Archive for the ‘Products and releases’ Category
March 31st, 2012
I have created a better Windows keyboard layout for developers. It is very similar to the US keyboard but with a few tweaks that makes it nicer to work with. For a regular US keyboard user the only difference is less pressing of the shift key.
Download it here, of course as open source.
Longer story:
The US keyboard is a good working start for a better developer keyboard since most languages are created for the US layout.
Symbols often need shift to be pressed.
As developers we often press ( and ) and = and @ and the other symbols at the top row, but to reach them we need to press shift. That is a total waste. So I switched them. With Keyboard 1337 you instead press shift to reach the figures. Or use the num pad.
Alt-gr-\
Swedish developers have a problem with the keyboard layout. For instance backslash “\” is reached through “alt-gr”, a button to the right of the space bar and then 7. There is no good way to press those two buttons without hand gymnastics. My solution is to switch to US layout.
ÅÄÖ
I need ÅÄÖ and instead of switching keyboard every time I need one of those letters I put them in their regular place but activated with alt-gr. A solution that works better than it sounds.
Physics
The physical keyboard layout doesn’t change due to installing a new keyboard layout so you have to have a bit of fantasy or switch the plastic keys if possible.
March 25th, 2012
I have started at a new job and after some days of contemplation and a try-out I decided to go for running Windows as a virtual machine under OSX on an Macbook pro.
I had several reasons in no particular order.
- The hardware is nice. The rumour is that Apple don’t buy cheap stuff on the spot market. When you use a Mac it feels nice and I can play with it in the store; ordering a Dell over internet doesn’t give me the chance to handle it.
- I need to learn other stuff than the Microsoft stack. If you use a thing for long enough you start to believe the world has to be that way. I want to get that rust out of my fingers. I have installed linux several times but without being forced to use it, it has all but collected dust. Digital dust.
- I want to get started with using virtual machines for developing. I have tried developing on a Windows virtual machine on a Windows host before but failed; it was too easy to use the host for everything.
Setup:
17″ screen, 7200rpm hd, antiglare. The rest is stock and will be upgraded as time goes.
I intend to use Parallels for running my Win machines virtual. If the hardware can’t handle it I should be able to use the same virtual drive through Bootcamp.
I can’t afford SSD right now even though it was a requirement to start with. Apple’s prices are too high so I will buy on the spot market later.
I can’t afford 8gigs right now and Apple’s prices are too high so I will buy on the spot market later. I am running Win8 on 1,5gigs and that is not enough it needs at least 4. My machine doesn’t take more than 8 gigs according to the specs so I’ll probably have problems running more than 1 virtual OS at once.
For better and worse:
I have played with the first Mac thousands of years ago, worked with Mac during the 90s and I have played with my SO’s Macbookpro so I know a little from beforehand. But playing and working with pre-OSX is not the same as knowing.
The win keyboard is arguably better than the mac one. It has page up and page down as separate buttons. Yes it can be remedied by pressing fn at the mac keyboard but that not the same. The delete button is also missing and corresponding work around is more cumbersome, instead of 3 delete presses for deleting 3 characters one has to press 3 shift-right and then one backspace. If you are used to fiddling around with the mouse for moving your caret 3 characters to the right this isn’t a problem for you. But then you probably have blunt knives in the kitchen anyway.
The OSX keyboard doesn’t have a properties button but I instead have to use shift-f10 in Windows (which really is what the properties button is a shortcut for). It. Is. Not. A. Proper. Workaround.
The apple touch pad is awesome. It is awesome enough, on its own, to argue for running Win on a Mac through Bootcamp. The best touchpad I have tried on Win isn’t even close to the Mac. I use 10.7.3 and it has an even more awesome touchpad with up to 4 (5?) fingers recognition for doing stuff. I gladly confess it isn’t perfect and sometimes miss my swipes but it won’t push it from 1st, 2nd and 3rd place.
I recommend turning on all the features on the touchpad. They features are not turned on out of the box.
On the other hand, keyboard handling and shortcuts in Windows is way better than in OSX. OSX is created for people with three hands, two on the keyboard and one on the mouse. If you think using the mouse for moving around in your application is state of the art you probably have blunt knives in the kitchen too.
Give me the Mac touchpad and the Windows keyboard handling and we have nerdvana. Wait… that is what I am sitting with right now!
Appstore is a must. But why does it want to know so much about me? On my Android phone I can download anything free without giving away my credit card number.
Through my bank I can create virtual credit cards with a limited amount of money on. It works on Appstore.
OSX doesn’t have as many good gratis text editors as Windows has.
The installation of OSX is smooth. Start the machine, do your choices and you are good to go. Windows, on the contrary, requires a day and a half for reboots and checks for updates. Add another day if you want Visual studio and Sqlserver.
OSX doesn’t run the full fledged dotnet framework but Mono. Dotnet is a good framework so it is a shame.
