Dev::Blog

FYI - you’ve got until the end of the year to snag VisualSVN for $30 off. It’s probably worth it for the rename integration alone, even at the full price…

Technorati Tags: VisualSVN

A few miscellaneous things to round out the week:

ReSharper has a new build available. On the whole, it seems faster and objects to more of my code, but they did something with the way they handle brackets as you type that’s screwing up my rhythm. I’ll probably get used to it around the time that they change it back.

The 2nd Toronto Code Camp is gearing up for March 31. Registration and submissions for speakers are open (222 registrations at last count!) I love when sites are small enough that I can get my first name as a user ID….

Slashdot has another article about P2P content distribution, Digg has a few about the death of the page view in the age of AJAX and video. What’s this going to mean for crawlers and aggregators? My first thoughts are that the nature of crawling will change, but this might lead to a lot more structured metadata to make everything come together easier…

Of all the things I miss about working at a larger company, it’s having other developers around. Not so much for the ability to work on larger projects, but mostly to have people to bounce problems off of. I think if I was to graph out my time allocation for the past two years, I’d see a huge spike in “working through a coding problem.” I don’t think I’ve gotten dumber, but I have gotten slower, and it’s all due to those roadblock kinds of coding errors that, without a second pair of eyes, simply “take as long as they take” to solve.

Today I lost 4 hours to debugging some javascript when the problem was in the HTML. Once I realized what was going on, I did the happy dance followed immediately by the argh argh argh dance. That should have taken 15 minutes to fix, but I let myself get drawn down blind alley after blind alley…

I don’t see a new hire in the near term, so what’s a single dev to do? Here’s the plan: from now on, don’t spend more than 15 minutes on a problem.

This is one of those “turn your weakness into a strength” things - there are always 5 or 6 projects going on here, plus maintenance, so if I’m stuck on a problem, I’m moving onto a different task in 15 minutes. Whatever it is, it can wait until I get stuck on the new task. I’ve had too many cases in the past where I come back to a puzzle and the solution is lying there with blinking runway lights. Yes, some of these puzzles were actual sudoku puzzles. No, switching from a problem to sudoku doesn’t count.

I’m also going to use a timer to track those 15 minutes so maybe I’ll cheat less. Hopefully there’s a Vista sidebar gadget (the site’s down at the moment), but I’m tempted to bring in a real timer so I can share the joy with my office-mates.

It’s not the be-all, end-all solution, but it’s a start. I’ve only just realized what’s been slowing me down, so hopefully this’ll lead to some new realizations and improvements. Of course, if I speed up too much, we’ll never hire any more developers…

Technorati Tags: GTD, debugging, productivity

I’m probably late to the party, but I’ve just discovered Google Browser Sync. It claims to synchronize all your Firefox browser settings across multiple computers. I work on about 4 different computers on a regular basis (including one Virtual PC), so this seemed like a cool idea. Just like the move to IMAP for my mail, this moves towards a more location-independent means of using a computer.

I’ve got it running for two of my work computers, and so far it looks pretty decent. I don’t know if I’ll extend it to my home machines though. At first I was worried about sharing memorized passwords (I only have that running on one computer, since it’s not appropriate for a work machine I don’t 100% control, and I don’t want it on a laptop, especially after my dad had his stolen this summer and I saw some of the consequences of that decision), but it look like you can disable sharing at that level. More important is the fact that while I might not mind having my work bookmarks on my home computers, I don’t know if I’d like my home ones available at work - I’m not that worried about what people might think, but I worry that I’d find them too available and distracting. I suppose I could create another Google ID to keep the two profiles separate, but I’m trying to reduce my identity footprint.

Since I’ve just started testing it, I’m not going to worry about long term plans. Give it a try if you’re interested - I’d love to hear from you about your experiences.

Technorati Tags: Google, Firefox, Google Browser Sync

My friend Kathleen once mused about how some bits of technology are going to vanish in our lifetime. Her example was the raised numbers on a credit card, and while I don’t necessarily believe her, I think I see the world differently these days.

I watched Code Rush recently, and I realized that documentaries about computers are changing with the loss of the CRT. On the bright side, we’ll lose that flicker of the screens, but I’ll miss the close-ups of monitors that show the red, green, and blue elements of each pixel.

While at the Vista launch even this week, I had a chance to talk with some folks from Bell Mobility, one of Canada’s three cell phone carriers. They suggested that they were looking into raising the 250 meg/month cap on their data plans, but I didn’t get the feeling that things would open up at all at the consumer level.

