Head.SmackOnTable();

Well iv seen hundreds of posts such as “This is my Firefox setup” and “This is my Visual Studio Setup”, but not many that is, well basically, everything…

First off, this is my desk. Its a cheapo Ikea corner table, that fits. Iv got a bog standard mesh chair, from Ebuyer, for about 60 quid.

My hardware / desk setup:

• Custom built Monster:
  • Quad Core Processors
  • 8gb of the fastest DDR2 ram that was out
  • Dual 500gb HDDs
  • Dual DVD writers
  • 2 monitors – one 20″ widescreen, one 19″ bog stanard, both Iiyama’s (I know i have 3 on my desk, the 3rd one is hooked up to a temp pc)
• Sennheiser HD 465 Headphones – very comfortable, fairly cheap, I wear them for hours a day with no problems
• A small “localised” lamp from Homebase, useful for looking at small things
• MS Natural Keyboard
• Microsoft Laser Gaming Mouse 6000 – Its a lightweight mouse, the last thing you want is a big heavy mouse to move around all day.
• A speaker / subwoofer setup, from Ebuyer, for about 10 quid – for when headphones arnt good enough (probably not recommended for offices!)
• At the bottom of the picture is a fan, for when I get hot, yeah baby!
• Im not sure why my laptop was sitting on my desk…ignore that.

My “misc” software setup:

• Running Vista  SP1 – im tempted to run Windows 7, but not anytime soon, im just getting used to Vista!
  • UAC is disabled on Vista – its the FIRST thing i do when installing vista on a box!
  • IIS7 and management tools installed.
• Hostsman – easy editing of your hosts file for testing
• Winamp – for music! You cant code without music!
• Windows Clippings – easier to use than other screen grabbing software, very lightweight, very very good, deffo worth the $18! Has useful features like timers and ability to send to clipboard etc…
• MSN Messenger / Skype – I know some companies dont like it when their staff play around on IM, so dont abuse it – its saved my skin a few times when iv had trouble, and its less intrusive in the office than annoying someone
• WinSCP – freeware FTP / SFTP/ FTP over SSH client – covers pretty much any server you need to connect to, its free, and it just beats all other FTP clients hands down.
• Ultramon – you get a 2nd taskbar for your 2nd monitor, so basically only the stuff that is running on that monitor is on the taskbar.
• Microsoft Outlook – I have outlook running for my email – its easy to use, very straight forward, and quite cool with exchange.
• Daemon Tools Lite – when you have to mount ISOs without burning them, useful for .iso files downloaded from microsoft / off network shares.
• Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 SP1 – free software from MS, basically allows you to run virtual pc’s – useful for running XP off a virtual machine (Crappy versions of IE, anyone?) – although I had problems installing debian on it, so im looking into running VirtualBox
• Firefox – better than IE by MILES. Have loads of plugins, such as Web Dev toolbar, firebug, greasemonkey, firephp, Fission (cool loading bar thing), IE Tab, Its All Text (You get a cool little “Edit” button on text area’s that load it up in notepad), ShowIP (Shows ip address of server), AdBlock (blocks 99.99% of crappy ads), ColorZilla (picks colours out from page), Download Statusbar, Extended Statusbar (tells you pagesize, how long it took to load, etc).
• Opera – because someone will complain that it dosent work in this browser
• FeedDemon / Newsgator – Free software that sync’s with their free website, so you can still check your favourite feeds away from home. By far the cleanest, easiest to use, and best RSS reader there is.
• Hamachi – Free VPN software that works behind firewalls, very very useful, esp when you have less tech savvy friends.

My dev setup:

• Visual Studio 2008 Pro – Pro because you need at least that for integrated unit tests and Pex to run.
• Codesmith Generator, with my own custom version of Nettiers code generator – WHY on earth would you want to write CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) for your DB/objects over and over? Point this baby at it, and go baby go!
• Resharper – Solution wide error highlighting BEFORE you hit the big compile button. Instant solution for alot of errors. Advanced intellisense. Advanced unit testing tools. Code clean up, inline code generation. Even does cool stuff like close your speach marks and brackets for you!
• A White text on dark background colour theme like the image below – the last thing you want to do is look at retina scortching white screen for hours on end, it will do your eyes in, it really will.
  
• I tend to have Microsoft SQL Server installed on a virtual PC, so I can mimic the server environment – you can use the Microsoft Loopback Adapter to create your own private network – a hint, the 1.* ip address network (same for 2. all the way upto 9) is non routable, so feel free to use them for your virtual machines – i.e. my vps start off at 1.1.1.2 etc)
• Not sure if this should go in Misc or not, but NotePad++ – iv replaced notepad.exe in window with this, and it works ACE!

Im sure I have forgotten something, so when I remember, ill add to this post. If you have any great ideas, lets hear them!

If you get the following error with YAF:

While using a custom language pack, you probably have tried visiting the forum, and you probably have read this following, brilliant, useful post:

And guess what happens when you click on that link?

