If you haven't tried it you should give it a whirl. It is definitely the closest us, aesthetically challenged, yesterday's news Windows users are going to get to the lofty heights of TextMate.

UPDATE: I notice the Powershell tag is pulling a fair few people into this post from Technorati but only a small proportion of visitors are actually clicking through and checking 'E' out. If you are searching for a Powershell editor dear reader give it a look. I think this could be the Powershell editor that people have been waiting for. Whilst there isn't, to my knowledge at least, a Powershell bundle, there will certainly be a demand for one as this editor takes off. As the bundles are coming currently from the Mac world there obviously has been nobody interested in writing Powershell stuff on the Mac. With 'E' this will change and the 'bundle' set up is very extensible/flexible. Give it a whirl...

Basically, if you aren't logging into GMail using SSL then someone can grab your cookie and replay it. Well, that is pretty obvious if you are familiar with how all that kind of thing works and of course, I only log into GMail using SSL in fact, Google enforces this. Oh... actually, now I look it doesn't enforce it at all...

If you enter the url mail.google.com it automatically redirects you to https://mail.google.com and all is well. But if you log in and then close your browser, re-open it and enter it again it takes you straight to http://mail.google.com presumably passing the unencrypted cookie along the way.

Opening up your e-mail is not good, especially when you consider the alarming wealth of sites that still send password reminders as plain text which are all sitting in your mail archive along with those that send your full credit card number when you get an order confirmation.

GMail works perfectly well if you add the all important little 's' into any of its URLs so why don't they just enforce it and save us the bother?

So, I had a look around and spotted 'Be' which offers downloads of up to 24mb and uploads of 1.5mb (you can get up to 3mb up I think but I didn't go for that)... I asked around and found that David Smalley had taken the plunge and he seemed happy enough. I signed up...

Well, today it finally arrived. All went smoothly and I only lost my connection for a couple of hours.

Nuff said...

I was just setting up another new Dell laptop when I noticed that the Notebook System Software utility was running (on Vista) and was periodically checking for updates from Dell having scanned the system to determine the hardware. That sounds about the cut of my jib thought I and off I scurried to install it on my M90. Having run the installer 3 times I still haven't got it working, hence the call to Dell support.

After the usual switchboard tennis I got through to the person I needed to speak to.  I explained that I had upgraded my operating system and that the Notebook System Software (NSS) wasn't working. "I don't think we are going to be able to help you" he told me. Why, because they don't know if that application will work on my machine with Vista. "So", I argued, "why does it appear in the Vista 32-Bit Drivers and Downloads list and state in the release notes that it applies to the Precision M90". "Err...", he replied, "that is only with the operating system that we supplied the machine with." After a bit of pointless to-ing and fro-ing I capitulated and hung up.

During the call he also suggested that I 'try the Internet, you know blogs or newsgroups'. Obviously, I had already done this but his suggestion to try 'blogs' was a good one, hence the post :)

So, the moral of this story is, once you upgrade your operating system you are screwed as far as any Dell drivers or system software is concerned. You are on your own...

I was equally surprised following the talk at how many people in the group had some symptoms, pretty much everyone I spoke to in fact.

So, be warned...

The slides are available here in pptx, ppt or pdf.

Thanks to those who attended and thanks to Andrew and Code ComputerLove for arranging/supplying the venue.

I just thought I'd have another look and the url is currently displaying this:

You've gotta love 'em...

Just to get the acknowledgements out of the way I didn't think of this all by myself but had it suggested to me by Steve at Convex IT. I thought it was a good idea so here's what you do.

Lots of small businesses run MS Exchange or more likely MS Small Business Server at the end of an ADSL web connection. This is fraught with problems not least of which are managing anti-virus and spam and coping with the inevitable loss of connectivity. I looked around a while back for some sort of back-up mail server service but didn't find much around.

