My occasionally updated Blog

I'll expand on this later but I am tired of waiting for the time to do perfect posts.

I am spend a fair amount of time tweaking my computer to be the perfect tool of my craft. I recently had the opportunity to build out a new computer and so I kept track of my installs. Here it is:

• Firefox: My default browser. Free and open source http://getfirefox.com
  • Plug Ins:
    • Firebug: Debugging for javascript. I can't imagine client-side coding without it.
    • Ubiquity: Command line for your browser...still experimental. I think you have to see a demo to get it. From Mozilla Labs.
    • LastTab: I like Ctr-Tab in Firefox to come back to the last tab I looked at...not go in the order of the tabs. This does that.
• Notepad++: As a developer text is my clay, and while I love Visual Studio there are times (about 30 a day) where I just need a good text editor. Free and open source
  http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm
• Microsoft Visual Studio.NET 2008
• Winmerge: A very nice open source text compare and merge tool. I know geeks how don't use one; can't imagine how. Free and open source http://winmerge.org
• WinAmp: Gota have music http://www.winamp.com/player/
• tunneler: A very nice ssh client particularly for automating the process of setting up ssh tunnels. Free for individual use.   http://www.bitvise.com/tunnelier
• cygwin: Linux command line and utilities for Windows. Free and open source http://cygwin.org
• WinSCP: My favorite S/FTP client. Free and open source http://winscp.net/eng/index.php
• KeePass: A very nice password manager. Because that text file with all of your passwords in it is a bad idea. Free and open source http://keepass.info/
• Google Desktop: I held back form this one for a long time, but I am hooked now. It does a very nice job of helping me find things and is pretty darn good keyboard application launcher. http://desktop.google.com/
• pidgin: Multi-network IM client. Free and open source http://www.pidgin.im/
• skype VOIP and chat client. http://www.skype.com/
• ditto: An extension to the clipboard in WIndows. It keeps your clip history so you aren't stuck with just one. This is a HUGE productivity advantage once you get used to it. I have tried others and settled on this one because it is easy to use and still maintained.  Free and open source http://ditto-cp.sourceforge.net/
• tortoiseSVN: Easy to use Subversion client for Windows. A version of this for Source Safe would remove almost all of my complaints about VSS. Free and open source http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/
• StExBar: An extension of the Windows file toolbar. I haven't gotten into this as well as I might be has never caused me problems and I think would be very useful if I remembered to use it.  http://tools.tortoisesvn.net/StExBar
• paint.net: I am not a graphics guy for the most part (though I love writing graphics manipulation code), but I do need to tweak an image fairly often, for a button on a page or to pare down a screenshot or whatever. paint.net is to MS Paint what Notepad++ is to MS NotePad. Free.  http://www.getpaint.net/
• .NET Reflector: Visual Studio's object browser on steroids. Free and Paid versions  http://www.red-gate.com/products/reflector/
• NUnit: My favorite Unit testing framework. Free and open source http://nunit.org
• Windows Powershell: Microsoft's crack at a competent command line. I am still getting into this but folks like Scott Hanselman speak well of it. Free
• ASP.NET MVC 2: I am a MonoRail guy from way back in 2007 (geek time is longer than normal time), but I must admit I have really fallen in love with Microsoft's implementation of Model View Controller. I love the simplicity of the MVC model and it seems I am not alone. Free and open source
• Fiddler: Need to see everything that is passing from browser to server? This is your tool. Free  http://www.fiddler2.com/fiddler2/

I love the holidays, December is one of my favorite months...and I love January because I am ready to get back into creating things.

Lots of cool things happening in my tech life...jQuery 1.4 just released (and a Denver jQuery Meetup group having it's first session this month), .NET 4.0, Visual Studio 2010 and ASP.NET MVC 2 all releasing soon. It is the little things that make me happy.  And on a personal note my birthday is this week. I am most pleased to have completed another orbit.

I have a few things that I have been intending to post for a while and will get put in place the next couple weeks. The first being a really simple jQuery Tree script later this week.

I just listened to a cool RadioLab podcast about what a new born experiences of the world...I was left wonder struck (OK that is easy to do with me but still). Check it out at http://blogs.wnyc.org/radiolab/2009/08/24/after-birth/

I was listening to PRI's "The World" (http://www.theworld.org/) yesterday and they had as their featured musician these Americans that moved to Granada, Spain and started recording with the local music community there. The resulting album is available for free online and is quite wonderful.

Check it out at http://gnawledge.com/granadadoaba/. The interview with them is here

My boss asked me to evaluate some sample code that we requested from a candidate for a software development position. Two things not to do jumped at me, one trivial and one I think important:

The trival: it was sent as a compressed file, but as a 7z file. This is, as I said, a trivial point but not everyone has all of the different compression tools installed. Do you want to require someone to install software to look at your sample code? They might not bother. I prefer a OpenOffice to MS Word, but I sure make sure that my resume looks good in MS Word because that is the defacto  standard in business. Same principal here.

The important: The code was an advanced Hello World. Perhaps the nicest treatment of Hello World I have seen. But there is very little I can tell about a software developer's real abilities from a Hello World. Yes I can tell the person knows how to write a switch statement and parse input strings. However I was looking for something that let's me see how the person thinks at both a tactical, line by line level, as well as the strategic, how do you structure a application level.

You have no code that you can give out you say? Start/contribute to an open source project. Volunteer to write something for a non-profit. Pick up some side work. Write a cool application that tickles your fancy.

I am a big fan of immortality/transhumanism fiction. "Border Guards" by Greg Egan has been my favorite for a long time and I recently found out that the author has published it for free online. You can find it here

Mary bought me a new computer yesterday so I am building out a new machine. The machine I was describing in the last post was a work machine and so the tool set is very focused on the particular work i do there; a home machine gets a broader set of tools. So I am expanding the Tools post to a Tools Page just like all the cool kids like Hanselman.