One of the things that took me a while to work out how to do when I first switched to a Mac from a PC a few years ago, was how to simply create an empty text file. Of course on OSX you have stickies but sometimes you want to create a new plain text file in a particular folder. So for those new to OSX: Open a terminal window and drag the folder you want to create the file inside into the terminal window, this will automatically switch to the directory of the folder in terminal. Then enter "touch filename.txt" that's it...almost as easy as right clicking and selecting "create new file ..." :)

I've been watching the rise of the ebook reader with interest, particularly as Apple are rumored to have one in the works. The reason it is of particular interest to me is because I do a lot of reading while commuting. If you use London Underground to get to work then you'll know that in cramped carriages during rush hour it can be difficult to flip through one of those huge Wrox or Apress books. iPhone to the rescue!. O'Reilly Safari used to provide an iPhone app that allowed subscribers to download a couple of chapters of a book on your O'Rielly bookshelf to your phone. Unfortunately they have replaced this with an application which requires internet access. Which is no good if you're underground!. That's when I found Instapaper. My favourite app of the moment. It's very simple, you have a button on your browser - you click read later and then hit an update button on your iphone it begins to download the pages to your phone (with or without images). Great for that arduous commute after work on the way home.

Which brings me on to ebook readers. What I would really love is an ebook reader which allows me to read through digital copies of books I already own. When I purchase books from Amazon (or somehwere else) I would love the option to buy an ebook version as well (or instead of). The up and coming ebook reader Nook from Barnes & Noble which runs the Android OS is rumored to allow you to do this. I'd absoloutely love a light ebook reader which I can hold in one hand, turn pages with one hand, has a decent screen, allows me to download books or load my own books. I would also like it to allow me to read word docs, pdfs etc. and bookmark or annotate them. The key thing here however is to be able to download and read anybook I purchase (as opposed to the limited libraries some of the ebook reader vendors make available). From this comparison it seems that we are almost there..

 

I just came across a really useful site for generating invoices online: www.invoicemachine.com. The site has a nice clean design and despite a few minor usability issues it's easy to use. It allows you to provide a link to an invoice online, track the history of an invoice and add payments. It also has an API so you could integrate it directly with say your issue tracking system for example.

 

So GMAIL is down looks like it has been now for a while... I feel lost without access to my email...

If you have a very small company, are a one man band or would like to use Jira (the awesome issue tracker from Atlassian)  to track issues on a small project you are working on - now may be the time to rush over to the Atlassian website . They are currently selling Jira and their Enterprise wiki Confluence for 5$ each , yup 5$ each (a 5 user license). But this offer is only for the next couple of days. It is part of a initiative to help raise money for a good cause, Room to Read

I'm a bit late coming across this, but I found a site, please fix the iPhone which allows you to vote for fixes and improvements to the iPhone. The site isn't run by apple and who knows if anyone at apple even reads it, but it is no surprise to see that many people have the same gripes with the iPhone that I have. Unfortunately there are a lot of duplicates, and it doesn't look like people have searched first to see if someone has already added the same wish. The amazing thing here is that apple doesn't have to run any focus groups or pay for extensive market research ,everything they need to pack into future releases is all right there out on the web.  In fact I do wonder if Apple had omitted crucial features such as cut and paste, sending contacts etc. just so they can drip feed us functionality over the next few years until they come out with a newer version.

I have an iPhone and a couple of iPods all of which have different tunes and are synched with different computers I also have tons of CDs. I'm often finding that I want to play a particular album on one device only to find out that It's on different computer or iPod. I had a search around for a quick solution to get music off of an iPod and came across a number of suggestions - I decided to give a program called Senuti a trial and was impressed at how easy the whole thing was. If you just a want a quick, no nonsense way to grab music off of an iPod complete with playlists, tracklisting etc. then I would thoroughly recommend it.

 

 

Santa gave me a PlayStation3 for Christmas, I wanted to try some of my old PlayStation2 games but had to do a system update first. I whizzed through the Internet connection settings and expected to have no problems connecting but instead got the following error:

An error occured during communication with the server this is a

DNS error 80710102

Turns out a quite a few people have had this problem, it's not a new problem and various people have found various solutions that worked so I am just posting the solution that worked for me first time.

I selected manual settings for the DNS/IP address settings and entered the following information into the console (not into my router as others have done):

IP Address: 196.168.1.50

Mask: 255.255.255.0

Router: 192.168.1.1

Primary DNS: 208.67.222.222

Secondary DNS: 208.67.222.220

For the DNS I used OpenDNS's servers. 

Now I'm off to see if I can get my RSI to flare up again... :)

 

I currently use Vmware Fusion on a Mac Book pro (mainly so I can still run visual studio if required). Recently when starting my machine it would hang on the 'Restoring virtual machine state'. Turns out that the fix for this is to get inside the .vmwarevm bundle and delete the .vmss file. This is the suspended state file which saves the state of a virtual machine. Be warned you can loose any unsaved work inside the virtual machine.

Simon Brown will be giving a talk at the next Coding the Architecture London User group helping you to make an informed decision!

