Essential Web Design Tool: CSSEdit

Lately, in my “free” time, I’ve been doing web-development work in PHP.  A bit of a change from the usual .Net application hacking I do.  A tool I’ve been using that has been saving me loads of time has been MacRabbit CSSEdit.  I don’t know how I previously lived without it.  If your a web-designer or CSS hacker it is definitely worth the €30 it costs.  Check out the trial on the MacRabbit website if you don’t believe me.

Filed under: Programming , css, html

Games: Is it Art?

Thanks to @greenspeak I found an excellent article on games by John Lanchester at the London Review of Books that describes them in a way that non-game playing people would find understandable and perhaps illuminating.

Filed under: Gaming , art, video games

Unfuddling.

Recently I began using a service known as Unfuddle to manage a little personal software development project I have underway.

According to Unfuddle.com:

“Unfuddle is a secure, hosted project management solution for software development teams.”

This is a succinct and accurate description of what the service offers, however in conversation I tend to describe Unfuddle as:

“Trac & Subversion that you don’t have to set-up & manage yourself.”

Much like Trac, Unfuddle offers a wiki with file attachments, ticket/issue tracking with version control integration, milestone tracking & basic scheduling, source repository browser, and commit/change-set explorer.  All the basic tools for managing work in a small to medium sized software development project.

Some things that Unfuddle offers, that Trac (out of the box) does not, include Git SCM support, email activity notifications and unified user authorization/access control administration.  Ie, your Unfuddle website log-in is the same as your Subversion/Git log-in and as an administrator you have fairly fine grained control over what each user can do at the Unfuddle website and via SCM.

Each account at Unfuddle gets their own subdomain. For example mine is deeperdesign.unfuddle.com. Within that domain you can create a number of different projects & users, with users having potentially different access to different projects. The number of projects and users you can have in your account is determined by your subscription level. Free Unfuddle accounts are limited to 1 project and two users. For $9 a month you can have 10 users and 4 active projects. Likewise the amount of storage space your account has varies based on your subscription level.

So far I’ve been very happy with Unfuddle’s performance and price. Sure I could save some money by setting up my own instances of Trac & Subversion on an existing hosting account, like DreamHost.com. But that involves time & work. Time I’d rather spend “getting things done“.

There are really only two things to complain about with Unfuddle.

1. Storage space – Although you’re unlikely to exceed your accounts allocated space unless you store lots of binary assets in source control, the allocations at each account level seem fairly paltry considering today’s terabyte hard drives and “cloud” storage services like Amazon EBS. Hopefully with Unfuddle’s recent migration away from Rackspace to Amazon EC2 they will be able to take advantage of the cheaper storage solutions and pass those savings and space gains on to their customers.
2. No “public” access – All access to Unfuddle is for “cathedral” developers. It would be nice, for example, to be able to expose certain parts of the ticket/issue tracking system or wiki to “public” users. For user bug reports and other such things. Though perhaps services such as Uservoice are better suited to that role.

If you have a need of an easy to use online software development project management solution I can highly recommend Unfuddle.com.

Filed under: Programming , Programming, SaaS, unfuddle

Essential World of Warcraft Addons & Websites.

Lately I have been playing quite a bit of World of Warcraft.  I have to admit I’ve come pretty late to this party.  It seems there are 11.5 million or so other people enjoying the fruits of Blizzard Entertainment’s labour already.

I first tested the waters of WoW in 2005 and the game didn’t catch, however there is something about being unemployed for a little while that meshes well with the amount of time you have to commit to a game like WoW to get anywhere.  Also, since 2005 the game has been continuously updated and revised and it now seems like a much more streamlined entity.

Now even given this streamlining, the game still involes a lot of “grinding” in the early levels.  This can make the game a little tedious.  Especially considering that the “classic” content of levels 1-60 is considered quite inferior to the newer content of the Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King expansions by grizzled WoW veterans.

I’m still working my way through this grinding process with fairly low level characters and up until recently I had been doing so with just the stock WoW game.  I had not looked at any of the user interface add-ons available for WoW from sites like Curse.com.  However the other day I decided to check some out, and crikey do they make a difference.