HURRAH! Oh hangon, no thats not good. Anyway, the solution is to put this :

<page name=”CP_EDITAVATAR”>

<Resource tag=”TITLE”>Modify Avatar</Resource>
<Resource tag=”AVATAR”>Avatar</Resource>
<Resource tag=”AVATARCURRENT”>Current Avatar</Resource>
<Resource tag=”AVATARNEW”>Choose a New Avatar</Resource>
<Resource tag=”AVATARUPLOAD”>Upload Avatar from Your Computer:</Resource>
<Resource tag=”AVATARDELETE”>Clear Avatar</Resource>
<Resource tag=”AVATARREMOTE”>Enter URL of Avatar on Remote Server to Use:</Resource>
<Resource tag=”OURAVATAR”>Select your Avatar from our Collection:</Resource>
<Resource tag=”OURAVATAR_SELECT”>Click Here to Select an Avatar</Resource>
<Resource tag=”AVATARTEXT”>Avatar Explaination Text</Resource>
<Resource tag=”NOAVATAR”>[ No Avatar ]</Resource>
<Resource tag=”WARN_TOOBIG”>Image size can’t be larger than {0}x{1} pixels.</Resource>
<Resource tag=”WARN_SIZE”>The size of your image was {0}x{1} pixels.</Resource>
<Resource tag=”WARN_RESIZED”>The image was resized to fit.</Resource>
<Resource tag=”WARN_BIGFILE”>The size of your image can’t be more than {0} bytes.</Resource>
<Resource tag=”WARN_FILESIZE”>The size of your image was {0} bytes.</Resource>
</page>

Into your chosen language xml file, and it should work.

I have the following plugins installed for WordPress:

• Akismet
• Faster Image Insert
• Google Analyticator
• iMax Width
• Scissors
• Simple Tagging
• Simply Exclude – I use this so I can exclude the “links” category from the mainpage, and the rss feed
  
• Sociable Zyblog Edition
• SyntaxHighlighter Plus
• TinyMCE Advanced
• WassUp – ultimate live web stats
  
• WP Easy Uploader – this alows me to upload files and themes, without downloading them locally, connecting to the server via secure ftp and uploading the files manually – can give it a URL, and it will download and extract.

If you have any more decent wordpress plugins, let me know!

My Technobabble : ForEach, a simple but very useful extension method

This evening I was writing some code (Yay!) for an Xml based MEF catalog I am prototyping. I came across the need to invoke a set of methods on an IEnumerable that was returned from a LINQ to XML query. Unfortunately no such animal exists on IEnumerable.

This came in very useful, thanks Glenn – basically, I needed a ForEach to handle some lamda’s, on a Stack<T>, and this was very useful!

The comment of all comments « Freekshow

What does the line of comment add? Does it tell you anything that the code does not? Indeed not. Zero points. This kind of gratuitous comments is all too common, and if you have many of these, will you keep reading them? Will you not start to blank out the comments in your mind, thereby possibly missing the important comment that actually does explain a certain coding decision?

Finanlly, what I consider to be a proper developer, agrees that commenting is bad. His example image proves my point:

The comment literally does not add anything – the code signature says everything you need to know – List<Joke> GetMostPopularJokes – Im guessing that its going to get you a list of the most popular jokes.

Testing ScribeFire for Firefox…

While im writing a new project using vs.net 2008, Resharper cropped up a nice helper, saying I should use a lambda expression on my code, which made me think about how looping has evolved…

for (int i = 0; i < all.Count; i++)
{
tagCount.Add(new TagCount(container[i].Count, container[i]));
}

foreach (Tag tag in container)
{
tagCount.Add(new TagCount(tag.Count, tag));
}

container.ForEach(delegate(Tag tag)
{
tagCount.Add(new TagCount(container.Count, tag));
});

container.ForEach(tag => tagCount.
Add(new TagCount(container.Count, tag)));

Iv always thought lambda’s were gimmicky, but I do have to admit, they do look fancy and makes things like what im doing easier.

Well iv got a pet project, its creaing my own Automatic Numberplate Recognition System. Why? Because I think it will be very technically challenging to do it in the .net framework.

This is what I have sofar, from an image like this:

it picks up the following:

Not bad, if i say so myself. It needs hell of alot of work though.

Well here at my new place of work, after only being here for 5 weeks (I think), we had a company meeting in Brighton, and sofar its been quite well, but I guess I have to, as is my prerogative, complain about something.

Its about the information in the meeting, basically, its all interesting on a level, but totally useless to me. No offence to anyone, but I don’t particularly care how the design team is doing, or how much revenue we have coming in, or we lost this or that project – I know its all company information, and I work for the company, so I should be interested, but unfortunately, im not.

Joel on Software calls it the “Developer Abstraction Layer” – basically, I shouldn’t be fussed with any other information apart from what I need to get my program running. I dont need to know about how we missed the 5th Q targets for 34.6% of the projects last year, its fascinating, so is the fact that sharks are the only animal that dont get cancer. But, both facts are totally useless to me at work, so id rather not know it.

Im not saying I dont want to get involved at all – give me tidbits, then if I dont ask for more information, dont take it personally. I know it sounds really harsh, but to be really honest, im not that fussed with office politics etc, I just want to sit down, write damn good code, and be proud of it. Sometimes, if I am really passionate about something, I will get involved, or if I know of a different way of doing things, then I will voice my opinion. But in circumstances where, in a company meeting, loads of people tell me stuff that will not impact my work, and being forced to sit through that for a morning, thats just a waste of time in my opinion.

I have a feeling if my boss read this tomorrow morning, he will fire me. Good thing he dosent have his laptop with him.

Im gunna do a full post about this later, but for the time being, its time I declared to the world that I love Resharper 4.0 and im going to marry it.

A reason for this:

Simplicity! Beauty! And it works!