Month: November 2002

Chris Sells:

.NET Refactoring Tool Enters Beta. “C# Refactory is a revolutionary new tool which enhances Microsoft’s Visual Studio.NET IDE. It performs a number of complex refactorings automatically, allowing you to shape and re-shape your code as needs arise. It also helps you identify code which needs attention by calculating metrics, from ‘lines of code’ all the way up to ‘cyclomatic complexity’. It is fully integrated with the IDE – no external tools means that refactorings are always ready at your fingertips.”

As I’m writing a bunch of book code just now, I’m not a good beta tester for this tool, but the descriptions of what it does look yummy. I would especially love Extract Method and Rename Type.

Blogroots: Blog resources.

Reverand Jim has stumbled upon Phrame, which implements a modified version of the Model-View-Controller design paradigm.  Watch his weblog to see what he does with it.

Mark Pilgrim has been tweaking his site, and also tells his tales of XHTML1.1.  It’s top notch reading as always.

This is the obligatory link to the infamous Ellen Feiss interview at Brown.

Well, Brent, be careful what you wish for.

system.verbs.builtins.radio.weblog.metaWeblogApi.rpcHandlers.getRecentPosts changed on Fri, 22 Nov 2002 09:59:12 GMT: Return an array of the most recent posts. Per recommendation from Brent Simmons.

Dane Carlson has a secret.  Let the rumors begin.

Tweaked the item template on the site, added a little ~> to make the title stand out from the post a little bit.  It was bothering me.  Those in RSS-land probably won’t notice.  I also ditched a few <br>’s that were littered about, I’m a little happier with the visual part now.  My focus is on content, but having it look pleasing to at least my eye is important too.  I need to get rid of the tables in the item template, but that will have to wait.

It looks fine in IE6 and Mozilla on Windows and fine in Mozilla under Red Hat 8.0.  The tilde looks a little silly in Lynx, and I’m slightly worried about mixing up content and visual stuff.  We’ll see

Brian Graf pointed out one of the coolest services I’ve ever seen.

It’s extremely rare that I have the opportunity to be as completely satisfied as a consumer as I was last night. After seeing some testimonials on the DOTNET-WEB list, I decided to give Mimeo a try.

I took a look at the demo, and it looks wicked cool.  I’ll definately use them the next time I need a big document printed or binded.  The prices are right, the service (from Brian’s experience) sounds great, and it’s damn quick.  Is this on anyone’s killer app radar?  The prices I saw seem to be a fraction of what Kinkos charges, plus you have complete control over everything.  So cool.

Scott Hanselman gave a talk entitled Web Services, Behind the Music last night in Oregon. He points to several things that were mentioned at the DevCon, and he also put together a great list of tools that he used in the presentation. All of the web services heads in the audience should check it out.

OpenBSD Journal points to several projects designed to make you/let you write more secure C code:

A recent thread on secure programming idioms on the secprog list (hosted by securityfocus) raises a lot of good questions people here often have, namely “how can we more easily program more secure and robust code?”

John Udell writes about debugging SOAP, including using Mindreef’s SOAP Scope.  SOAP Scope is truly wicked, and worth more than the $99 that they are charging if free tools like Simon Fell’s TCPTrace aren’t enough for you.  I think changing views from looking at the raw XML going over the wire to pseudocode was truly cool, and can really help visualize what’s going over the wire.  I’ve said it before, but their presentation at Web Services DevCon East was an eye opener.

Here are the installation instructions for Memo, a simple alarm clock/appointment keeper written in Python for Gnome.

1. Make sure ROX-Lib2 is installed (drag it to your ~/lib directory).
2. Download the archive above.
3. Extract it (eg, by dragging it to Archive)
4. Click on it to run it if your filer supports application directories, or run the Memo/AppRun file if it doesn’t.
5. The documentation is in the Memo/Help directory.

This is, of course, NOT the way that I would install the program.  People look at me funny when I drop to the DOS prompt in order to do some heavy lifting.  I would snag Memo and ROX-Lib2 via either Mozilla, Lynx, or ncftp, then do a little tar -xvf, and probably run ./AppRun & to test it out.

Of course, Linux will never truly make it on the dektop until installing every program (RPMs, .tgzs, etc) install in a similar manner.  Listen up, Red Hat.

Come to think of it, I’ll probably still drop to a shell…

Jonathan Krim at The Washington Post writes:

The Energy Department has shut down a popular Internet site that catalogued government and academic science research, in response to corporate complaints that it competed with similar commercial services.

Department officials said abandoning PubScience, an electronic service that cross-indexed and searched roughly 2 million government reports and academic articles, will save the government $200,000 a year because two equivalent services exist in the private sector.

There’s no way that I can rationalize this as being a Good Thing.  Other agencies are worried that this might pave the way for other closures.

DPReview reports yet another itty bitty storage format, as if we didn’t have too many already:

The MultiMediaCard Association (MMCA) has approved a new RS-MMC (Reduced Size MultiMediaCard) standard. This new flash storage format has the same width but almost half the length of existing MMC cards, RS-MMC cards will be 24 x 18 x 1.4 mm. Hitachi are the first manufacturer to announced RS-MMC cards up to 64 MB in capacity. It’s clear that this new reduced size format is aimed primarily at the mobile phone / PDA market but I’m sure it would also offer digital camera manufacturers the opportunity to build even smaller digital cameras.

So here are the formats available in order to store your stuff: PCMCIA solid state or hard drive, Compact Flash (I & II), Microdrive, SmartMedia, Secure Digital, MultiMediaCard, Memory Stick, xD (Fuji and Olympus’ stupid format), and [drumroll…] RS-MMC.

Crap, which one does my camera take?  What about my PDA?  Oh, that’s right, they’re all different.

Russell is getting back in the C++ saddle in order to play with Series 60/SymbianOS. 

John Terpstra at IBM Developerworks takes UnitedLinux 1.0 for a spin.  I think I have .ISO’s for the UnitedLinux Public Beta, but I don’t think I ever bothered to install it.  Skimming the specs, I see GCC3.1 not 3.2, and KDE but no Gnome.  The installation screens look fairly useful, but not as easy to use as the Red Hat installed, and no where near as pretty.  It does look like quite a solid distro though.

Margaret Kane at CNet reports:

Members of the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) have formed a working group to develop an XML file format specification for the OpenOffice project.

Leo is taping a new pilot tonight:

I’m trying to contain my excitement, but I’m getting to pilot a new show tonight. We’ll tape Leo Up Late (only the working title) tonight after The Screen Savers at about 9:30p Eastern. It won’t be on the air, but you can still help out.

John McGrath has a good roundup of four open source content management systems at ZDNet. [via James Robertson (Column Two)]