What you need to do is:

• Set up a Google Apps for Your Domain account which give you e-mail services on your domain
• Create a catch all mail address in there
• Point your domain mx record at the Google address
• Point your mail server at Google's

Voila... you now have Google filtering your spam, checking your mail for viruses and holding on to your mail if your Internet connection goes tits up.

Your mail might not arrive quite so quickly as it did and this also isn't going to be the best for large numbers of users but for small companies I think it is a good idea.

There will be those, you know who you are, who will question why there is a need to run a server at all instead of just using Google corporate mail. I think there are probably lots of reasons, having all company e-mail stored locally, shared folder, calendar sharing (I know Google has a calendar but I'm still not sure it is up to Exchange's features quite yet.)

(mooning) (kate) (finger) (bandit) (toivo) (headbang) (smoking) (rock) (drunk) (flag:GB)

Most of them are more or less self explanatory so I won't bother. And to give credit where it is due I found them here.

Happy emoticoning :)

First, heads are going to roll at Microsoft I would have thought because of all of the 'we waited forever to get all of this out of the door to make sure it was secure' hype we have had from them for a while. The last thing they need prior to the release of Vista, which incidentally does not suffer the vulnerability with IE7, is what will undoubtedly become a high profile vulnerability on the day IE7 shipped.

The other side, which makes me sick in some ways... I would bet my left teste that Secunia knew about this vulnerability during the beta and yet, rather than disclose it to Microsoft, as technically they should if they were using the beta, they waited until minutes after the release was announced to tell the world. What does Secunia stand to gain in undermining Microsoft's security reputation, like it needed undermining in the first place.

I don't know... You tell me.

The consensus is this isn't coming anytime soon but if you fancy a bit of free online storage have a look at the GMail Drive Shell Extension which will give you another drive that uses your GMail account for storage.

WHAT THE HELL DOES IT WANT WITH MY OUTLOOK? ITUNES... GET OFF...

And while I am at it Apple... SORT YOUR UPDATING STUFF OUT. (and you Adobe, you are worse... )

Before my army of attentive and intelligent commenters leap into action, I have noticed that there is some mention of update something or other relating to ITunes since I installed the latest version (yes I threw caution to the wind, who needs e-mail anyway) which may be some attempt to deal with the update inadequacies. I just haven't looked yet.

UPDATE: (pun intended) I just looked at the 'Apple Software Update' application that was installed with ITunes and it looks like they heard me before I even said anything. Haven't used it yet though so I can't say whether it works...

My first opinion is that some people definitely have too much time on their hands. My second is that is gives a new slant to the rise and fall in the popularity of Firefox and IE respectively.

In short the article points out that the growth rate of the Gecko browsers on the whole and the consequential loss for IE has actually slowed since the introduction of  Firefox.

He sums up:

At best, we can conclude that while it was bound that non-IE browsers would eventually hit the "glass ceiling" of people who will never leave IE, it may have raised that ceiling a bit.

Interesting...

So in the process of all of this I read with interest Steve Yegge's article entitled 'Good Agile, Bad Agile'. In the post he describes at great length how fantastic it is to work at Google. It sounds like the software version of Willie Wonka's Chocolate Factory. He also writes off 99% of agile practice as guff. I've not worked in large teams that have employed agile or formal methodologies so I'm not really in a position to disagree from personal experience but during the course of my recent research it would appear that Steve 'Umpa Lumpa' Yegge is being a bit harsh.

An interesting counterpoint to Steve's article is this recent set of survey results. Unfortunately I don't see them as particularly useful argument fodder as the survey was sponsored by The Agile Alliance and conducted by VersionOne, an agile tool vendor. Shame that...

UPDATE: Roy Osherove has picked up on this article (Steve Yegge's one, not mine) and is promising some further posts about it. As Roy has a good deal more experience of agile methodologies than I it will be interesting to see what he has to say. So has Rocky Lhotka if you want to get the other side of the coin.