Interestingly, one of their data sheets said that they were selling the AudioVox PPC6700 phone with wi-fi enabled. That’s a bit of a surprise, since Rogers took the “sell the Nokia e62, which is just like the e61 but doesn’t have wi-fi” route. The Bell website doesn’t say anything about wi-fi for the phone, so it’d be worth asking at a store to be sure, but if it’s true, it might be a sign of a change in attitudes with at least one of the carriers. Or a mistake.

A while back I had a chance to talk with someone from Telus, and he suggested that the reason for the slow spread of the mobile web in Canada had more to do with the lack of cell phone towers. Bell and Telus are able to share theirs, but bandwidth is still limited in some areas, and at $1 million per tower, it’s not likely that excess capacity will boom anytime soon, at least not outside of areas where the VPs have homes and cottages, and I don’t imagine that Bell will announce a special “VP zone” package with better pricing for people who live in those regions…

Technorati Tags: mobile, wi-fi, Bell, Telus

I spent Tuesday hanging out near the airport for the Microsoft Vista launch event. Supposedly there were around 3000 people there, or at least that’s what they said at the keynote, and while the intent was, supposedly, to boost awareness of how cool Vista and Office were, I was left with more questions than answers.

The keynote was a little weird. Instead of going out with some kind of “hi, we’re Microsoft, we’re awesome” variant, it was more of a “here’s why you should stay with us” theme. Yeah, “stay.” It was almost apologetic and whiney. I didn’t think MS was very worried about their position, especially in the enterprise, but the keynote actually had me wondering about alternatives.

The rest of day was broken up into different “tracks” of sessions following various themes. I don’t have my notes in front of me, so this might be off a bit, but there was a developer track, an IT Pro track, a business/government track, and a architect “track” that had one whole session in it. I went to the architect track and most of the developer track talks, skipping out on most of the Office stuff (I do mostly consumer-facing work these days) and I think I missed one talk due to a confusion on my part over timing.

Oddly, most of the stuff I saw at the Vista launch didn’t have a lot to do with Vista. I saw a lot of .Net Framework 3.0 technology, which is available for XP, and the only Vista-specific code example I sat in on was about how to make a Gadget for the sidebar, which was, from what I saw, pure HTML/Javascript with no new MS technology that made the thing any simpler to do than anything you’d write on a Linux box for any old browser. The example that was written was a basic XmlHttp request, which brought out a snaky tagline from the peanut gallery: “Vista harnesses the amazing power of COM!” I didn’t see any mention of server technologies, and nothing about the new IIS either, although there were a few brief nods to the AJAX framework, which is still in beta.

The guest speakers didn’t really do anything for me. There must be some kind of rehearsal for these things, but when they brought the partners up on the stage to talk about their successes with Vista, it wasn’t particularly inspiring, and in some cases, it was downright painful to watch.

I think the best thing Microsoft’s done with Vista is to allow .Net 3.0 to run on XP. I attended the day with some former colleagues who’d just made the migration to XP. Does anyone wanna guess how long it’ll be before Vista rolls out to their desktops? There’s no killer app in sight (at least nothing was mentioned at the event), and I don’t see the average consumer buying a new OS (hmmm, a couple of XBox games or Vista? Hmmmm….), so adoption is going to be mostly limited to new hardware purchases, which seem to be happening less frequently these days.

Robert Scoble recently wrote about Microsoft’s failure to manage Vista expectations in the early days, so maybe this was just a new hype-free direction in marketing. Still, for a launch, I would have expected a bit more glitz…

Technorati Tags: Vista, Microsoft

You know, with the decision to make Virtual PC free, it strikes me that Microsoft could have made some bigger steps away from the path of compatibility with Vista. As it is, I’m running MySql 4.1 and Macromedia Studio from a Virtual machine running XP, which is a pain in the ass, but something I can live with. It’s a shame Microsoft didn’t take a page from Apple’s “run in Classic” or IBM/Microsoft’s OS/2 “DOS box” approach. Sure, it would have been a lot more disruptive, but in the long run some interesting improvements could have happened. Corporate users would have complained, but from what I’ve seen, there are enough incompatibilities to cause a ruckus anyway, and these companies are going to take at least 4 years to switch over anyway, by which point I would hope that most of their critical infrastructure would be web based (I know, there will be exceptions everywhere, but it seems to be the “future proofing” direction that most enterprises I know of are taking).

We’re always going to need an OS to make stuff happen on a computer, but system level dependencies should be decreasing over time. Maybe the Microsoft’s next kick at the can (which I don’t expect for at least 10 years) will be more bold.

…But enough complaining. Here’s something cool about Vista - the nifty thumbnails of applications as you hover over the task bar. They made me smile a bit when I saw them (which should be an OS’ primary responsibility, in my opinion), and when I saw the video sync, I may have chuckled out loud:

Technorati Tags: Vista, Virtual PC