2008 March archive at Ivan Porto Carrero

Archive for March, 2008

19MarMade some changes: The macbook 5 weeks in

I’ve been using my macbook as my personal and work pc. So I’ve had windows vista installed on it for all this time. While in the beginning everything seemed to work just fine. This week my vista box didn’t want to move if its live depended on it. So I upgraded my vista install to an XP install. So far the XP machine is heaps faster than the vista box. It has the same software installed as my vista box and yet it works suprisingly better.

The only thing that kept me on vista was IIS7 because I like to use my projects as roots not as virtualdirs. I do most of my development as webdevelopment, but then again it’s rare that I’m working on a project that needs more than one root website, so I let that go.

I care most about speed or lack thereof and in my previous setup it was definitely lack thereof.

So I thought I’d share some of my thoughts around switching.

OSX and windows is the combination that can do it all. I use visual studio with resharper through parallels and with XP it seems to be able to keep up with my typing.

Explorer on Vista is the best file browser I’ve ever used. Finder on OSX is utter crap, the UI is crappy and the UX is just egregious (thanks to sbellware for teaching me this word).

I use paid for and use Pathfinder on my OSX and that is more usable although a bit heavyweight for something that should just enumerate the filesystem.

Somebody didn’t think that menubar through properly because people nowadays use 2 monitors or more, having consistent shortcuts would make this less of an issue.

Consistency on keyboard shortcuts is something I miss but got over it and have a post where I explain what I did to make it work slightly better http://flanders.co.nz/2008/02/07/more-on-mac-keybindings/

And that was about all the bad news I have apart from the fact that my macbook pro can get incredibly hot. This can be remedied to some extent by installing smcfancontrol

Now onto the good news.

Configuration on the filesystem is so much better than having a registry hive that gets corrupted now and again.

The speed of my OSX is great, startup time is much shorter.

The whole experience of organising my personal stuff like photos, music and how it integrates in the OS and other programs is fantastic. I don’t want to go back to a broken model for this.

Sleep just works and i’m not hoping and praying that when i use it my box will recover from it. It’s incredibly light and the battery life of 4 hours without windows running or 2.5 hours with windows running is still very ok for me.

In terms of UI slickness I have to give the advantage to a linux distro with Compiz enabled they give you the freedom to choose how your computer behaves on certain actions instead of no options on windows and 2 choices on OSX.

I don’t think Apple has innovated much on an OS level apart from the Dock. IMHO OSX isn’t perfect but it is really great at its job and stays out of my way.

Technorati Tags: macbook pro

in Apple. 0 Comments

19MarMade some changes: moved blogs

First off. Maybe you haven’t noticed but I switched my blogging engine from Subtext to wordpress. I did this not because I think Subtext is bad. I actually liked it, but because of my host. I was hosting my blog with webhost4life. I get a very very modest amount of people over my blog daily but even that wouldn’t work. It doesn’t have anything to do with the blogging engine and everything with them. I tried using that server as a stagingserver for an app I built for a client and in the end we staged it from my pc over and adsl line (NZ to Belgium) and that was faster.

I wasn’t looking forward to moving blogging engines because I don’t want my permalinks to change etc. The whole move was less painful than expected because somebody had already done the work and made a nice write-up. http://www.aaronlerch.com/blog/2007/08/23/breaking-up-moving-blog-engines/

For the moment I’m running wordpress. Everything seems to work ok and I don’t have to restart it 2 or 3 times a day by "changing" my web.config. So in short long live more reliable hosting.

in hosting. 1 Comment

18MarA status report on the IronRuby in Action book

The last couple of months I’ve been fairly busy writing my book. I had a first draft ready and that was submitted for review.

At this moment I’m working through all the remarks that the reviewers gave me. Some of them were quite good and made me realise that not everybody expects what I’m expecting from an IronRuby book. So I’ve been expanding some explanations and rewriting big chunks. I expect that we will have another review round soon. I have to process those remarks again and at that stage we’ll probably be ready to publish it in and EAP style.

Now that my first 3rd is done I’m starting at actually developing applications with IronRuby. I’m pretty curious to a couple of things from the community.

At this stage I have the following things planned for DataAccess.

I’ll include a brief tutorial on how to use IronRuby with:

SubSonic
Castle ActiveRecord
Linq2Sql
Rails ActiveRecord
LightSpeed

I would like to know which one I should emphasize most and focus on most.

After that I’m starting on WPF and/or Winforms. At this stage I’ve only planned to talk about WPF and not about Winforms. But I’d like to confirm if that is the general idea from the people that are going to take this IronRuby ride with me.

When I start talking about ASP.NET which topics are of most interest ?

That are all the questions I have for now. When I have more questions I’ll surely post them. And I would like to thank everybody that puts his 2c in.

I’ll post more when I have more news around the book.

Technorati Tags: ironruby,ironruby in action

in IronRuby. 8 Comments

08MarColor scheme for visual studio with resharper and Ruby in Steel support

This is certainly an exciting time for me. A release of dynamic silverlight that supports IronRuby, Asp.NET MVC that can be used to in conjunction with that.

I think that web applications and the way the web looks will severely change in the near future.

Anyway not only the people at Microsoft have been busy also the guys from sapphiresteel have been busy lately. They releases a really cool update to their Ruby In Steel product. A visual rails work bench and support for developing IronRuby apps with visual studio !

I finally got round to doing some installs/upgrades on my machine and played around with the color scheme until it suited me. I’ll post that here.

I use Resharper 4 as well as IronRuby and in Resharper I have code analysis turned on with color identifiers. So my scheme needs to support those.

I don’t like bright colors nor a totally black background, they have the same effect as a white background on me. I get migraines and can’t concentrate as long as I need to. (the latter may also be due to undiagnosed ADD).

So in C# with resharper the code looks like this:

I do lot’s of webdevelopment but I haven’t tuned the colors for xaml yet. Will probably get round to doing that next weekend. This is how the html colors look (this is from rails html but html looks the same).