• Title : Flex, Silverlight or JavaFX - which should you choose?
• Summary : Rich Internet Applications are a hot topic at the moment; with Adobe, Microsoft and Sun vying for your attention in a post-AJAX world. But which should you choose? In this session, Simon Brown will present a look at three major RIA platforms - Flex, Silverlight and JavaFX. A common example will be used to demonstrate each of the platforms, additionally acting as a baseline for an unbiased comparison of the code, development paradigm, flexibility, ease of use and so on. The format will be presentation followed by a roundtable discussion where you can ask questions and share your own RIA experiences. Come along and let the RIA debate begin

More info here

 

I was on the way to work this morning at Bank station and on the wall opposite the platform was a moving advert. Initially I thought it was a screen embedded into the wall. On closer inspection I realised it was being projected from across the platform. It stopped being displayed when my tube arrived. A bit of digging turned up this from CBS. No doubt in the future it will be able to display downloaded content perhaps live, although my understanding is that there are some infrastructure issues to be resolved before this can be possible. Wireless isn't available on the Underground for one, and I don't see Transport for London allowing a third party to utilise whatever infrastructure they already have in place to achieve this.

[update] I found a video on YouTube... 

 

 

On windows one useful way to boot someone off of a windows server who has logged in via remote desktop (but hasn't yet logged off correctly) is to start the remote desktop client from the command line with the console switch :

-> start ->run mstsc /console

I've been looking for a way to do this for ages with the remote desktop connection client for mac. The latest version allows you to now do this by entering the IP address followed by /console.

 

UPDATE: In a race to find out who could find out how to do this on Linux - my colleague Mike discovered that if you click on the performance tab - there is an option to 'attach to client'  :)

Bit late picking up on this but Ted Neward has written an article on the myths of running apps on multi-core systems. While he makes some good points, I think it falls slightly short in addressing some of the issues raised. This is quite pertinent for me as I work in a place where we seem to be buying up quad core billion processor machines with little regard to how well the applications being deployed will make use of multi-core CPUs. I think developing for multi-core machines in future is going to require much more thought and this could be one reason why people are looking at languages such as Erlang. The days of "we'll just throw more hardware at it" are at an end, while I am a firm believer in avoiding premature optimisation - I also think performance is an important architectural concern.

This paper on Highscalability.com takes a look at the architecture behind wikimedia.com the platform for Wikipedia.com and a number of other sites.

CFrameworks.com are giving away a free copy of CF8! Come along to the CFrameworks meeting next Thursday if you're in or around London, for some drinks and the chance to win a copy of CF8 at the Abacus bar .

 

Next Thursday the British Computer Society have organised a talk on modern technology choices. There will be talks from people (not vendors) representing the Java, .Net, Ruby and Flex camps from the respective user groups (I wasn't even aware there was a London Flex usergroup). This is a free event and should be an interesting look over the fence at the various communities surrounding the various technologies.

I was partly prompted to write this on the back of Brian's recent blog post on gateways. I've been meaning to talk about this for a while now as it has sort of bugged me. Far too often when people I meet mention OO in ColdFusion - the very next thing they mention is DAOs, Gateways and Beans as if thats all there is to it. In fact its almost expected that if you are writing an OO application in ColdFusion there will almost certainly be a DAO in there. What bothers me about this is it kind of smacks of a herd mentality. I'm convinced that there are many people who don't understand the trade offs of the design patterns they actually use and worse still aren't even aware of the alternatives out there. Many of the people I talk to who actually use gateways aren't even aware of Martin Fowler's book. Why is this an issue? Well because before you use a design pattern you should be aware of the intent, where it is applicable, the consequences and trade offs. More importantly for the ColdFusion community what are the alternatives to the gateway and or a DAO? Can you name any?  So come on guys what ever happened to the Observer pattern, Active Record or  (two of my favourites) the Strategy pattern or the Specification pattern? There are tons of design patterns out there and it worries me a bit that many (not all) ColdFusion programmers have a toolbox which only includes 3 types of hammers - don't use any other hammers and haven't even read the instructions for the ones they use.

 

Following on from Charlie Areharts list of people who had blogged about CFEclipse - I've added a CFEclipse category to my blog. While searching my blog posts from the past four years I found a handful of one line posts on CFEclipse short cut keys which I had blogged but never actually published from June last year. By now there are more comprehensive lists and I'm sure everyone knows these by now but just incase...

TIP1: For a drop down list of all available files currently open: press cntrl-e

TIP2: To create a cfdump with a positioned cursor: shift + cntrl + D

TIP3: To delete a line: cntrl + D

TIP3: To insert opening and closing cfoutput tags, select the code you want to be wrapped up in cfoutput tags and then press cntrl-O

Tomorrow I'm off to celebration Europe which will be attended by Boba Fett and C-3PO! Now if I can only find my purple Light Sabre.

Some of my female friends in the past have commented that they never really understood what all the fuss around Starwars was. To them I say this - to understand men you need to understand Star Wars

Well for the first time in the last 4 years I won't be making it across the pond to cfunited. Instead I will be at home sulking over Thiery Henry leaving Arsenal!