Development

Moving my blogs

Egil Hogholt — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 19:24:00 GMT

I'm moving my blogs to a new home. More about why and how I (hope) to do it here: http://blog.egilh.com/2010/01/moving-from-text-095-to-blogger.html (the link will not work until the DNS changes take effect)

Are you a great problem solver?

Egil Hogholt — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 11:03:00 GMT

Then you should try your skills at Code Jam 2009

It's all about solving problems so knowing the latest development fads will not help you. You can access last years tasks in the practice section to get a feel for the problems you will have to solve. You can use any programming language, development environment or text editor as long as the compiler or interpreter you use is freely available and easy to download and use. Visual Studio can be used as there is a free version available: Visual Studio Express.

The top 25 online contestants will travel to Google headquarters in Mountain View, California where they will will compete for ACRush's title of Code Jam Champion and the grand prize of $5,000.

Registration ends September 3rd so register now.

Good luck!

How to fix The address is not valid error in Internet Explorer 7

Egil Hogholt — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 10:48:00 GMT

I hardly ever user Internet Explorer so I don't know when it broke, but today it gave me this error for all sites:

The address is not valid

Most likely causes:

There might be a typing error in the address.

If you clicked on a link, it may be out of date.

Looks like one of the latest set of security patches messed up something as the problem went away after I reset the browser settings:

Go to the Tools menu
Choose “Internet Options“
Click on the “Advanced“ tab
Click the “Reset“ button
Close the browser

Make sure you subscribe to the Chrome dev channel

Egil Hogholt — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 22:25:00 GMT

You can get a preview of the next version of Google Chrome by enabling the developer preview channel. It is not for the faint of hart so only do this if you have time to waste or like to be on the cutting edge:

The Dev channel is where ideas get tested (and sometimes fail). The Dev channel can be very unstable at times, and new features usually require some manual configuration to be enabled. Still, simply using Dev channel releases is an easy (practically zero-effort) way for anyone to help improve Google Chrome.

The latest build picks up a lot of fixes from Web Kit so you will notice increased compatability and several new features like user scripts.

The last barrier to developing for Android is gone

Egil Hogholt — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 20:36:00 GMT

Developing with emulators is “fine” but you have no idea how it works on the final device. Which is why I usually make builds for the real device as soon as possible to verify that what I am trying to do is feasible on the real device.

So I'm thrilled to see that Google has launched a $399 Android Dev Phone that is not locked to any provider:

The Android Dev Phone 1 is a SIM-unlocked and hardware-unlocked device that is designed for advanced developers. The device ships with a system image that is fully compatible with Android 1.0, so you can rely on it when developing your applications. You can use any SIM in the device and can flash custom Android builds that will work with the unlocked bootloader. Unlike the bootloader on retail devices, the bootloader on the Android Dev Phone 1 does not enforce signed system images. The Android Dev Phone 1 should also appeal to developers who live outside of T-Mobile geographies.

I got an Apple iPhone 3G this summer but this is pretty tempting as I haven't done much device coding after I changed jobs last year. I have got several requests for improving my Windows Mobile apps but I'm still evaluating my options; make cross device web apps (iPhone, Android, Win Mobile), buy a (very) expensive Mac, buy a expensive Visual Studio license or go for the free and open source Android. I had loads of fun, and I have learned a lot, developing the apps but at the moment they are frozen as I don't use my Windows Mobile device anymore.

I firmly believe that web apps (with syncronization in some cases) are the way to go but they are not very well suited for the apps I have developed for Windows Mobile so far (password manager, gmail notifier with Today Screen support). Android has a very interesting model for extending built in features so that may be the way to go (if Santa gets me a Android Dev Phone :-)

Tools for debugging http and https traffic

Egil Hogholt — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 21:14:00 GMT

I spend a lot of time troubleshooting web applications. My Swiss army tool of choice for all network related issues is WireShark but it falls short when it comes to analyzing SSL encrypted traffic.

