scott.hodson.blog

So I thought I oughta publish my favorite development tools. Some are well-known, some perhaps not as much. Hopefully you may find this list helpful. Most of these are free or inexpensive.

• Web Development Tools. I have a lot of tools in this category I cling to. Here are some worth mentioning:
  • Debugging/Validation- FireFox WebDeveloper Plugin – Great tools for doing web development, debugging your HTML, Javascript, etc.
  • Editing – Macromedia HomeSite+ – not as feature rich as Dreamweaver, but more nimble and lightweight and perfect for my HTML hand-coding ways.
  • Screen Resolution – JRuler – Since I usually develop at 1600×1200 it comes in handy when I want to see what the rest of the internet will see when viewing the site I’m working on.
• Version Control – SourceGear Vault If you hate SourceSafe, and dread the thought of using CVS, this is a good alternative that’s not as costly as some of the others (Perforce, Bitkeeper, StarTeam, etc) out there. However, with their rising prices from v2 to v3, I may be giving Subversion another looksie. It will be interesting to see how well this product does with the advent of VSTS, though after having looked at it there are plenty of holes where companies like SourcegGear can add value, not to mention the high cost of VSTS.
• SQL Server – Query Analyzer – this is one of the most underused development tools used by developers. Often thought of as just a CLI into SQL, it provides a lot of un-obvious features for creating and managing SQL objects. WARNING: knowledge of T-SQL required, get out of Enterprise Manager when designing views or stored procedures you sloth!
• MySQL – phpMyAdmin – I love being able to manage my database remotely from any browser with this installed on my server. The interface is extremely thoughtful and feature rich.
• .NET Development – ReSharper – Goes way beyond what’s provided in VS.NET out of the box in terms of refactoring, real-time colde analysis, etc. This has been worth every penny I spent on it.
• Java Development – IntelliJ IDEA – Another great JetBrains product, this is a must for anybody doing lots of serious Java work. While Eclipse is a great product and continues to garner broad industry support, it hasn’t reached the capabilities offered by IntelliJ (yet).
• General Productivity
  • SnagIt! – great for grabbing screen shots for documentation, when Alt-PrtScn is just not enough
  • EditPlus – great multi-tabbed text editor, very quick and light-weight, Notepad on steroids.
  • GoTo Meeting – great for online meetings, demos, walking customers/partners through code, invaluable collaboration tool at a fraction of the cost of competitors like WebEx
  • Trillian – Because I have IM accounts on AIM, Yahoo, and MSN, and my friends and colleagues are spread across these different networks, Trillian allows me to connect to all of these networks and more from 1 interface. Saves me from having 3 IM programs loaded in RAM. For Linux users check out GAIM or Adium for Mac OS X users.

LATE UPDATE: Here’s PC World’s Top 100 Products of 2005, interesting to see so many web sites or web services show up in a Top 100 “Product” list such as Gmail and Flickr.

So I’ve been playing with Linux as a desktop option, particularly for PHP/MySQL and Java development. I’ve focused my energies on Ubuntu and Fedora Core. Played with OpenOffice…OK, this is workable. Evolution can work too. GAIM…not bad. Then I wanted to play an MP3 file, dbl-clicked on it, opened the Helix player but it said it didn’t have MP3 support (?) and I had to install an MP3 module. After about 10 mins or so looking for or figuring out how to get one, I thought “never mind, playing a music file shouldn’t be this difficult.” Try again later…

After getting more and more frustrated with TiVo’s increasing ventures into DRM, I’ve decided I want to build a MythTV box. However, I don’t want it taking up a lot of space in my entertainment center area. Anything Mini ATX, including those “cube” cases, are still too big and ugly.

So what I want is a laptop-sized PC without the LCD, keyboard, touchpad and mouse buttons. I want a small, headless, commodity-parts PC. Basically, I want a Mac Mini but with commodity parts. Laptops are really small, but confine you to 2.5in HDDs and mini PCI cards, but that’s OK for me with the sizes of 2.5in drives > 100GB now. I want to drop a nice cool, quiet Pentium M chip in there with a snappy ATI Mobility video card and leave it on all the time. I’d probably have to use a USB DVR card, unless this mini PCI card will work. I looked at assembling my own laptop from commodity parts, but all of the laptop “cases” come with integrated LCD, keyboard, etc.

So my question is then does anybody know of any manufacturer that builds something of a headless laptop “case” without the LCD, keyboard, and mousing controls? I’ve looked around and haven’t found any such thing yet. Perhaps I should just buy a Mac mini, install Linux on it, though I’m not sure if MythTV will run on PowerPC.

Thanks to those who attended the Orange County Java User’s Group meeting last night. My Powerpoint slides and AJAX sample code can be downloaded from this link.

Make sure you configure your build.xml to point to wherever you have your servlet-api.jar file. Also, adapt any connection strings to the database as set up in web.xml and the LiveMarket.java class. The quote.sql file will create the MySQL database I was using.

