Last week, lightning struck at my parents apartment building (literaly). Other damages aside, my dad’s PC also died.
The guy at the PC repair shop warned my dad that “we may need to wipe the HD, do you have a backup”? Ofcourse, all data was backed up daily and “off-site” at my house so all important data was safe. But just in case, we wanted to make an exact disk image of the drive, so that we could easily restore it when the PC returns from the store
Another great example showing the differences between OSX and Windows. Bot applications synchronize your phone over bluetooth. Both applications are simple to use, but one is simpler. And contrary to expectations, this time the Windows version (left) will cost you money, and the OSX version (right) is free.
Although you’d expect the Windows version to do more with all these bells and wistles on the screen, but it’s actually iSync that also synchronizes the calendar to my phone, and back. Automatically. No configuration needed, it does what is considered logical to the sensible mind.
Apple and OSX are just like a Volkswagen New Beetle. Either you like it, or you don’t. But either way, it’s good that it’s here.
For the record: I don’t like the Volkswagen New Beetle, and I do like OSX. My Mac Mini is absolutely by far the best computer I have bought in the past 5 years, maybe even the best computer I’ve bought ever. No kidding.
I’m using a few development servers over SSH, and for that I have used myEntunnel to tunnel a few remote ports to my local machine. When I screw up my configuration or forget to start myEntunnel, Firefox is “smart enough” to change “localhost:9090” into “http://www.localhost.com:9090” when it can’t reach the local port.
More people are having this problem, and apparently there is a configuration trick to stop Firefox from adding “www” and “com” to the URL when it can’t reach the site. Read more about it at the latenightpc blog.
In FireFox 2, do the following:
That’s it. Happy browsing!
Google calendar is the new “Cool” in the calendar world. Or at least, the guys at work seem to think so. For me, a 100% online calendar is not always a good solution, because I can’t take it with me. Getting Google calendar to sync with iCal would help, because that syncs to my phone and iPod. I tried BusySync and Spanning Sync to do this. One of them succeeded.
In my last post, I wrote about how I got HomeZone to detect my bluetooth phone, and automatically start iSync. While I was playing with it, I noticed how HomeZone opens the Address book application and iSync, and doesn’t close them. To make it more seemless, I used a script I found at The Technocrat to start and stop iSync without interfering with your work. Here’s how I did that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
… 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:
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…
