Category: Software

HomeZone: Start iSync automatically

2008-04-27 rolfje 2 Comments

Recently, I installed “Do Something When” and use it to start rsync scripts when I plug in certain USB devices. By doing this, every time I plug in my USB memory stick containing my Password Gorilla password databases, it gets backed up (Apple style, with timestamps). Needless to say, it then gets backed up by TimeMachine.

I also needed this hands-off approach for synchronizing my iCal calendar with my new Nokia 6300 phone. Enter Homezone, a very cool app that can detect if a certain Bluetooth device is in range, and start iSync. It can also lock and unlock your screen when your phone is in or out of range, respectively. I did find some buttons looking funny when running it in Leopard, but it does work fine.

Next up: a review between Busy Sync and Spanning Sync for synchronizing iCal with Google Calendar.

Apple, Software

File does not exist?

2008-04-22 rolfje No Comments

For those people who have had problems accessing their files today, I remind you of the very old saying:

“A file does not exist until it exists in two places”

Naturaly, this means on two different physical places, preferably miles apart.

Software

Layer Violations

2008-04-13 rolfje 3 Comments

Like buildings, software usually a deviation of a standard structure. The architect chooses the structure his design will be based upon. After making design adjustments to the structure to cater the requirements, the architect supervises the builders. Like a building architect, the software architect supervises while walking around in the structure during the build.

Software projects can get so large and complex that the architect can not posibly monitor all the code all the time. This is where te tooling comes in. In this post, I will explain how to use Checkstyle to automatically monitor the basic architectural integrety of the software.

It’s not about tools; it’s about people

2008-03-30 rolfje 2 Comments

Last week a collegue of mine did an introductory talk about RUP (Rational Unified Process). It was an interesting talk about how RUP can be applied in projects, what the philosophy is behind RUP, and lessons learned during her first RUP workshop.

After the talk, we discussed how RUP looked a lot like DSDM, Agile and XP. In all these methods, developers are arrogant enough to “demand” customers to conform to their process. Sure there is a lot to be said for consulting the customer often, and having lots of pre-releases, but the customer is still the customer, not your in-house QA department.

Software

DOCTYPE is a myth…

2008-03-25 rolfje No Comments

… and other wisdom from Joel. Finally, after weeks of slightly boring posts about travel, speeches and FogBugz, Joel has an article on his blog he was so famous for: Martian Headsets.

The article discusses the problems with the HTML spec, and numerous other problems developers are facing these days. That, and the Martians’ strange fascination for all kinds and shades of red.

At times, the article remembered me of some thoughts I have during my dayjob:

Minimize. (also known as the KISS principle)
Have a contract early in the process. Make it testable. Find a way to handle problems in the contract.
Be strict and transparent. Fail early and explain.
Using a standard and conforming to it are two different things.
Communicate.

Although all are true to some degree, they aren’t going to solve all problems, because everybody has their own set of thoughts and rules. For every problem there is a nice, clean, simple, cheap, wrong answer.

Now go read the article, it’s much better than my writing…

Microsoft, Software

Nokia 6300 and Apple’s iSync

2008-03-16 rolfje No Comments

Last week, my trusty Sony Ericsson T610 became a bit awkward to use. The “down” function of the joystick finally gave up on me, after intermitting failures the past month. The only way to select the next menu item was to go “up” through all menu items. It became a pain to use, so I needed a new one.

Hardware, Software

OSX 10.5.2 Solved SMB problems (for me)

2008-03-16 rolfje 1 Comment

In a previous post on this blog, I indicated that the 10.5.1. update of Apple’s OSX did not fix my network and SMB problems with my Iomega drive. In the comments underneath, some readers kindly pointed out that Iomega’s K104w11 Firmware update is available for the Iomega drive I have. Now that 10.5.2 is out, I reconnected the Iomega drive to my network. And suddenly the world changed…

Apple, Hardware, Software

Remember The Milk review

2008-03-07 rolfje 1 Comment

This morning I thought I had way too much tasks, way too much paper on my desk, a messy inbox, and a cluttered schedule. Then I made a terrible mistake: try to solve this with more tools. You don’t always solve “more X” with “more Y”.

Read More “Remember The Milk review” »

Software

Migrate CVS repository to GForge

2008-03-05 rolfje 13 Comments

At work we were testdriving SourceForge Enterprise Edition. It is a great system to keep all your project information, source code, documents, bug reports and changes together, and linked. As you may have noticed, the pricing model of the Enterprise Edition is a well kept secret on the site. Our management bargained with the Colabnet people, but the costs (or TCO) were way to steep to keep SourceForge as our main system.

Another product which promises to do almost the same thing is GForge Advanced Server. GForge originally started as a fork of the (then open source) SourceForge code, and is not as advanced as SourceForge is today. But their pricing is more to the likings of our financial people, and we decided it has a good tradeoff between function and price.

Having said all this, we need to migrate a few projects from SourceForge to GForge. If you’d like to know how to do this, this article is for you. It describes how to get your CVS repository into GForge in 6 steps.

Software

When “J” means “:-)”

2008-02-27 rolfje 12 Comments

Lately I’ve been recieving mails with the letter “J” in seemingly random places. At first I thought I had gotten old, the world around me changed and people were starting to replace the smileys with single letter J’s. I thought it meant “Joke” and carried on.

Recently I noticed other people being puzzled by the J’s aswell, so I thought I’d find out where the J’s come from. It actually turns out to be a technical problem when using Microsoft Outlook to send smileys.

Microsoft translates a “:-)” into a smiley character from the wingdings font. When the mail is sent, the character encoding of the mail screws everything up and by the time that I recieve the mail in Thunderbird it has become a “J”.

Until Microsoft solves this, try to refrain from using smileys, or turn off the “show emoticons as icons” feature.

Fun, Software