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March 24, 2007
Filezilla in Linux-land
No, not the latest Disney feel-good horror film, but still something to make my day a little brighter,
Filezilla - the incomparable FTP client that I sorely missed when forced (rubber arm...) to make the swap to Kubuntu - has been ported to Linux!
Its a beta (life's not beta, more's the pity...) but seems to be rock solid so far....
Happy happy joy joy!
Posted by dottie at 9:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 17, 2007
Microsoft and ASP.NET gang up on radio-boxes
ASP.NET rips a new one for the humble old radio button.
The problem? You can glean absolutely no useful information from them apart form the fact that they are checked or not.
When you use them in static ASP.NET pages the situation is not too bad as you get to define each radio button individually as a control / container. You can then set up events for CheckedChanged or even check directly that the button is checked on a page postback and then undertake some actions based on that fact.
What if you wanted to create the radio buttons programatically from the database and then access something like a table row id from the VALUE of the checked radio button? Seems simple enough, seems reasonable.
It can't be done.
The only information you can access is the Text value of the radio button. In every other control that contains the 'value' of the input. The 'Text' property of a radio button is the text that appears BESIDE the control. wtf? WTF!! The old Visual Basic programming model rears its head with a vengance - you can have consistency as long as you don't expect everything to work the same way!
Note to Microsoft - writing a computer language is not like creating a spoken language - there don't HAVE to be irregular verbs you know!!
What Microsoft forces you to do is to set up something like a hidden input field in the same context / container as the radio button. When you see that the radio button in question is checked you can then grab the data you need from the hidden input field (using FindControl usually...)
Easy? Hmm...
Posted by dottie at 4:54 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 16, 2007
Windows does it yet again - Linux and VMWare comes to the rescue
Yet again in a matter of moments my machine went from being a perfectly functionable machine to a wheezing, cantankerous slug-a-bed. Why?
Well, Windows decided that it needed to update itself to patch some crap that a previous update had broken. After a restart the new patch would send my firewall spiraling off into 100% CPU usage for no good reason (...) leaving my computer unable to access the internet and useless for any work-related activities.
Damn.
And I had a deadline for the next day.
Double damn.
Actually, fuck. Fuck Microsoft. Hard.
Question : How can I claim to be a Linux fan and still be running Windows virtually on every machine I own? read on...
Luckily I have had Ubuntu languishing on my hard drive ready to be used when Thunderbird runs successfully on it - that's all that is stopping me...
With no choice (and rapidly approaching 3am) I decide to ht the hay and make the final(ish) change to Linux on the morrow.
Well, I did (biting the bullet a little in spots...), and It's been great so far - I even had Thunderbird running stable for a brief period (the answer is to run it as 'root' - which causes its own issues - attachments and the ilk will need some CHOWN love). But unfortunately it mangled the email and stopped working - soon my pretty...
I do ASP.NET development so I need to be able to access my Windows Server from my laptop.
For remote desktop I installed and configured the fantastic rdesktop to run over SSH tunnels (as I had done with remote desktop in Windows using puTTY). To tunel over SSH in Linux:
ssh remote_ssh_server -L 3389:remote_windows_machine_on_ssh_server_domain:3389
That sets up a nice secure tunnel for the remote desktop to wander through, safe from the slings and arrows of the wibbly-wobbly-internets.
rdesktop is called thus:
rdesktop localhost -f -a 16 -z -P -u Windows_machine_login_username
Where:
-f : fulscreen (swap back to Linux by hitting Ctrl + Alt + Enter)
-a 16 : 16 bit colour
-z : use compression
-P : cache bitmaps
Shock, horror - the performance of rdesktop (an open-source project) is far superior to the native Windows offering. Very impressed. I mean FAR superior! Did I mention that its free?
So now I can access my Windows development server from anywhere in the world - rock and roll!
I still have to do a lot of graphics and Flash based work so I stil lneed to keep Windows around in some form.
This is where the fantastic VMWare server comes into play. I have this running on my laptop with a Windows XP virtual machine in residence. I connect to that using rdesktop too - the performance is much better than using the VMWare console.
My development Server is also a virtual machine running under Linux - the same box that runs the SSH server.
So, the answer to the question above - its a trick I do have windows running on every machine - but virtually :D
Posted by dottie at 11:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 14, 2007
KDE4
Call me a geekboy, but I am a little bit excited waiting for the upcoming KDE4
Its a complete rewrite along the lines of Apple's OSX with new desktop, hardware and multimedia API/Kernel/Thingys (I dont know what they are called!!)
It also uses Qt4 which is said to bring a performance increase of 20% - wow!
Personally, the fact that it promises an end to the current clunkiness of KDE, better looking with better performance sells me. As an alternative to the ever-looking Vista, it's a hands down winner.
Coupled with a new laptop when I get my SSIA - I'm set for the next few years! ( </technolust> )
Posted by dottie at 11:33 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 4, 2007
Tagging
I use del.icio.us a lot. An AWFUL lot.
In some ways AWFUL is the operative word.
While I have grown to use some easily recalled tags for specific areas of interest my initial set of tags were all over the place, there are always typos and when it comes to tagging a page I sometimes have to think too much (for my liking) about what tags best describe the page I'm 'tagmarking' in del.icio.us.
Del.icio.us have provided a helpful little service that plays on the folksonomy of del.isio.us - for pages that have already been tagged they show a list of suggestions and even go as far as to pop-up tags that match the half-completed tag while I am entering it.
This is great - as far as it goes...
My only gripe with this is to do with the laziness and ignorance (intended or otherwise) of the mob. The mob in this case is the folks who collectively use their smarts and experience to slowly quilt together a folksonomy.
The thinking is that this folksonomy is meant to make it easier for folk to find wat they are looking for as when they type in search tags they will of course be returned the information they want due to the nature of folksonomy - millions of people spelling colour without a 'u' can't be wrong can they?
Well, they aren't. But you see the problem - 'one mans meat, another mans poison' and all that.
While I appreciate the power of a good folksonomy from many levels including the fact that I hate being told what I should be doing, I feel in this case that we need some sort of 'strict father' to guide us a little bit.
What I am suggesting is that the folksonomy be allowed to sprawl as it does now, but occassionally the tags should be assessed. Some tool needs to be developed that will be able to form a profile of a web page based on its content and then associate that with the tags gleaned from the folksonomy, using the frequency of a particular tag to weigh its importance (all normalised of course).
The point of all this is twofold. First, the 'weakling' tags should be retired - with predjudice. Possibly even going as far as updating the tags in a persons taglists - after all they are using the wrong tags and skewing the folksonomy - not good.
Second, someone (possibly Google) should use the profiling tool (which would probably not be fundamentally different from Googles page-ranking algorithm) to start associating searched pages with tags.
This means that when I go to Google or even del.icio.us and type in 'asp.net templates radiobuttonlists' (knowing that that is approved tag to use..somehow...) that I will get back pages that are profiled with the folksonomy tick of approval rather than just a page rank guess.
I reckon what we are looking at is using a blind profiling tool to leverage the power of the folksonomy to stand in for a hypothetial person, knowledgable about our area of interest and in possession of an encycolpeadic knowledge of available web pages on the very subject.
Slightly more precise, I would hope, than a typical Google pagerank 'guess' (a damn good one...) that would rely on the fact that a page contains the keywords typed in - which is largely accurate, but...
Plu it would mean that I wouldn't have to spend five seconds wondering what tags to use for a previously untagged page :D
Posted by dottie at 5:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack