snippets, that's a problem to begin with. Let's assume that you do use them and improve from there. Let's take a specific example of your...
For whatever reason, setting up SubText on GoDaddy is more difficult than elsewhere. Or at least it's been an issue at some point, so much so, that there is a FAQ entry to specifically address this issue. To setup the blog, I followed blog setup instructions outlined here. For email setup, I looked here. Unfortunately, the blog still came up with the yellow screen of ASP.NET death (not the one in the photo), which stated that since I am not on the actual server, I can't see what the actual error is. So, if you run into the same...