I like that way he points out that he is still 'stoked about Vista' despite the fact it has buggered his machine up. Never say die...

I reckon if Scott Hanselman (without lavishing too much praise in his general direction) is having trouble then there isn't much hope for the rest of us...

So what does RC stand for then?

• Retreat Cautiously
• Really Crap
• Return at Christmas

Any suggestions?

The presentation only briefly touched on the other elements of the 'Atlas' framework but did cover the server side of things in a fair bit of depth, particularly the update panel and the process it utlises to weave its magic.

I have used all kinds of terribly hackish methods for doing away with obvious page postbacks in the past, which generally involved stashing a hidden page in an iframe or sneaky window, but I haven't really scratched the surface of the frameworks that are available now. So I'm no expert but what I would say is that we should all give it a little bit of thought before using asynch callbacks for everything. Alex Bosworth has an interesting list of AJAX no nos on his blog. The ease of the update panel might make AJAX monsters of us all...

I stumbled today on a new podcast that I hadn't listened to before and funnily enough the current episode (show, cast, release... what do you call them?) is about the client library side of the Atlas set up which is the bit that was largely absent from Gary's talk. The podcast is by Wally McClure and can be found here and includes a demo video.

If you fancy going to any of the Manchester VBUG meetings should keep an eye on the listing or get in touch with VBUG.

A couple of interesting presentations were delivered:

Rob Lee gave us an entertaining run down on REST. Slides are on his blog.

Andrew Disley gave us a timely reminder about the importance of backing up your stuff. He also mentioned the Amazon API which appears to be worth a look.

Thankyou gentlemen...

The rest of the night was the usual bunch of nerds having a few beers. Not a pretty sight I think it is fair to say.

The most notable happening of the night was the impromptu creation and organisation of the free GeekUp - Ruby and Rails day scheduled for 30 September. Get 'em while they're hot, they're lovely...

He mentions that he forgot his laptop power supply and was effectively 'nerd naked' for the duration of the conference. My question is this, "Why didn't you take your mac Phil?". Then you could have borrowed one :)

On a browse around the web this morning I discovered that according to Mike Kolitz (and he should know as according to his bio he is on the Virtualization team) the VM Additions that you need for the RC1 build are cunningly hidden inside the iso that comes when you install Virtual Server 2005 R2 Beta 2. You need to install that first and then attach the iso that ends up in your programs folder to the virtual machine for installation. Why they aren't available seperately is anyones guess but there they are.

Once I managed to get those installed everything was hunky dory. Well, almost everything except I had no Internet connectivity. After a lot of prodding around I discovered that the Virtual Machine Network Services that are required on the host machine network connection had been mysteriously disabled. Virtual Server perhaps? Who knows but having enabled them again all was well.

I was hoping that, armed with the appropriate VM Additions I would get the Aero interface but alas, the emulated graphics card in Virtual PC doesn't appear to be up to the task. I didn't even realise that it emulated a graphics card so I spent a fair while trying to get the drivers for my card into the VM thinking that their absence was causing my initial woes... Well... you live and learn.

As for Vista, it looks great. I don't think you can really give an informed opinion on an operating system until you use it 'in the trenches' but it is looking good so far.

Now, I am not an RSS expert by any means but I have had a cursory glance at the feed contents and all seems in order. When I compared a Google one to a Digg one it looked ok. Also, if you copy the URLs from the link tags within the Google feeds and paste them into the address bar of your browser they work fine. Click on them from live.com however and you just get a blank page.