I use Keepass on Mono in OSX. To make a long story short it fails in several ways. The most noticeable is that the good copy-password functionality in Keepass doesn’t work. Add mismatched highlighted text, crashes and that it sometimes refuses to start. It might be a bad port of Keepass, it might be shortcomings in Mono. If you give me time I will investigate but as for now I am short of spare time.
OSX has a proper *nix/BSD terminal. Windows still has its console and Console2. Windows also has Powershell which is *nix terminal piping made right. Like so: in *nix one can do lots of automation from the terminal through piping and griping. A big drawback is that what is piped is the text output and not the contents. Powershell can also pipe data between apps but uses real dotnet objects instead. Ponder this for a while and realise what a leap that is in functionality and updatability.
One of the reasons for choosing to use both OSX and Windows is to not fall into the belief that everything should look like Windows. The start menu is one of them. I have always thought the start menu was a good idea, especially after Vista when one could start entering text directly and let Windows find the application or document for you; much like Spotlight in OSX. Now I have seen OSX’s 5 finger pinch which gives me all apps as icons over the whole screen. (think iPhone) It has the same drawback as the Iphone app chooser – there are lots of icons but no system to separate them for making them easier to find.
Minimising and maximizing works better in Windows than in OSX. There are system wide short cuts and visual clues (menus that pop up). OSX can minimize a window but one needs the mouse to open it again. Sometimes.
Which brings me to Safari which has recently passed IE as the least good web browser. Example: if you detach a tab you cannot attach it again. Unless you choose to mouse to the menu window-merge all windows. When every tab in every Safari window is put into the same window. I am not saying all other browser behave differently but right now I am irritated on Safari so it has to wear my flames.
I am not irritated on Evernote but it is equally mousey. If one hides a window of Evernote one has to use the mouse to get it back.
The TextEdit editor in OSX is better than Notepad in Windows. On the other hand Notepad is (easily) replaced with other good and gratis editors. Good and gratis editors in OSX are not as plenty.
I miss the light telling me the HD is working. When the machines doesn’t respond for a few seconds it is a good clue to what is going on – is it the HD or the code that is the culprit?
My OSX version has switched up and down while scrolling. I say the OSX direction is the correct one.
Here is why: when I programmed scroll bars back in last century I learned that there is no correct way regarding what is up and down. The document goes down when the scroll bar goes up when the earlier/above text is shown when the up arrow is pressed. Now we have learned to use fingers for moving documents around and now there is only one way to look at it; the correct way.
You, dear reader, might disagree, but I suggest you embrace change, mr Quixote.
Notes:
Parallels has its own Swedish keyboard. I don’t know the difference between that and the regular OSX one.
Windows ctrl-alt-del is in Parallels fn-ctrl-alt-backspace.
I have yet to figure out where backslash is on my Swedish OSX, Swedish Win and English Win keyboards. I am not sure Parallels work properly there.
Folders in Finder is opened through command-o. Enter does something else. I won’t say it is 100% bad but I believe the Windows choice of making Enter open the folder is better.
I really miss having standardised command-o for opening, -w for closing a window, -h for hiding a window, and command-comma for settings in Windows. Alt-f4 and ctrl-f4 are steady standards in Windows but the combinations were probably invented by a chiropractor gone mad. Ctrl-o is standard and alt-enter almost so. OSX could learn something from Win what happens when a window is hidden, opening a hidden window on OSX changes from app to app and often requires the mouse.
Switching tab in windows is ctrl-tab and command-left/right in OSX. Unless where it is ctrl-tab. The gratis editor Textwrangler has its own scheme where switching document isn’t visualised as a table and requires the mouse. Which made med ditch Textwrangler since a text editor is keyboard centric and shouldn’t force me to stretch of for the mouse or move my fingers to the touch pad.
Ctrl-left/right is used in Windows for selecting a word. In OSX it is used for switching desktop. I had to turn that functionality off in OSX. I now have to do a 4 finger swipe to change desktop. I see no immediate other solution.
When I get in to heavy programming in Windows on this machine I will bring forward my Windows keyboard. I wonder how my muscular memory will react when it is subjected to the OSX layout. I plan to update this article. Let’s see if I remember.
Pressing the function buttons in OSX requires the fn key. In Windows it does not. Thankfully there is a setting in OSX System preferences to turn this off. Recommended if you run Windows under OSX.
Zooming in OSX is done through ctrl-scroll up/down (two finger swipe) much like in Visual studio. Windows has a similar functionality I can’t recall the name of and shortcut for. I have a feeling the Windows variant works better.
October 30th, 2011
I won’t write much about what is good because there is so much and it can be found in ads and with sales people.
+ Very good machine.
- No real keyboard.
- Doesn’t have a tonne of external hardware like the Iphone.
+ Big screen.
- Big phone.
