May 31, 2007
I came across a post (from TheServerSide.net) regarding an issue between TestDriven.Net and Microsoft.
I think this typifies the general difference between ‘open source’ development platforms and ‘closed source’. Microsoft’s main concern here appears to be driving people to purchase full versions of Visual Studio by handicapping Visual Studio Express (which is free) as much as possible. You could argue it was ’nice’ of them to release it at all as a free option, but who am I to give Microsoft credit. :)
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May 30, 2007
Palm today announced their long awaited ‘mystery device’. It turns out to be a full size keyboard/monitor for your smartphone. My first reaction was a big yawn.
However, it reminded me of a conversation I’d had several years ago about the future of computing. In that conversation, I suggested that the ideal situation would be for everyone to carry around a ‘wearable’ computer. This block would contain a basic processor and data store. There would then be a universal protocol to allow this data block to be plugged into other devices. A basic ’laptop’ device would immediately become your computer. If you needed to do ‘heavy lifting’ you could plug it into a workstation with big monitors and supplemental processing power, etc.
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May 30, 2007
I host several open source projects at SourceForge. For the most part, the service is effective and it is a great service. They have certainly had periods where they’ve been overwhelmed but for a free service I’ve been fine with it. I’m excusing the fact that their site design hasn’t really changed in 5+ years and it isn’t the most usable site.
I do seem to recall that I used to be able to ‘press a button’ and have my CVS repostory converted to SVN. That was great and I did it for several of my projects. However it now seems that that option is gone and I need to download the entire CVS repository and run the conversion script myself.
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May 26, 2007
I found a pretty interesting hack to get your ReadyNAS to serve as a dynamic DNS client.
I have not tried it out as it looks like you can only schedule it to run up to every 4 hours, and I’m not ready to commit to a 4 hour outage if my IP changes at the wrong time. But, if that were the last service I needed before I shut down one of my servers I’d jump on it.
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May 26, 2007
I’ve finally found a way to setup iTunes to share write access to a single library.
I maintain a single integrated iTunes library for my family. However, everyone wants to maintain and edit their own playlists. iTunes’ built in sharing allows you to play from a single library, but does nothing to allow you to edit that single library remotely.
I recently moved my entire library to my NAS and, inspired by a recent lifehacker post, I setup all the iTunes applications installed in my house to use the shared music and iTunes Library (.itl) share.
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May 19, 2007
My current storage configuration consists of a big hard drive in my main windows desktop and a couple hard drives in my Linux server as backup hard drives. I use rsync to make sure everything important lives on at least two hard drives. Fairly time consuming to step but pretty effective.
Unfortunately I just ran out of space on my desktop and I’m running out on the server. So instead of buying more or bigger hard drives (the Linux server is already full so I’d need a new controller card anyway) I decided to suck it up and get a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device. I ended up choosing the ReadyNAS NV+. I also bought 3 500 GB Hard Drives to start, which delivers ~ 1 TB of space using X-RAID (basically expandable Raid 5).
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May 18, 2007
I released a new version of my iTunes Export utility.
iTunes Export exports your iTunes playlists as M3U or WPL files, allowing you to setup playlists in iTunes and use them with other software or devices.
This release is just a bug fix for the 1.3.0 release. Unfortunately I didn’t sufficiently test the release and due to differences in how the development and production builds are performed the GUI version crashed on startup.
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May 18, 2007
Google recently updated their Google Analytics product to a new beta version. They’ve slowly been releasing to individual accounts and I just got my invite today.
I must say I’m very impressed with the new version. It pulls up the information I’m really interested in (page views, visits, traffic sources, etc) into a nice dashboard view for the last 30 days by default. You can then easily drill down into each one.
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May 18, 2007
While I still haven’t made the move to a Treo 755p yet, I did finally change my current Treo to sync with my work Outlook instead of Palm Desktop. For a long time I’ve been keeping two calendars manually to keep my work and personal calendars separate (but synchronized). My personal calendar (Palm Desktop) would sync with my Treo so I had to copy all my work appointments into that to stay updated. This is of course a horrible approach.
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May 13, 2007
I’ve been working on a little app to display optimized train schedule information online in Java. I’m writing it more to play with new libraries, etc. than because I really want the functionality, but that’s irrelevant to the story…
As I mentioned in my previous post ‘Juiced about Guice’, I wanted to play with Guice and see how it worked ‘in the real world’. So, I used it to help configure my application.
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