Follow these steps to recreate this and you tell me:

• Go to http://news.google.com and click on the RSS link near the top left of the page
• You now have the feed open. If you know what you are talking about in RSS terms, have a look at it and see if you can tell me what the problem is. Otherwise copy the URL from the address bar
• Now, go to http://www.live.com. If you are not already a live.com user (and you should be, Google 'censorship' aside it is a good service) click the 'Get Started' button beneath 'Personalize your Homepage'.
• Click on 'Add Stuff', then 'Advanced Options' and then paste your Google feed URL into the middle of the three text boxes and click subscribe.
• Drag the Google News icon from your 'My Stuff' section down onto the page below. You should now have a list of the latest Google News entries.
• Try clicking on one of the links... Firefox - you get a new tab with a blank page in it. IE - you get a blank new window but you do get the URL in the address bar.
• Repeat the subscription operations using another RSS feed, the one to the right of this article for example. Give it a run out... Works fine.

So, you tell me. Is Microsoft censoring Google?

It appears that once you have 21 years of development experience under your belt you can divine whether your code works correctly using the force.

I have not really got into 'Test Driven Development' myself, now that isn't to say it hasn't got its merits, but my brain doesn't work that way at the moment. I at least get a class defined with some method stubs in before I think about unit tests. I very often fill the methods out and I am sure there will be XP purists that balk at that.

I have in the last year written an application that because of time pressure I decided to do away with writing the unit tests. I think this is a reasonable decision to take if there just isn't room to fit them in. I wish I had though as six months later the client was back for some new features that involved a bit of a reworking of some of the old stuff and it was a nightmare without the unit tests available.

You see, I am of the opinion that to consider unit tests as purely a time consuming mechanism for finding bugs is to undersell them. Bugs will out eventually, unit tests or not but the big thing for me, and the thing that gives the payback for writing them in the first place is when you come to do some refactoring or other. Particularly when things have got a bit out of hand. To be able to instantly see what has broken as a result of your changes is where it is at for me with unit testing. You also can't argue that if you are able to automatically run a defined, possibly 100%, amount of your public APIs with every build then you are going to have a more robust application at the end of it than if you arbitrarily give it a manual runout.

The 'time consuming' argument is not really holding water these days either. I mean, you still have to write some stuff but there are plenty of tools that can lend a hand. Just out of the ones I have had a play with you have CodeRush that has some templates, Visual Studio will generate tests for you that need a bit (or a lot at times) of editing and there is nothing stopping you generating them with CodeSmith or any of the other miriad of code gen tools.

Judging from the comments Wil Shipley isn't alone. I don't mind people like that though...

...because they are wrong.

I have maxed out at 38 views and have 2, yes, 2 feed subscribers (hello both of you). I am averaging about 2-6 readers a post. I have no friends, I feel lonely, violated and down right miserable...

Joking aside, I think I am probably experiencing a common phenomenon. For most of us, blogging is a lonely sport in the beginning. Inevitably, your first few posts, or 10 in my case, go largely unread. So what can be done?

Well, I am obviously the wrong person to ask for the answers at this stage but I will not be deterred and will soldier on and try everything I can think of to build up my traffic. What have I tried so far? Well...

• First of all, I only told 3 people directly that I had started blogging. I intended to tell noone but I couldn't help myself. My idea was that I wanted to see how my readership would grow purely through the medium itself...
• Next I lightheartedly outed someone with a bit of clout in my industry. I'm not sure how he found out but I guess it was through a mutual friend who was one of the people I told. This gave me an early peak in my traffic of 6... Not bad for a first post I thought.
• I wandered a bit after that until I decided that I would try a trackback to Robert Scoble. I hit my peak there and thought I had stumbled upon a traffic goldmine. Turned out to be a bit of a fluke though as I have tried it since with more or less no effect. I think the title of my post actually naming Scoble had quite an influence on the success of this first attempt.
• I tried the trackback route to a couple of other blogs without much effect. I reckon the trick with that is to get your comment in near the top of the comments on a popular post but I am yet to manage that so I can't say for certain at this stage.