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This humorous blog post is a great retrospective on what the Engadget blog would look like circa 1985 as viewed via a BBS. Great ASCII art, 11lb cell phones, newest Apple Lisa computer, and more hot new products. Gotta run now and re-attach the phone headset back into the suction cups of my 300 baud modem!

With recent articles about how Google is evil or how Google is the new Microsoft, over-leveraging their powerful position in the web and its hoardes of current and soon-to-come cash, it makes me wonder about poor old Yahoo. Afterall, they were the first web site I went to when I was using Mosaic 1.0 in 1993, running on my Sparc workstation in my lab/office at BYU and in the menu of Mosaic there was a menu item called “Cool Sites” or something like that which would take you directly to Yahoo’s page, which used to be just a page of links since there were so few websites then.

So before you start wondering if Yahoo is the next AltaVista (which used to be the best search engine), don’t worry. With some smart acquisitions like Overture and Inktomi, minus Broadcast.com (thanks for creating the ego-maniacal monster that is Mark Cuban), they have some pretty smart people on-board. And I’ve seen several job postings on user group mailing lists, Craigslist, etc. by Google down here in Southern California, both for their Pasadena (Overture, GoTo) office and their newer Santa Monica office which I think deals more with their forays into media and entertainment. This strength in hiring and acquisition shows that they are taking a very aggresive and bullish stance on shaping their future.

I later heard a rumor on Leo Leporte’s podcast (episode #19) that Google engineers had said that Yahoo’s search engine is more accurate than Google’s. I couldn’t find any such report on the web, so it’s just a rumor, but it prompted me to give Yahoo’s search engine another look. Visually, it was disturbing, not because it was poorly designed, but because it wasn’t Google, which I’ve become so accustomed to. I was surprised by the amount of resistance I gave it solely on look and feel, and realized that switching search engines may be more difficult than people think. Eventually, I overcame the UI resistance and I started using Yahoo for search throughout the day, comparing them with Google’s results, and I was noticing that I actually was getting better results on what I was looking for than at Google! I’ve even changed the default search engine in Firefox from Google to Yahoo…a big step.

So my advice? While everybody talks about Microsoft and Google duking it out for the future of computing, Yahoo may be the sleeper play in all of this. Also, give Yahoo’s search a try out next time you do a search, and give it some time to get used to it if you’ve been a long-time Google user.

<disclaimer>I do not own any Yahoo or Google stock, nor am I shorting Google’s stock either</disclaimer>

I’ve seen the several announcements about people getting OS X to work on their x86 boxes and thought I’d try it out. I ran into some of the problems others have had but then got around them. I post this for those trying to do the same thing and having some of the same problems I was running into.

My main reference is this post from the UneasySilence website.

For your reference, my hardware is

1GB RAM
P4 3.0E socket 478, Prescott core, 800 FSB
ATI Radeon 9600 128MB video
DVD-RW attached
80 GB HDD, with 3 partitions (Mac, Linux, Windows), all blank
OS X is on the first partition

First of all, let me say I’m not very expert with Linux nor OS X. I’ve put together from scratch 2 PCS and have maintained my own hardware and occassinally fixed other people’s hardware for 10-15 years now so I’m pretty decent at hardware stuff but primarily on Windows. Also, I’m primarily a .NET/Java/database programmer and don’t deal with hardware at this level too often.

Secondly, I didn’t try to install from Windows, I did it the way originally described in the original post, using an Ubuntu Live CD and the OS X image on a separate USB hard drive. I got the OS X image from the .torrent as hinted at from the UneasySilence website. The downloaded file is a .bz2 file, about 1.28GB, but once unpacked it’s about 6GB. I had to download some special program for Windows that could unpack a .bz2 file, my WinZip didn’t know how to handle it. I don’t remeber the program, Google “bz2 windows”.

When I booted Ubuntu Live with the USB drive (an old 20GB HDD in my hard drive enclosure) it showed up in Ubuntu as “/media/usbdisk” and not under /dev as originally described.

It took me a while to get the “dd” step to work. From Ubuntu, make sure you use the “Root Terminal” application and not “Terminal” to ensure you have root privileges. I kept trying /dev/hda or /dev/hda1 and it wouldn’t let me. I then realized my HDD was at /dev/hdc so that finally worked. Again, I’m not very knowledgable in Linux so forgive my naivety here. Some have reported using hda, hdb, but hdc worked for me. Do an “ls /dev/hd*” to see all of the hd devices you have and you can naively try each one. If one you choose takes several minutes of waiting then it’s probably working for you, otherwise you will get an error almost immediately about access or not enough disk space.

