Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Toys For Coding Boys

Seems like every developer with a blog inevitably posts his list of favorite coding toys. So I figure, who am I to buck the trend? Without further delay, here's my list of favorites...

Programming Toys

Code Rush - Without a doubt, this is THE coding tool you need if you are a Visual Studio developer. I will NEVER code without it again. It combines nifty code templates with refactoring tools and visual coding aids. Plus the support for this thing is unparalleled. The site hosts short, 5 to 15 minute training videos that will get you started. The newsgroups are regularly browsed by the guys who write and use it.

Visual Studio 2005 - Yeah, I know, all you Microsoft bashers out there are ready to start picking at MS. I've been using their development tools since Basic Compiler 1.0 (yeah I'm an old fart). I even recall VB for MSDOS! So VS2005 is really a great development environment. I don't know of any tool that is as complete as this one. You can knock MS all you want, but their tools have kept me employed since the 80's.

DPack - From USysWare is a nifty but overlooked little set of free utilities for VS 2003/5. The "surround with" feature is especially useful.

General Use Toys

UltraEdit - No one should be without this powerful text editor. This is the best tool I have ever downloaded, period. It's a text editor, so what makes it better than notepad? Oh how do I count the ways.

It has a Column mode, for cutting and pasting columns of text. It has View As templates for Syntax Highlighting. Included are C#, VB (6 and .Net), Java, XML, HTML and more. You can also download additional templates for Perl, PHP, and more. Can't find one? You can make your own too!

Big Files? Oh yeah. Using it's built in FTP capabilities I downloaded a 1.2 GIG log file from the server. Took a while to download, but once to my laptop it flew through it with no problems. Has a built in macro language, search and replace (can use regular expressions!). So go look at it already, you won't be disappointed. This is the one tool I use every day without fail.

PS Hot Launch - This handy little tool will let you create a custom menu for your system. Then you can tie it to a set of custom defined hot keys to bring up the menu, or items in the menu. For example, I use Win+Alt+Z to pop up the menu. In the menu I created shortcuts for each of my hard disks. Now I can get to them either through Win+Alt+Z and picking the drive in the menu, or hitting Win+Ctrl+C for drive C, etc. It's free, and quite handy if you are a keyboard junkie.

SlickRun - Cool little utility, puts a command line anywhere you want on the desktop. Single line, you can key in any command you want. Additionally, you can define shortcuts of your own. vs, for example now brings up visual studio for me. And it's free!

FreeRamXP Pro - Handy little memory monitor and compactor. Sits in the system tray and gives constant updates to the amount of free ram. At predetermined times, it will compact memory, free up much needed space. Very handy. It also has a nifty menu option to Force Shutdown or Force Restart, when you have a pesky app that is refusing to let you reboot using normal methods.

RenameMaster - Extremely handy no install program that will let you bulk rename files. It has all sorts of fancy ways you can rename, including adding numbers to the beginning of files. I find that very handy before creating MP3 CDs so I can get the play order like I want.

Brainy Blogs

Intellectual Hedonism - Carl Franklin goes way back, in many ways our paths paralelled. We've worked with many of the same tools (anyone remember Ethan Winer's Crescent Software?). Only Carl is a lot smarter than I, as he know owns several companies and I'm an anonymous blogger. Buy hey, no jealousy here!

Computer Zen - Scott Hanselman's Log, I just recently discovered this, but good info here. He also does a podcast called Hansel Minutes which is worth a listen.

Rory Blyth - Rory's an insomniac with a twisted sense of humor. My kind of guy! (Now where'd I put my Jolt cola?)

Richard Campbell - The Toy Boy has some fascinating reading on his sight. His water cooled systems sound interesting. How does he get all those neat toys?

Mark Miller - OK, imagine Robin Williams, Einstein, and a space alien got together and had a baby. OK, don't imagine so hard, or you'll give yourself a brain zit. But if they did, it'd be Mark Miller. The dude is a genius with the computer, I first saw him in a presentation at VS Live in Orlando last year. He's largely responsible for my favorite tool, Code Rush. They say genius borders on insanity, and Miller continually wavers back and forth across the line. I've decided he's now my diety of choice. I figure why wait, avoid the rush and start a cult now.

Well there you go...

My short list of favorites. These are the tools I use on a regular basis. A few I haven't seen in other blogs, so hopefully you found something new here that will help you in your daily existance.

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

The Family That Blogs Together...

I knew she couldn't resist long. My kid sister finally got around to creating her own blog. You can check her out at http://www.digitaldivas.net. I warn you, if you're in to pepto pink you'll like this, other wise...

Her husband's got a long running blog called Geek Ramblings, you ought to check it out. He's big in the WordPress community.

