Mike's Musing

In June of 2009 I left my first programming job to move to LayerX, it’s been roughly six months since the switch and I haven’t looked back. One of the biggest changes in the switch over that I wasn’t expecting to be so big was moving from Linux to Windows as my primary development environment I had not realised how many of the small apps that shipped with Ubuntu that I relied for my day to day work. It’s only been just recently that I felt that I’ve settled into windows development enough that I am no longer swapping and trying out new tools. As my first post for the year I thought that I would share the list of tools that I currently use often.

In this list I am trying to avoid major tools (like an IDE) and rather focus on the small language agnostic tools which makes my day to day life just that little easier.

Notepad2 – This is just a simple text editor, what puts it above the notepad that ships with windows is the syntax highlighting that it provides for many

Putty – While my primary development environment is no longer Linux I do still need to access various Linux servers and putty is still the simplist and most light weight tool for the job.

WinSCP – This is yet another tool for dealing with linux servers, getting files off of a linux server (lacking samba) onto a windows box can be a PITA and that is where this tool comes in to save the day it makes retreival of files from linux machines a breeze.

WinMerge – An awesome visual diff tool.

7-zip – I can not stress how much I love 7-zip or how lost I’d be without it. Able to uncompress every compression format I have come across so far, you no longer have to fear others sending you files compressed in formats which are not zip.

Balsamiq Mockups – I think this is damn near the perfect tool to create mockups to show to clients, the sketched feel to them seems to strike the right balance between looking somewhat professional and not looking like a real application.

Filezilla – An ftp client that just works.

TortoiseSVN – This seems to be the svn client for windows, with it’s integration into explorer it is easy to see why.

IcoFX – A simple easy to use Icon editor, it can be used to create Icons from scratch or transform existing images to icons.

InnoSetup – Distributing an application and want an easy to use installer? Then InnoSetup is the tool for you.

Console2 – I do not like the standard windows command prompt window at all. I have my reasons and half of them can probably be solved quite trivially, the point is the shouldn’t have to be. The ability to have multiple tabs of different types of consoles in one window is great.

Sqliteman – If you deal with SQLite databases then you need this tool, it lets you get into the database and examine and manipulate the data contained within.

MSBuildShellextension – This is a neat little tool I only discovered recently courtesy of the 2009 Hanselman tool list. My life is a little bit brighter now I can build VS projects from explorer without having to launch Visual Studio.

Is there anything you feel that I might of left out? Or do you know or better alternitives to some of tools listed above? If so leave a comment so I can look into them.

So a quick post to let those who might’ve wondered that yes this site is still semi-active, I haven’t posted as much as I would’ve liked to due to being busy at work.

Enough of that though and onto the purpose of this post this site and the collection of other sites who share the same server as I do have just finished transitioning to our new server at xlhost we decided to leave layeredtech after spending a couple of years there due to layeredtech shutting down the data center our server was hosted in and xlhost offering a better deal.

I was able to export all of the content from my old wordpress installation to import here. However it appears that I was not able to get all of the images which is a little disappointing, I might go looking through the google cache and hope I stumble upon something. Due to importing all of my posts from my old wordpress installation into this new one I’m not sure if people who subscribe to my rss feed got swamped with entries or not, if you did I apologise.

Well it would appear that I’m not dead yet and rumors to that effect may be slightly exaggerated. The main reason I have not been posting lately is because I’ve been in a bit of a funk where I haven’t had the motivation to work on any of my personal projects. With nothing new to show off I have had no real reason to make a post.

What is different with today you might ask? Well not a lot in relation to the lack of motivation to work, however enough semi-interesting – and one important – things have happened which together warrant me writing something.  Yesterday I finally upgraded to WordPress 2.8 any issues the site might be having will probably have been caused by the upgrade.  Last week I brought a HTC Magic (which runs Google’s android phone OS) I plan to do a post in the next couple of days about how the phone is working out for me so far.

Most importantly, a month ago I quit my job (that was the required notice I had to give) because I was approached with an offer I felt that it would be foolish of me to refuse.  Today was my first day at my new job working for LayerX, a small software company based here is Hamilton.  Like my last job I’m a software developer and I am looking forward to the oppurtunities that this new position has.  Due to this happening I finally got around to updating the about page, it still is not anything fantastic but at least it is up to date.

So I think I’m becoming addicted to statistics, for those of you who have either been reading my blog for a while or have gone back through the archives you will have noticed that it wasn’t until recently that I started posting frequently.  I’m going to come out and say that I think that this is because I’m now collecting statistics about visitors to this site.  I recently installed StatPress Reloaded largely out of curiosity to see what sort of data I could get from it.  I made a couple of posts here and there to see what sort of traffic I got, from there it has turned almost into a craving to see the graph peek after each post like a junkie seeking their next hit.

I find it odd that my motivation to blog wasn’t triggered by the urge to show off the work which I have been doing, but instead it’s by a group of coloured boxes that vary in height and I wonder slightly what that says about me.  Whatever that does say about the kind of person I am it has the good side effect of I’m now doing more work on my personal projects, due to the more work I do the more material I have to blog about. It has thrown up a couple of interesting facts that I wasn’t expecting as well such as – currently I get over 4 times more referrals from Windows Live search than what I get from Google (which was perhaps the biggest surprise), that some of the most requested pages don’t actually exist and it’s mostly Canadians that are requesting them (I’ll let you draw your own conclusions there).

