Yearly Archives: 2006

Ultimate dev laptop

I’ve been looking around at laptops for a while. I want the ultimate laptop.

  1. I want Core 2 Duo or similar AMD
  2. At least 2GB RAM
  3. A fast hard drive (7200rpm)
  4. Dual display out, DVI and VGA
  5. Ability to run 2 external 20″ monitors
  6. At least 15.4″ monitor
  7. Very good build quality
  8. DVD writer
  9. Onboard Wifi
  10. Optional: Bluetooth
  11. Optional: Card reader

Does anybody know of such a laptop that has had good reviews. I’ve looked at Asus, Acer, Rock, Alienware, Evesham, AJP and Dell. Each of them falls down on at least one of the above. I’ve been weighing up whether to push for a laptop in work or to bite the bullet and buy one myself. If I found the right one, I would have no hesitation paying GBP1500 of my own cash. The amount of time I spend on it, it’d be stupid not to. At the moment, the front runner is the Dell XPS m1710 but it tops out at GBP2000 which is a bit too much.
I need all suggestions, so please comment 🙂

Multiple instances of jEdit

I am a complete jEdit fanatic and it always has a place on my taskbar. jEdit is ver clever when running multiple versions each instance communicates over TCP IP so that all instances are identical. What if you don’t want that and want to have different file open in different instances of jEdit (or if you were using something like GoScreen). By default the shortcut for jEdit is something like:

“C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.5.0_06\bin\javaw.exe” -jar “C:\Program Files\jEdit\jedit.jar”

But to stop the instances communicating to each other you need to use a “-noserver” switch:

“C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.5.0_06\bin\javaw.exe” -jar “C:\Program Files\jEdit\jedit.jar” -noserver

I found the above in the wonderful jEdit userguide, chapter “starting jEdit“.

W3C Log File format on IIS- UTC timestamp

We were trying to check the log files for a site of ours to make sure a rewrite rule was working. Due to lack of rotation, the log file was 3GB and would not open in textpad (understandably). What a I really needed was a win32 version of tail. Voila – tailforwin32.sourceforge.net. It’s a GUI to view the last few lines of a file. It changes as lines are added to the file so you can view error or server logs in real time. Great we can check if the rewrite rules are working now. But is the last entry in the log file always exactly one hour ago.

2006-09-18 13:47:04 GET /Default.aspx – – 84.92.72.226 HTTP/1.1 Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;+MSIE+6.0;+Windows+NT+5.1;+SV1;+.NET+CLR+1.1.4322) – 200 8307

After some research on W3C Log file formats (microsoft article), it turns out that it is the UTC time that is logged, not the LocalTime of the server. And since we are currently using daylight saving time (from March to October), which is UTC+1, which means that the UTC time of an entry in the log file looks like it’s an hour behind (from March to October anyway).

Mystery solved

And yes we have rotated the log files now.

auto rewrite rules and google sitemap generation

Although we’re very busy in work at the moment, the last few evenings I have been pythoning myself up and have come up with 3 nifty little scripts.

Usage of all three is quite simple –

python scriptName.py http://www.karova.com

There is also a zip archive for download. As you can see I have started using Google Code project hosting. It suits my needs perfectly as it’s simple to use and the SVN server they are using is hellish quick. I’ve named the project acr (Auto Create RewriteRules). For a sample of output see http://www.karova.com/sitemap.xml . The rewrite rules was written as a personal project but also for KarovaStore – So expect release 2.1 to have clean urls and auto google sitemaps.

Update:

Yes I know Google have their own sitemap generator but mine is alot easier to use.

Krugle Audit

I’ve been harping on about Krugle for a while now and rightly so. I was on their beta testers list and as such was also on their mailing list. Last week I got a mail asking me to part-take in an audit with a third party company to gauge my views on the web app so far. Sure I thought (plus there was a chance of getting a $50 Amazon voucher if I was in the first few to reply).

The audit only took a few minutes with simple questions:

  • What do I do?
    Senior software developer for Karova.
  • How did I find out about Krugle?
    On some blog – I’m not sure which one
  • How often do I use it?
    About 4 times a day
  • Will I continue to use it?
    Hell yes
  • Describe it to a friend
    Google for code (but not google cod search of course)
  • Example of when I use it and why do I not choose a competitor
    To quickly find out how to use a specific class

Low and behold I did get a $50 amazon voucher. Thanks guys – it doesn’t seem fair really.

The krugle blog have also given me credit for the Firefox search plugin I wrote 🙂

Krugle Firefox search plugin

I was cursing krugle.com and it’s bastard (yet brilliant) ajax as I could’t write a Firefox search plugin. Then today I saw on their blog that they have the “Krugle Search Environment” which allows you to bookmark searches and thus create a firefox search plugin.

In the archive which you need to save to “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins”. I have included a Firefox 1.5 version krugle.src and krugle.png for a C# search and also a Firefox 2.0 Opensearch krugle.xml which also searches C#. The language is quite easy to change or remove if you open the src or xml files.