Stuff I haven't tried yet:

• Promising some kind of porn in the title and hoping to draw some traffic in from the recent posts section on WordPress. I suspect any success that this generates will be fleeting and I don't anticipate a great deal of subscriptions being generated when the unsuspecting visitor finds out I am a speccy nerd.
• Being abusive about another high profile blogger in a comment title. I am not generally an abusive person but I think this might work if carefully done. I would have to choose the victim carefully as most people would probably just delete the comment but if I chose someone who is a freedom of speech buff and did it semi-subtly then it just might work (captain).
• Sprinkling some links in amongst the forums that I use. This is one of my more pleasant and positive ideas that I should probably have a crack at.
• Telling more people about my blog. This would go against my initial experiment in flirting with the medium but I might have to give it a shot. I've been getting a bit more 'community' involved of late so perhaps I should make hay.
• Exploring the aggregation, blog search, general bloggy stuff that is available on the web. Being a new blogger, I am only just starting to find out about all this stuff and there is probably something out there, who, if I could find them, maybe I could hire, the A Team...
• Writing some interesting content that people would actually want to read. Now there is a thought...

So, for me the //TODO comment is a life saver, at least, it could be a life saver if the darned thing worked properly. I am sure it works as intended but I fail to see why the TODO Team or whoever was responsible for it limited the task list to only show TODO comments from currently open files. Not to say that this isn't useful but, as the files are open, I could probably find those myself in a couple more seconds than it takes me to look at the task list. Valuable workflow time I agree but not as valuable as the time I lose on all of the TODOs that lurk unnoticed in all the unopen files.

Being a bit of a Flash and more recently Flex noodler I was pleased to find the TODO plug-in for FlexBuilder/Eclipse. Downloaded... Installed... works like a treat. As you add a TODO it turns up in your task list and there it stays until the TODO is TODONE. Why can't we have this in Visual Studio?

To that end I rustled up a quick console app that you stick in the root folder of your project/solution and run. Tell it whether you are looking for .as (I did this before I started with Flex and its plug-in) or .cs files and it recurses through your folders and files and gives you a list of all your TODOs and where they are. It also counts the lines of code, excluding comments and lines that only have a curly brace on while it is at it. Am I particularly proud of myself? Well no, it is a stupid application with about ten lines of code in it but I was desperate to actually have something codesque on my blog and it was the only thing I could think of. It has also been really handy for keeping track of my TODOs so perhaps I'm being a bit harsh on myself there. I haven't posted the source because there isn't anything exciting in it, apart from a keylogger and a couple of trojans, but if any of my regular readers, sorry, if either of my regular readers would like it then let me know...

On that note, how the hell do you attract traffic to your blog? I have tried a couple of things with varying degress of success but am yet to pass 40 readers... Maybe that is another post.

I am wrong because Google obviously think there is a need as they are investing a fortune developing that side of their business and according to Om Malik discussing an article on the Red Herring there are 17 high(ish) profile efforts currently going at the Web Office thing and no doubt a few more lesser efforts. I am assuming that the people who are throwing their money at this know better than I do as to the potential of the market/idea and thus I must be wrong.

Now don't get me wrong, I fully understand the usefulness and potential of web based collaboration but do I need to do my word processing, spreadsheet err... ing and whatever else they concoct in my browser? Well, no I don't. What is wrong with storing your stuff on the web and editing, creating etc in your desktop office suite of choice. Nothing...

Nothing, except that, use of OpenOffice aside, you have to buy your office suite wheras your Web Office is generally free. So for home users perhaps that will be the attraction.

Perhaps this is where the battle will be fought for business too. I didn't think that there would be many businesses willing to turn over their private data to the Google machine. There is even a school of thought that says that Google houses its servers in the mines of Mordor and that there is a privacy time bomb just waiting to go off. (I've paraphrased a bit there...) It surprised me to hear that Scoble's new company are 'actually using most of the “Google Office Suite.”' A start-up with more than a couple of bob of VC loot behind it has chosen to go the web office route despite Robert Scoble probably having a couple of copies of Exchange/Office lying around.

So there you go, for what it is worth, I'll be sticking with my trusty Office 2003 until 2007 comes out...