FireFox takes forever to load compared to IE7 but its wide range of add-ons can be a life saver at times for developers. I am a heavy user of:

User Agent Switcher which quickly lets me change the user agent of the browser
SwitchProxy lets you quickly swap between proxies. Proxy configuration scripts are great if you always use the same proxies but I frequently have to force a specific proxy to test different web application behaviors.
LiveHTTPHeaders plugs into FireFox so it is able to see all the http traffic in real time. You can filter the request using regular expressions and see https requests in clear text!

Fiddler is also able debug https but it relies on a "man-in-the-middle" approach which has some limitations.

Community Days Milano 2008: 09-10 July

Egil Hogholt — Wed, 21 May 2008 13:35:00 GMT

The agenda is not finalized yet, but I am sure Community days 2008 will be as interesting as the past events.

I doubt I will attend the free event this year as I do not program in .NET at work. I still do some coding for fun but it is hard to justify two days away from work just for fun :-)

I will try to attend some Microsoft events to stay in touch with friends but you are more likely to see me at Python conferences in the future...

Contexts made GTD work for me

Egil Hogholt — Mon, 19 May 2008 18:20:00 GMT

I have played around with GTD for several years. It has worked reasonably well but I recently learned that I have done one thing wrong: I used categories instead of contexts. They sound like the same thing but using context has made a big difference.

In the past I used categories like: "personal" and "work". It works for grouping tasks together but it is a bad idea when you have to choose the next thing to work on as it says nothing about the "context" you require to do them. I could have a personal task like "scan letter" that I actually have to do in the office where I have access to a scanner.

Defining real context makes it very clear what you should work on at any given time. No need to scan through the tasks and discard the ones you cannot work on as you are missing something. These are the contexts I use the most

Computer
Home
Person A/B/C etc: Something to do/discuss the next time I meet the person.
Office
Waiting: Anything I am waiting for ends up in here. I review it on a weekly basis to make sure I'm not loosing track of something

You can find plenty of good contex suggestions here.

Seeing a long lists of things to do regardles of context is just overwhelming and causes stress, so I have extended poToday to use context as well. Changes in version 3 of poToday

Support English date formats
Added a "move to no date" feature
Added context support (using the categories in Outlook).
Support for different screen orientations and sizes

Free essential guides for SQL Server

Egil Hogholt — Sat, 03 May 2008 08:19:00 GMT

SQL Server Magazine has a set of free essential guides regarding many SQL Server tasks. They are targeted at people that are new to the topic and they are short and to the point:

The Essential Guide to Business Intelligence Reporting: Choosing the Right Tool for the Right Job
Virtualization of SQL Server 2008
The Essential Guide to Reporting Services Tips & Tricks
The Essential Guide to Disaster Recovery and Virtualization
The Essential Guide to SQL Server Backup and Recovery
The Essential Guide to Jump Starting Your SQL Server Skills
The Essential Guide to User Continuity
Special Report: Perspectives on SQL Server Sprawl
The Essential Guide to Solving Server Sprawl
The Essential Guide to Analytic Dashboards
The Essential Guide to Antispam Solutions
The Essential Guide to Choosing a Clustering Alternative
The Essential Guide to Table Partitioning and Data Lifecycle Management
The Essential Guide to SQL Server Skills for the Oracle DBA
The Essential Guide to SQL Server Management Fundamentals

Registration is required for the guides I had a look at.

Google App Engine

Egil Hogholt — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 22:48:00 GMT

Got a great idea for a web site or web service but not the resources to host it? Why not try Google App Engine:

Google App Engine lets you run your web applications on Google's infrastructure. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs grow. With App Engine, there are no servers to maintain: You just upload your application, and it's ready to serve your users.

You can serve your app using a free domain name on the appspot.com domain, or use Google Apps to serve it from your own domain. You can share your application with the world, or limit access to members of your organization.

App Engine costs nothing to get started. Sign up for a free account, and you can develop and publish your application for the world to see, at no charge and with no obligation. A free account can use up to 500MB of persistent storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for about 5 million page views a month.

During the preview release of Google App Engine, only free accounts are available. In the near future, you will be able to purchase additional computing resources.

I am not a big fan of Python as a language, but the service is too cool not to give it a try.

Thanks to Omar for the link.