I’ve been back at work a couple of days and once again settling back into the daily grind.  I had originally decided to make a series of posts once I got back from holiday called ‘Holiday Hacking’ which would detail the coding that I got up to during my time off, as it happens there was just one small hitch in that plan – I didn’t do much coding in my time off.  It would seem that I choose to relax these holidays rather than try and chip away at my to do list for gIDE.  While I didn’t work on gIDE this holiday I did however start a new project: Cuttlefish.  I plan to go into this in more depth in a later post so for now just let me say that it is a syntax highlighting Textbox component for .Net written in C#.

I have been doing a little bit of work around the site as well, mostly involving integration with my facebook account (which I’m intending to give more attention to this year).  For those that haven’t noticed (or read this via rss) a link to my profile now appears in the in the sidebar and all of my posts should hopefully be appearing on said profile. This has the added side effect of some of my friends who hadn’t noticed it before get to see how truly geeky I am.  For those who are interested the two plugins I am using for the integration are Wordbook and Facelook.

Today is my last day of work for this year, I have three weeks of holidays to look forward to.  I’m going to see family for Christmas and it is looking increasing likely that I am going to end up at some random lake to catch up with a few friends for new years.  The downside to this is thanks to my current living arrangement it means I’m going to all but drop off the internet for those three weeks, this isn’t a necessarily a bad thing though as it is going to give me a lot of time to work on gIDE.

I was hoping to have the first release of gIDE done before Christmas which is looking increasingly less likely, so much so that I’m not going to bother with it any more.  There isn’t a lot that I have to get done before I’m happy to make a release, these will also be the first things on my list of things I am going to work on during my time off.  In no particular order the features are:

• Find/Replace
• Project Properties
• Generic Build System
• Document split view

I’m also considering implementing a limited subset of vim commands, though I think I will wait until after this release in the hopes of getting some user feedback on what they think would be the most useful commands to include.

In other news I recently saw The Day the Earth Stood Still.  To be honest I was not that impressed, the movie seemed to trying to get a message across but not succeeding, at times I even felt that the movie wasn’t overly sure what that message should be.  The casting for the movie however was spot on, especially with Keanu Reeves.  Also a couple of days ago I recommended that you go read Pictures of You by Gibson Twist, from there I got linked to another webcomic of his which I enjoyed.  So if you enjoyed Pictures of You you might also want to check out Our Time in Eden.

Over the last couple of days I have been reading through the archives of the webcomic Pictures of You and have been thoroughly enjoying it.  The story is gripping as I’m sitting there eagerly waiting for it all to spectacularly fall apart as promised in the prologue, while I think that is a long way I’m still waiting with bated breath.   It was one of those stories that once you start it is very hard to walk away from it wanting to find out what happens next.  The art in my opinion (the whole 2 cents that it is worth on a good day) is beautiful,  I’m not sure if this is the right way to put it but I’d describe it as simple yet engaging able to get the point across without necessarily needing any dialog.

The first book is available somewhere as an actually book and I’m thinking about picking it up early in the new year.

The day before I shifted I picked up a couple of new games to keep me entertained during summer, they were Final Fantasy IV for the Nintendo DS and Star Wars: The Force Unleashed for the Wii. I haven’t really given Force Unleashed the time it deserves yet – because of the move and simply put Final Fantasy IV has really sucked me in, once I have settled in a bit more and get a chance to sit down and spend a few hours on Force Unleashed I will probably post my first impressions of that as well.

Final Fantasy IV is the remake of the SNES version for the DS, outside of Japan this game was originally released as Final Fantasy II.  It was in this game that the Active Time Battle system was introduced, this system was used in many of the subsequent Final Fantasy games.  This remake has seen the game transition to 3D engine (the same as what was used in the Final Fantasy III remake.) with new rendered cut-scenes and voice acting.  I am told that the script has had some of the content that had been cut in the original version restored to this version, however because I don’t want to risk spoiling the story for myself I don’t know how much content or where the content takes place.

Final Fantasy IV is my first venture into the games of the Final Fantasy franchise, having before only watched the not so great movie – Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, and the awesome Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. Up to this point I have been just iterating over many of the points that you can find on a retailers site or Wikipedia, that wouldn’t make much of a post about my first impression if I didn’t actually give any impressions, so here we go.  Final Fantasy IV is a visually stunning game and would easily be the best looking DS game I have played or seen for that matter.  The actual game-play is quite addicting, I can happily sit down for a few hours and lose myself in the game.  It took me a little while to get used to the battle system but once I was it added that little bit more excitement than the more traditional turn based systems.  Having not gotten all that far into the story line I can’t really comment much on it, but what has happened so far seems good.

The game doesn’t use the touch controls of the DS much, at most it allows you to move the character around inside of a dungeon, to me this felt more clunky than using the D-pad so it was quickly abandoned.  I would of preferred to see the designers try and use the touch pad for the interface more, in particular the the menu based elements of the game or the selection of an enemy/character in a battle.  Aside from that small gripe I can’t think of anything bad to say about the game,  I’m sure there are some annoying qualities but I haven’t come across them yet or they haven’t begun to bug me yet.

So to sum it all up Final Fantasy IV has made a good first impression on me and I would recommend anyone who owns a DS to go out and pick up a copy, I am seriously considering also going out an picking up the remake of Final Fantasy III for the DS which is based off of the same graphics engine.  Perhaps once I finish the game I will do another post detailing any annoyances that I come across and give a better indication on how good the plot is.

Typing this post from a friends new iPhone, it is easier than I thought it would be. It’s a pity that the plans in New Zealand are so expensive and the iPhone isn’t free (as in speech) as they are really quite nice.

At the moment I’m a little disappointed with the openmoko which I was quite keen to get but from everything I’ve heard it doesn’t seem quite ready for release, I think in about 6 months there should be quite nice product there, I wait with high hopes.

Also Jason a new post because you asked without trying to insult me.