scott.hodson.blog

A recent survey from CodeProject reveals when asked “What is your favorite text editor?” the winner is…NOTEPAD! Are you kidding me people? Either the CodeProject community is pretty lame (I doubt that because I know there are some great resources there) or else someone on the notepad development team in Redmond (is there a Notepad development team?) was just trying to rig the results.

While looking at the list to see how my favorite editor fared (Edit+) I didn’t even see it on the list! So maybe I’m lame too. I did check out the runner-up, Notepad++ and it looks pretty cool. I know UltraEdit has been a well-respected editor for a while. I’d never consider vi or emacs as a “favorite” but I’m forced to use it when I’m ssh-ed into a Linux box and I need to modify my httpd.conf or something like that. Actually, I use nano in that instance if it’s available (thanks Ubuntu!)

So I downloaded the M9 pre-release of NetBeans 6.0 to preview for Ruby/Rails development. WAIT!

NetBeans? Ruby? I haven’t used NetBeans forever. I remember using some 4.x version for J2EE stuff years back but it was a giant and slow hairball. So I switched to Eclipse like most Java developers, then upgraded to IntelliJ for a few extra bucks and never looked back. So my initial response at the thought of using NetBeans for Rails development was one of thoughts of waiting, sludgy response times and buggy IDE responsiveness. Being greeted with a 166MB download (get the “Full” version) didn’t help to assuage my fears of history repeating itself. After downloading, extracting, installing, and then launching for the first time (10-15 minutes later) it came up and I immediately went to create a new Rails project. The process was quite painless and simple:

I would like some Rails please! Let’s build “depot”.

OK, fine, put it there, whatever

Hmm, it suggests that my rails may be out of date, let me go to a command-line and…oh wait, I’ll just press the button…voila!

Thanks, I was just thinking the other day that I needed that ActiveRecord-JDBC bridge (?). Actually, this is required if you plan to use Rails on JRuby, and if you’re using NetBeans you’re going to be encouraged to use JRuby if not forced (I’m not sure if it’s going to use my native Ruby runtime or JRuby, assuming it got installed).

OK, we’re up and running! Nice color coding, collapsible sections, some extraneous comments and some session management code thrown in I’m not use to Rails putting in there but NetBeans has done it for me.

And all of this only took up 125+MB of RAM!

Well, that’s all for now. I’ll spend some time actually developing with this and get back to you.

With the release of iTunes and Safari on Windows, Apple Inc (former known as “Apple Computer Inc”) seems to be heading towards becoming a software company. Recent comments from Steve Jobs at D5 that “it’s all about the software” seem to reinforce that point. However, the bulk of Apple’s revenue comes from hardware devices (iPods, Macs and soon, iPhones). Since the switch to Intel, Apple has had to refresh their Mac lines more frequently than before to stay more price-competitive to comparably equipped Wintel boxes which has to be cutting into their Mac profit margins.

While the software is an important and differentiating part of the entire closed-system’s functionality I think the temptation to port iLife to Windows is probably very tempting to Apple because of software’s higher margins and hardware’s increased commoditization. The reason iLife hasn’t been updated in over 1.5 years could be partly due to the fact that they’re trying to release an iLife for OS X and Windows simultaneously. Indeed, there is fertile ground for an integrated digital media suite in the Windows camp as the Windows side is fragmented with one-off companies that are good at making DVD burning software, while others are good at authoring, while others are good at audio production but none of them really provide solid, well-integrated picture, audio, and video content creation and management as smoothly as iLife.

The problem is that iLife is practically viewed as part of the OS X experience. Indeed, an oft-repeated selling point of OS X is that it comes with all of this neato iLife software to manage your digital lifestyle. But if there’s a Windows version of iLife isn’t the reason to not use Windows less compelling, especially as it succeeds at becoming more and more secure as Vista has shown? And how many people will keep switching to OS X if they can do most of the things they love on a Mac also on a Windows box which is more open, more easily upgradable and costs less?

I think porting iLife to Windows would be great for Apple’s bottom line but would decrease OS X’s chances at becoming a more mainstream operating system and would more exclusively be relegated to the “media professional” market it so strongly dominates now. However, Apple could potentially sell more copies of iLife on Windows for $129 that would make up for the lost revenue of OS X/Mac sales.

Take the quiz, see what dialect of American English you speak. Mine was “Midland”

http://www.youthink.com/quiz.asp?action=take&quiz_id=9827

It turns out my side job playing baseball at Azusa Pacific University has panned out and I’m leaving my career in the technology industry to play baseball for the Oakland A’s. See ya in the dugout!

Story Here. You gotta love getting Google Alerts on your own name.

Here’s my hard and fast version of how to do estimates if someone needs a quick estimate and that is looking for a ballpark figure.

1. Estimate what you think it’ll take to develop it
2. Triple it.
   1. R&D of new or unproven technologies
   2. Proof of concept
   3. Debugging
   4. Project management
      1. meetings
      2. conference calls
      3. email
      4. conflict resolution, law suits
      5. travel
   5. QA
   6. User acceptance
   7. Requirements ambiguity
   8. Complicated migrations of legacy data
   9. Uncooperative partners
   10. 3rd world offshore programmer electricity and internet outages, natural disasters
   11. Company politics
   12. User and/or developer documentation, training
   13. Unforseen regulatory compliance requirements
   14. Recalcitrant status-quo team members
   15. Undocumented or incomplete APIs/web services that you’re required to integrate with
   16. All the other stuff that can derail a project
3. Then say the estimate has a degree of accuracy of +/- x% (usually 30-50%) and it’s not binding, a more precise estimate can be given with more details later.

If they don’t like it or think it’s too high then tell them they have to give you more details but with what little you have it’s too risky to shave an estimate with so little details and that you value an ongoing collaborative relationship more than a line drawn in the sand based on too little information. After all, you signed the Agile Manifesto, right?

“Customer collaboration over contract negotiation”

Just to make it official, I recently launched 802.11maps.com a site that maps over 30,000 WiFi hot spots in the US on Google maps. Just enter your address or the address where you are going to be and it’ll show you all of the known hot spots around you. We have hot spot listings from over 17 sources and will keep adding more sites as we become aware of them. We will be adding more features to add your own spots, comment on spots, post pictures, etc.

While the creation of the database was the part of this system the took the longest, the interesting part, technically speaking, was that this was my first application built on Ruby on Rails, as well as the first site I’ve deployed on my own Linux server. So there was a lot of technical ramp-ups to get through but it was fun to figure out how to put everything together.

If you want to show some love Digg us here.