Recently in Computers Category

I feel I should post something about the new browser from Google.

Cut a long story short, it’s fast, it looks good. But I need adblocker and firebug before I’d switch.

Well I’ve tried about 6 times now to install SP3 on my Windows XP machine.

Takes about 15mins to go through the process before I get this screen.

Tried unpluging my phone and killing off any processes that look unneccessary.

Thats it for me, I’m not trying again.

I started a new software project and after reading another developers recommended practice I thought I’d follow it and give it a go.

He recommended that when doing run modes to call them in the format “verb noun”.

So I gave that a go, and cut a long story short I think it’s a crap idea.

I’ve gone back to the way I used to do them, which is “noun verb”.

This has the benefit of keeping all the templates for a particular table together in the directory listing, instead of having all the Add pages together, then the Edit pages etc.

Using two almost identical projects and just making just this change, I cut my production time almost in half.

I like to be able to sweep my code clean with a quick key stroke. Under the Run dialogue in Notepad++ I use this external command, save and activate with Alt F7 :-

ptidy “$(FULL_CURRENT_PATH)”

A quick batch file ptidy.bat in my path does the heavy sweeping.

@call perltidy -b %1 @del %1.bak

You have to call perltidy as it’s a batchfile itself and we want to remove the .bak file it creates.

Notepad++ should detect the file has changed and reload it.  If perltidy does encounter an error, you’ll get a *.err file and it leaves the original untouched.

Just spend the last 12hours updating my systems because of vulnerabilities in PHP5.  Had a few sticky problems with some of the PHP modules integrating with Perl (yeah I was like WTF?!).

Finally get it finished and working again, and I do a quick check, and what do you know.

Another PHP bug has been found…

The simple moral of the story is - JUST DON’T USE PHP - ITS A TOY LANGUAGE.

I read a huge list of free software that had a number of utils I wasn’t aware of, thought I’d better document a few here.

System Level Tools

GParted Live CD is a powerful full-featured partition management software that can create, resize, check, copy, merge, and destroy partitions, and supports multiple file systems.

Unstoppable copier will copy files/folders from disks that have physical damage and attempt to repair these. It will ignore error messages generated in the copying process and attempt to restructure the file using every readable part.

Amic Email Backup is a small, free program that can backup and restore the data associated with most major email clients, including identities, email and news messages, address book, accounts, message rules/filters, signatures, and even the blocked senders list. It works with a number of email clients including MS Outlook, MS Outlook Express, Eudora, Pegasus, The Bat, PocoMail, Netscape Messenger, Opera Mail, and Incredimail.

Drivermax is a program that can backup and re-install your system’s drivers. It can also generate a report that lists all installed drivers and includes information such as version numbers and dates.

ProduKey is a free program that can display the product ID and Product Keys used in your installed copies of Windows, MS Office, Internet Explorer, SQL Server, and Exchange server.

DriveImage XML is an easy to use and reliable program for imaging and backing up partitions and logical drives.

Spyware Terminator is one of the few antispyware programs that includes automatic updates.

Comodo Firewall will keep an eye on communication in and out of your PC, requires an email address to get the download.

TweakUI has been a long term favourite for adjusting windows defaults.

XNView is my favourite image viewer.

CDBurnerXP4 is a complete CD/DVD burning solution for the creation of data CDs and DVDs, audio CDs and Video DVDs. It offers full set of features including on-the-fly disc copying, copying to and burning from ISO images, and ISO image conversion. Supports new DVD formats such as Double layer DVDs, Blu-Ray and HD-DVDs.

I spend 6 hours yesterday, and about 3 hours today trying to get this bastard installed.  Can I just say how much I hate Sqlite3 and its Python plumbing.

When you’re installing Python make sure you enable threads support at the start. Then install databases/py-sqlite3 for the sqlite default modules. Only then install trac.

I’ve been messing around with flash for a couple of months now.

Gotta say that I love some of the nifty little features of the FlashDevelop editor. When you’re typing in the names of variables in related classes it auto-completes them for you.

I’ve still to work out how to get it to compile the AS3 directly, but I’m getting there.

Update: I had trouble finding a way of indenting or outdenting a selection of text in the documentation. However highlighting your selection and hitting Tab or Shift Tab does the trick.  Just as I’d started to get used to Ctrl [ and Ctrl ]. Humph.

If you use Subversion to keep your software under version control, you probably use svn:keywords attributes.

Here is a quick and dirty way to get the Subversion revision number into the build number of your classes. I recommend using this as a build number and set the major version number by hand.

public static const VERSION:String = "Software 0.1 Build "

   + String("$Rev: 335 $").slice(6,-2);

To save screen real estate I then put this string into the right click context menu.