goption Brian's blog

My computer toolset

I got a new 64-bit Windows 7 computer at work, and have been setting it up with all the tools I need to get my work done.  Here's a list of the Windows apps that I've installed, for future reference:

• Firefox 6 - web browsing
• Thunderbird 6 - email
• Chrome 6 - for certain sites, Chrome 6's javascript memory footprint is tiny compared to Firefox.
• MS Visual Studio 2005 and 2010 - C compiler
• Intel Parallel Studio 2011 - Fortran compiler
• Eclipse - Java IDE
• Perl 5 64-bit
• Python 2.7
• Autohotkey - open source macro tool - very handy.
• VIM - I've been using vi for 20+ years.  It's a pain to learn, but once you know it you can make it do anything you need.
• TextPad - a more standard editor that's useful for certain tasks.
• MS Office 2007
• LibreOffice 3.4 - for most things I use LibreOffice, but when I get a document with complex formatting or a spreadsheet with lots of macros, I have to use MS Office instead.
• Lightscreen - an open-source screen cap app
• Perforce - my company's code management tool
• Putty and Putty Connection Manager - on my old XP workstation, I used a paid-app called AbsoluteTelnet, which worked very well.  It's price is now up to $49 per seat, and neither my company nor I are willing to pay for it anymore.  Putty and PCM together are very close in functionality to AbsoluteTelnet (once you get everything setup just right), so I have changed over.
• Xming - an open-source X-windows server system.  The combination of Putty, PCM, and Xming gives me a complete replacement for the bloated Hummingbird Exceed suite, with even better performance.
• Callibre2 - an ebook library management tool.
• Sigil - an ePub authoring and editing tool
• VMware - my new system is fast enough and has enough RAM to make VMware fly.
• Truecrypt - all my personal stuff and my security-related files for work are stored on encrypted Truecrypt volumes.
• Gimp - open source, very powerful graphics apps.  90% of Photoshop, but about $600 cheaper - it's free.
• Paint.net - when Gimp is overkill.  This handles basic graphic editing tasks quickly.
• Inkscape - an SVG editor.  I use it for maps and floorplans.
• Skype - a necessary evil for online conference calls.
• WebEx - another necessary evil, for online collaboration
• TeamViewer - VNC without a VPN.
• GNU Core Utilities - Unix commands.

Revolve in peace…

It's been five years since Pluto was downgraded.

Google+ and Diaspora

I'm not a big fan of Facebook, but if you want to keep up with the extended family, it's a necessary evil.  But maybe things are changing...

A few weeks ago Justin hooked me up with a Google+ invite, and this morning Jason sent me a Diaspora invite.  It's kind of a pain keeping all these social media sites up-to-date, but at some point one of them will grow into a tool that can manage everything, with the right levels of privacy and convenience.  Until that happens, I guess we'll have to do our best to check up on each site.

Tabbed browsers

How did the world survive before tabbed browsing came along?

Instascriber

There's one blog in particular that I enjoy reading, but the postings are too long to fit into my normal feed reading periods.  Instascriber is a minimal web app that sends your selected RSS feeds directly to your Instapaper account for later reading.  This is best used for feeds that update infrequently -- active feeds will quickly overwhelm your Instapaper.

Instascriber Automatically Adds Articles to Instapaper from RSS Feeds.

Froyo!

My Android 2.2 OTA upgrade arrived this morning. When I got to work, I had a message on the display with the good news. The upgrade went through with only one, very minor hitch.

The upgrade gives me better battery life, more accurate signal strength meters, native Flash support, 720p video capability, and SD card app installations. There's other improvements too, but those are the highlights.

The one glitch was with my cloud-based note app SpringPad. After the upgrade, it wouldn't sync with changes I made on the web. I uninstalled it, and reinstalled it, and it's now working perfectly. I haven't noticed any other problems.

Memory

My Droid Incredible came with a 2gb microSD card, and I made an early upgrade to a 4gb cards from the stash in my junk drawer, but I needed more. Using a stale Amazon gift card, I ordered a new 16gb Class 4 card, and it came in the mail today. I duped the old card's contents onto the new card, and now I have space to burn. At least for now…

Since battery life is a constant struggle, I also picked up a new 1750mah battery.

Incredible

After some not-so-subtle hinting which bordered on the obnoxious and may very well have crossed that line, my kids and Carole went in together to get me a Droid Incredible for Father's Day. Demand was high, so the phone didn't get to me until today. It was definitely worth waiting for.

Thanks, everyone!

Key-codes for selected special characters in Windows

The Race to Save the Cougar Ace

High Tech Cowboys of the Deep Seas: The Race to Save the Cougar Ace

A great article about a salvage team working to save a capsized cargo ship off the Aleutians.

vi skills

I sometimes amazes me how little some programmers know about the nuts and bolts of vi. They've spent four hours or more a day, every day, for years and years using vi, and they know only the most basic features.

There's a guy at work who's always giving hallway lectures on the newest cutting edge technology - python, SCONS, blah, blah, blah - but the last time I sat with him at his terminal, his vi skills were so basic and he took so long to get things done, I wanted to scream.

Juggling chainsaws

From The Codist...

Writing multithreaded code is like juggling chainsaws; amazing when it works and truly sucky when it doesn't.

Right now at my job I am writing the foundation for a transaction processing cluster in Java, so I'm immersed in lots and lots of threads and interacting applications. When you are processing 8000 of something per second, any problems in your approach or in your choice of frameworks is magnified.

In job interviews, a popular question is "what is the major problem you have to solve in writing multithreaded code?" Generally, if they have read a little about it, they often say "avoiding deadlocks". If they have done a bit of thread coding, maybe in Swing, they might say "protected shared data". Only the truly experienced in complex threaded coding will say "avoiding doing nothing".

The only valid measurement of code quality…

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XP VLK

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