Then when I boot OS X it froze and said something like it couldn’t find the primary drive. I remember something about primary and secondary IDE slots on motherboards. So I had to make sure my slave/master/cable select setting were right and the boot hard drive ribbon had to be attached to the primary IDE slot. My mobo has 2 IDE slots, the one closest to the front of the edge of the mobo is the primary IDE slot. Once I got my HDD’s ribbon plugged into that one I progressed.

Then when OS X booted, it froze like described during the boot up with the Apple logo and eventual a “no smoking” logo appearing after a few minutes. So I booted with the -x option as described. Then I got the “deadmoo” login screen, but my keyboard and mouse weren’t working. Turns out OS X wouldn’t recognize my PS/2 keyboard and mouse coming off of my KVM switch, so I had to attach USB keyboard and mouse. Now I could try to login.

My next problem was when I tried to boot “-s” to change the password it says I can’t because it’s running on read-only mode. Then when I boot in “-v” mode and it freezes at “VGA: vram [d8000000:00000000}” as other people have reported. I read through the Uneasy Silence original post’s comments and someone had mentioned that the “deadmoo” password is “bovinity”. I tried that and voila! It logged me into OS X!

I haven’t played with running any apps yet. Others have reported problems getting sound and network adapters to work, and I haven’t found anybody successfully running Rosetta on x86 yet. Many have reported that OS X on Intel is blazingly fast, but without Rosetta the only apps you can run are the ones that come with the OS X install until you get Rosetta to work. So until then you get to run Safari and iChat wickedly fast…yay.

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Well, I finally made the switch…

My bro-in-law had an unused G4 350MHz sitting around, and I’ve always wanted to play with and experiment with OS X, especially since writing write-once-hope-it-runs-anywhere (WOHIRA) Java desktop software and launching Mac versions without even testing it on a Mac (they always seem to work anyways, yay!). Also, when I build websites sometimes I get “it doesn’t work on Safari” comments, primarily from my web designer friends/partners, not that they don’t matter.

So, in general, I am very impressed. There’s certainly a Mac way of thinking/approaching computing that I’m not used to and need to learn a bit more to get more productive on it, but I was pleased with the ease of use and thoughfulness of the overall experience. And I got to reminisce with a UNIX command line again and play with running Apache/PHP/MySql (XAMP?) on it as well in addition to getting Eclipse 3.1 up and running. While this Mac is pretty old, at 350MHz it is rather responsive in terms of reading e-mail, IM, web browsing, etc. Just about everything I tried to do was plenty responsive for my needs, though the video card chugs along when I’m trying move and quickly re-open lots of windows around (genie mode). So this machine will suffice for now, until my bro-in-law needs it back, or my other bro-in-law needs it back (the actual owner of the Mac). If so, well then the upgraded Mac Minis are pretty attractive options at this stage.

As for Windows Vista, I will be interested in working with the next demo when it comes out, supposedly tomorrow. I’ve generally avoided the Longhorn betas so far because the launch has been so far away and, especially the ones that had WinFS, they were extremely slow. Also, I’m not a big fan of doing some company’s QA for them unless they are going to give me the product for free or at a discount. But I think I will give this next rev a try, especially now that I have MSDN download access again, thanks to Ubero’s joining the Empower ISV program for $375 (includes 5 MSDN Universal subs). The running joke with the name change to “Vista” is V=virus, I=infected, S=spyware, T=trojan horse, A=adware, which brings me to my next point…

I was recently asked to help a friend fix or diagnose his PC which was freezing up on boot-up. So I took his PC, pulled out the hard drive, put it in my HDD enclosure, attached it to my other PC, and virus/adware scanned it. It had 4 viruses, 500+ spyware candidates. The frustrating thing for him was he thought he was safe. He had Norton anti-virus (but the subscription expired 6 months ago) and installed Stopzilla, a supposed spyware blocker that totally failed for him too. He’s not a tech guy, he and his family use it for family/general purposes. I patched it (XP SP2 and all other updates), told him to renew his Norton sub, and installed AdAware and Spybot S&D and gave it back to him with a reluctant “good luck”. I’ve come to the conclusion that many frustrated PC users have: maintaining Windows PCs on the internet requires tech savvy, beyond most people’s ability. It’s almost as if you should have a license or certifiaction to prove you can handle running and maintaining a solid Wintel box on the Internet, like a driver’s license for Wintel usage on the Internet.

So I’ve come to the conclusion that when my kids get old enough to download programs (spyware) or get e-mail (viruses) I’m switching them to a Mac. However, since I do so much .NET/SQL Server development, I could never fully “switch” to Mac no matter how well my future explorations into Mac go. I think we’ll just become a dual-OS family and take advantage of both platform’s strengths. Competition is good…

OK, today is July 11th (7/11). The convenience store 7-11 is giving away free Slurpees to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Slurpee. Good enough, however I failed to take advantage of that. I think the nearest 7-11 is about 5 miles from here anyways. Then things got stranger. As I was driving around today I looked at my odomoeter and I had just passed 117,777 miles on the Avalon.