- Android OS which means more control.
- You have to sell your soul to Google to make it work good.
- Can’t change memory card without taking out the battery.
- Expensive, like 500€.
- For that price it would have been nice if a (simple) cover had been included.
- Slow camera.
- Android collects addresses from everywhere so one gets multiple entries for several contacts. These can be connected so only one remains. But edit this one and the x originals pop up and it doesn’t show which is which.
- Annoying sleep disturbing beep in the middle of the night when the battery is fully charged. A factory reset might remedy this.
- Annoying beep when the usb is connected. I have used an app to get rid of it and then changed to a night stand clock that mutes.
- Android: the calendar(s) can have problems synching if you have more than one calendar in your calendar. I, for instance, added one more calendar to my already 4 and it refused to site on my phone. Googling showed emptying the calendar data stores and resynching might help. I did and it could then only sync one of my 5. Factory reset did the trick, but I don’t want to do that every time I add a calendar.
- The WLAN antenna could be better.
July 6th, 2011
Uploaded 1.4 of CompulsoryCat, a small helper lib for dotnet(4).
New stuff is a COM wrapper for creating shortcuts.
June 30th, 2011
Updated CompulsoryCat to version 1.2
The first big news is the Assemblyname functionality for retrieving a tree of assembly references for an application.
The other big news is that I genereated help files and uploaded too.
http://code.google.com/p/compulsorycat/
June 13th, 2011
I found a nice little site for creating presentation graphics. Gratis for simple and public use.
Forget power point frame by frame imaging and instead reate slides with zoom and pan.
It won’t make your presentation suddenly look good but it makes them at least a little less prone for
death by powerpoint.
Until your prezi usage becomes mainstream that is.
I will use it for my next presentation. Just have to figure out something to talk about that is not that code heavy first.
April 30th, 2011
This is a placeholder for a possible review of the Nokia BH609 bluetooth headset. Intermediate commercial link: http://smartsontestpilot.se/nokia-bh609/bli-testpilot/
January 22nd, 2011
In short:
Fail.
A storage device with 3 single point of failure is a no no. Combine it with bad quality and it is a cheat.
Longer:
I cannot recall the exact name of the device but it was a 1TB NAS for about 300€ at the time, 3-4 years ago.
According to the specs it had an open source OS with two ordinary ext(2 or 3) discs. That sounded good for me. Open source OS meant that there was a possibility to tinker with it and knowledge out-in-the-world for discrepancies. Further if the hardware would fail I could always dock the disks into *nix machine and if one disc failed I could always get half the data from the other.
This was Totally wrong.
You see, Lacies support told me the OS was on one of the disks. So if a disk failed, the machine wouldn’t start. The machine was also setup in such a way that if the other disk failed nothing would start either. Finally the setup of the discs was in such a way that if removed from the device the data couldn’t be understood, Ext2/3 or not. To make the construction even worse, as if it wasn’t enough from the start, support told me that the disks and the OS and the machine was setup in the factory so there was no guaranteed way to get anything the disks runing in a new machine either.
I had it replaced with another unit that failed the same way. Incidentally a friend of mine had one too. It failed. He had it replaced. And the replacement failed again.
Having gotten 4 bad Lacie bigdiscs is possible as sheer bad luck. But the construction with 3 single point of failures is not coincidence.
January 16th, 2011
Just installed a Netgear ReadyNAS Duo RND2110 1TB.
+ Small.
+ 2 disks with a variety of RAID.
- Unfortunately with a proprietary solution called Xraid which we know nothing about. This is considered Not Good for a device that manges data. What if a disk fails? Is it readable again? Noone knows since Xraid is proprietary.
+/- Outside transformator. Make it easier to place but one more thing lying around. For me it was good.
+ Easy to reach disc bays.
( – Noisy.
Noisy like a fan running at full speed. Always. Netgear themselves have written that the developers took the drive to the bedroom to make sure it was quiet. My comment: 0ne developer was deaf and the other had the device turned off. It might be faulty unit I have.
UPDATE: replaced the unit without any problem and the new one was quieter. There was some error where the machine didn’t recognise the fan. ) I won’t say it is quiet because it isn’t. But it isn’t noisy.
- The hard drives that came with the machine has gotten louder. Unfortunately I cannot remember the name of them and am too lazy to open up and check.
+ Dropped some movies into the folder called media. Started an xbmc client on a laptop, browsed the LAN, chose, and the movies streamed.
+ At first glance (I haven’t researched) the site/forum/users at readynas.com seems good. Having a user base and a community is good.
+ Supports Time machine for Mac. But it only supports 1 client since the user name is hard coded.
- Slow web admin interface.
- Crashes once in a while.
+ Supports dyndns but only with a 3 letter suffix. E.g.: not myname.dyndns.info. I guess it is the 3 letter suffix that is the culprit at least; I got …dyndns.com working.