You call this work?
My morning got sucked up with e-mails. Amazing how much work it takes just to get some work done. I did get to spend the afternoon coding, which was nice. I telecommuted, so my afternoon was spent on the back porch working on my laptop. Nothing like some fresh air, sunny skies and good music to induce some productive work.

Strange item of the week...
I found the funniest thing over the weekend. While at Mt Cheaha, I found a unique item: "Wrist Bands - 3 Pack".

Think about it a minute.

Go ahead, I'll wait.

Get it now? I mean really, what am I going to do with 3 bands and 2 wrists? Make friends with someone named Lefty? In the spirit of MacGyverism, turn one into a sling shot?

All keyed up...
I found the keyboard of my dreams. Well, almost my dreams, if it was wireless it'd be perfection. But still, it comes real close. Check out http://shrinkster.com/eda. Cool isn't it? I want one soooo bad. When I'm coding it drives me nuts to continually shift from keyboard to mouse and back. I think one may have to come live with me real soon.

73 de N4IXT

Sunday, April 23, 2006

Mountains, Bug Juice, and Interfaces

Been a busy weekend. Got the Queue stuff knocked out on a big app I'm working on. Nice to finally get some coding time to make some real progress.

Took wife and kids to Mt Cheaha today. For those unfamiliar with it, Mt Cheaha is the highest point in Alabama. Some awesome views, everything was pretty and green. In the next few weeks my company is having a big meeting there at the park lodge, and we got a chance to check it out. Very nice park ranger showed us inside and out, told us some of the lodge's history. Cheaha is well worth the trip, and if you go definately check out the resturaunt, every table has a spectacular view.

OK, about the bug juice. We've had non stop rain for the last few days. Very heavy downpours each afternoon, violent thunderstorms, flooding, hail, you know typical spring time weather. Whenever there's a huge increase in moisture we wind up seeing a bug or two sneaking it's way in to avoid the rain. Happens.

So this morning I saw a small bug, and lept into action getting out the brand new gallon of bug death juice, and squirting a little down here in my office. The squirter gizmo is on a small hose which goes down into the gallon container.

Well, I was in a bit of a hurry, so after giving a few squirts dropped the sprayer and jug on the floor of my home office and off to the mountain we went. I know most of you are now smart enough to see this coming, but clearly I was having a "dumba than Mark Miller moment" (see mondays.pwop.com if you don't know what I'm talking about).

Yes, I got home to discover the contents of the jug had slowly leaked out of the container. My office floor is now saturated with bug juice. Smells a little but not too bad. The carpet is the cheap indoor / outdoor stuff, so it'll dry. And on the bright side, it killed the bug, I found it lying dead in my office doorway trying to escape. Heh heh heh.

OK, interfaces. As I mentioned I've been reading Juval Lowy's book "Programming .Net Components". In it, he advocates always having your components expose only interfaces, and programming against the interfaces. Haven't tried it yet, but it seems like a lot of extra effort, especially on limited scope type items. Going to have to really think about this some more to convince me it's the right way to go.

Hey, Braves just won, sweet. Pulled behind from being down 0-1 against the Nationals to win 3-1.

Monday, April 17, 2006

No Rest For The Wicked...

What a busy couple of weeks it's been. Egad. Was out of town all last week at meetings for work. Nice to break the routine, but all week was a bit long.

Week before we got hit by lightening. Fried our TIVO, two network hubs and all of the NICs that were hooked to 'em.

On the bright side, we finally got our van back from the repair shop. Someone hit us last year, and scheduling issues kept getting in the way of getting it fixed. Looks nice without the dents and scratches.

I also took advantage of the road trip to swing by a decent book store, picked up a couple of new books on C# 2005. Currently reading Juval Lowey's "Programming .Net Components". Well written, definately not a beginners book. It's looking like there's a shift beyond OOP to Components in the .Net world. Of course I'm only on chapter 2, will update as I go through it.

Weird link of the week: http://savetoby.com/. This guy is threatening to eat his pet rabbit if the general public doesn't buy 100,000 copies of his book. Previously he was threatening rabbit stew unless people donated 50k. He'd actually collected 28,000 before pay pal shut him down.

I say, set the table and bring on the rabbit stew!

Sunday, April 02, 2006

Welcome to Vicodin Land

Something like 20 years ago I dropped a book case on my right foot, big toe. Ever since then it has vexed me by growing in, dying, getting grody, falling off, then repeating. So the podiatrist says "it's gotta go". Couldn't agree more, so Friday she finally cut it off, removed the nail bed and dumped acid down there.

Anyone remember the bit Bill Engvall did on "Vicodin Land"? Well baby I'm there! And it's a fun place to visit. Well, sort of. Mostly it just makes me sleepy, and it really makes it hard to put two thoughts together in row. Haven't taken one today as I need to think. Toe hurts, but I think I'd rather put up with the flames shooting off of it than being next in line for space cadet school.

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?