August 2007 Blog Posts
Since the three days of pain in going quad, I've rather enjoyed using Vista x64 thus far. UAC hasn't been as much of a pain as it might and HP even had drivers for my old Deskjet. But beyond my initial impressions, there are definitely a few more 64bit switch issues that aren't going to go away.
There's no flash player plug-in for any 64 bit browser. And no sign of Adobe writing one soon either. YouTube is now but a copy hyperlink, open IE x86, paste and watch away. Joy. At least SlickRun makes this slightly...
I use Virtual PCs a lot. In general, I create a single slimmed down base image of an operating system, mark it read only and create differencing disks off that image to test software. There are a lot of partial guides out there to creating a speedy slimmed down base image and several more for simply speeding up XP but nothing all together. Thus I present, a near-as-dammit guide to really slimming down and speeding up your VPC.
As a Word 2003 doc file
As a Word 2007 docx file
...
A common thread going round the blogosphere questions what is required to become a better developer. One blogger reckons it's to read a book a week for 26 weeks and do a little catch up learning. He'll certainly be better read than before, but better as a developer? Well, maybe. There might be a few other things that will help too.
Ensure your foundations. Know the basics really well. If your core HTML, C#, PHP etc is always at your fingertips, it'll leave you time to concentrate on the trickier things. That includes using your IDE, its plugins...
About five months or so ago, I logged a few bugs about the documentation for MbUnit. I also created a couple of simple project templates for MbUnit and nUnit. It was easy enough to do and I ended up chatting to Andy Stopford a bit about writing a book on MbUnit. Nothing has happened with that yet, but instead Andy asked me to try and wrestle the current MbUnit documentation into some sort of shape. About the same time, there was a thread or two of discussion dismissing any open source project's hopes of having a decent set of documentation that...
Warren Ellis is closing down the forums at The-Engine.net
THE ENGINE will close a little before midnight UK time on August 31 2007.
The first year was about getting creators together and facilitating conversations that didn't have anywhere else to go. The second year was about just providing people with an interesting place to talk. Two years is enough. Time to move on.
Which is a great pity, but better to go out on a bang than a whimper. Warren, like the net, never stands still. For those of you who never came across this wonderful forum before, go and check it out...
Five days in with life on Vista x64 after the hardships of going quad and I'm trying to get used to working the Vista way but a few things are jarring.
Media Player plugins don't work on x64. My last.fm account will remain static now.
I really dislike the vista start menu, but can't not use the search function on it. Its the only way I've found of getting to it. To wit, everything I use is now run through SlickRun. Thank heavens for that.
I'm a developer. I...
Scott Hanselman and Jeff Atwood have been slowly building up a new development rig for Scott over the past month or so with Jeff giving blow by blow commentary on how he's put it together, tips and so on. It's a pretty good set of posts to read should you ever want to build your own.
The CodingHorror Ultimate Developer Rig Throwdown: Part 1 - The idea is presented and Scott's list of demands goals is kicked around.
The CodingHorror Ultimate Developer Rig Throwdown: Part 2 - Several possible hardware list. If only parts were that cheap...
I haven't switched to Hi-Def discs yet. With the HD-DVD \ Blu-ray saga continuing, my guess is that hybrid players will actually solve the main issue of what format to opt for anyway but hey what do I know? I found it interesting that the former chair of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers doesn't like Blu-ray because Sony (the company behind Blu-ray) refuses to use any video compression technique on Blu-ray other than the already surpassed MPEG2 codec and from a geek point of view I tend to agree and would go for HD-DVD if I had to choose...