+ It can report errors both through built in SMTP server and through logging in to gmail and send from there.
+ Easy to setup backup. Just connect a drive to USB, or find a windows share or an FTP or some other endpoints I cannot remember now. Choose weekdays to backup and which folders (has some choosings) and whether to backup all or inrementally (and overwrite once a week or so). Seems a bit slow though. Can report automatically both errors and success per email.
January 11th, 2011
Short story:
I have combined washing machine and tumble dryer that seems to do its job. But like with most washing machines today the user interface is created by twelve pidgeons and a monkey. When it fails it doesn’t give a serious clue about what is wrong.
Long story:
A review of a combined washing machine and tumble dryer is not very technical. But it is very much user interface and as such it is close to software development. Like how we did software user interfaces 20 years ago.
The machine seems to do the washing good and the tumble drying ok during the two weeks I have had it. It is a centimeter or two shallower than the competitors I looked at which was good in my case.
But the user interface…
To its defense I must say that all washing machines I have tried have stoopid UIs, possibly with the exception of the very simple ones which work like the mechanics inside it which is possible to grasp.
Let me start with a disease in every modern washing machine I have tried; the lag between opening-allowed and opening-possible. The machine is finished. The water is pumped out. The pump has stopped working. Sometimes even the key sign has been switched off. Why do we have to wait 30 more seconds before it is possible to open the door?
That was the easiest, most blatant, example of no-brain-design-this-user-interface.
Another almost as simple here: Machine just started and you notice something you forgot to put in the machine. The water hasn’t started flowing yet so the machine is dry. Now you have to wind through the whole program, pressing a button for 20 seconds. For one Wascator machine I had to release it at spin dry and then press it again for 10 seconds. Finally waiting 30 more seconds for being allowed to open the door.
The Candy I am reviewing here doesn’t have that sort of fast forward so instead one turns it off. And then to a program to turn it on again. And after that I haven’t had to figure out yet.
The graphics are also nice/friendly even though I don’t get why it has invented a new icon for wool.
If you want to wash at 95 degrees you have to set it to cotton and prewash. All other settings refuses to let the temperature go above 60. Why? It is my clothes and I might want to wash something in 95 for 20 minutes. Or without prewash.
On the other hand – with prewash runs faster than without. There is probably a perfectly good reason for that. But it eludes me
There is a play/pause button. That isn’t that. When tumble trying; it is a Play:start tumble trying and Pause:stop heating the air and change to 20 minutes(or 10 if it was 5 before).
You don’t understand what I wrote? The programmers probably didn’t either.
It does Not have 2 water inlets, one for cold and one for hot. In Sweden it is often cheaper buying water heated centrally than heating it with in the washing machine. It is also faster since the water is already heated up.
It does not manage to empty the washing powder slot properly.
The time-remaining-of-spin-drying calculator is built by the same guy that built WindowsXP time-remaining-of-copy-file where 1 minute is anything between 1 and 15.
The top is flat but has lining around the sides that makes dirt and washing powder not being easily wept off but instead caught in the linings. It probably has something to do with how the machine is assembled in factory.
The door is not rehingable from left to right. It is possible on every refrigerator I have seen, except the very trendy ones, the last 30 years. But no washing machine has it.
We are figuring out the user interface bit by bit and are sometimes positively surprised where someone has done a bit of good thinking.
Finally an example that is visible in so many modern washing machines: the program wheel.
In the old days we used a mechanical clock with relays to turn stuff on and off. The wheel to set this clock was situated to the side due to its size, normally right. Today we still have this wheel but it is just an electric switch connected to a computer. So in the Candy I am writing about the program wheel is a mixture of washing programs, spin cycle, empty machine and some more. Like the Tools menu of MSOffice pre 2007.
Here is another example where the product obviously isn’t tested or used before shipping. I set the program to 40° cotton. I get 1h34m runtime. I press start and it immediately jumps to 2h20m. (the figures are not exact)
Update:
The machine failed for me the other day, after a month’s use, with the clue “E07″. Searching the manual came up with nothing but “call someone”. To me this is a FAIL. Calling “someone” I got a “I believe it is the controller card.”. There are several other errors like E01 and E02 if I recall correctly.
It is hard to recommend a machine for several hundred euros that doesn’t give a clue about what is wrong.
Update:
I put in clothes and choose program. It say 1:34. I press play and it immediately switches to 2:02 or 2:22 depending on god-knows. What happened to the 1:34? What did the machine learn the moment I pressed play?
Then of course. The machine is finished. The water is pumped out. The timer says 0. I still have to wait over a minute before I can open the door. And you know what? – in other machines there is a small door at the front where a string (or similar) is hidden to open the door anyway.
This machine has a pressure sensor. So if the pressure sensor breaks down there is no obvious way to get your clothes out. Or if the power goes.