Specifically the add-ons I’m using are Quest Helper and Cartographer 3. Basically they give you GPS and Google Maps style UI features within the WoW game environment.  Pointing you directly at quest objectives, ploting the most efficient routes to complete and turn in the quests you have and many other useful features.  They also plug-in fairly seamlessly to the existing WoW user interface and aren’t too hideous to look at.

The other night I decided to begin a new Alliance Paladin on an Oceanic Realm (my previous character was on a US Realm) and I’ve been using these add-ons extensively.  They seem to be greatly increasing the speed at which I can advance in levels.

Another resource I’ve been using a lot is the website WowHead.com.  Which of all the WoW related sites I’ve seen on the net seems to be the best put together and most useful.

So much to my own surprise, I’ve become quite a fan of WoW.  As I said previously, at first blush I didn’t think that much of it, but I can safely say that now I don’t resent the monthly subscription fee Blizzard charges my credit card each month.

Filed under: Gaming , Gaming, worldofwarcraft

Why I love Jetbrains and Resharper.

I neeeed Resharper.  Like a drug.  When I don’t have it installed in Visual Studio I feel like my hands have been lopped off.

The other day I upgraded my aging personal license of Resharper 2.5 to the shiny new 4.1 version.  However due either my own stupidity or a glitch in the Jetbrains purchase process I got charged the full license rather than the upgrade price (which is significantly cheaper).

Having noticed this error I sent a polite email to Jetbrains requesting a refund for the price difference.  This is the response I got:

Thank you for letting us know. This is what we are going to do:
- We are going to delete the purchase of a new 4.x commercial license in your user account.
- We are going to send you a license key for an upgrade from 2.x ReSharper to 4.x ReSharper Full Edition Personal License.
- We are going to send you a refund of 210USD.

Hell yeah!  Thanks Jetbrains, for being so awesome.

Filed under: Programming , jetbrains, resharper

Office Space

I noticed (due to a tweet from Jeff Atwood) that Joel has uploaded photos of the new Fog Creek Software office space.  This appears to be an example of an office environment done right.  In the past I’ve worked in office environments that just plain sucked.

Dirty, dark, smelly, badly maintained holes packed with more than a hundred developers.  Where scratching around for a clean glass or dust free desk was an exercise in futility.

This sort of thing has a a huge negative impact on staff moral.

On a recent Stackoverflow podcast Joel was discussing the new office and estimated that FogCreek probably only spends an additional 1% of revenue annually on their office space and employee perks than any regular software company might.  Yet by doing so, they get what he believes are significant benefits in employee productivity and moral.  It also makes for great company marketing (witness this blog post).

Note that FogCreek is not a large company.  They don’t have billions in revenue.  One of Joel’s assertions is that any profitable software company can do right by their employees in the same way he does.

The office environment I work in at the moment is better than others I’ve worked in but not quite up to FogCreek standards.  I can only strive to ensure that I’ll either get to work in a similar environment or can provide one to my own employees in any future business endevour I may pursue.

Filed under: Computing , joelonsoftware, office space

Stackoverflow.com is addictive.

I’ve recently started contributing to stackoverflow.com.  For those who are unaware, Stack Overflow is a question and answer site where you earn “karma” for asking and answering programming questions.

Currently my Karma is low (~56) compared to some others on the site (>10k).  But I can see how they got up there.  They got addicted to answering people’s questions.  There is a certain amount of ego polishing that you get enamored with when someone up-votes your answer or otherwise accepts your answer to their question.  The system has been engineered from the get go to reward users for providing valuable contributions.  It even has XBOX 360 style “achievements” or badges as they are known on Stack Overflow.

The site was put together by a team lead by Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror fame.  He and Joel Spolsky of Joel On Software came up with the idea of the site and have been conducting a nice little weekly podcast about its development and subsequent launch.

It even lets you create an RSS feed of your activity on the site so I’ve added that as a side bar to this very blog.

On the whole I’m very impressed.

Filed under: Programming , Programming, stackoverflow.com

The power of video games to sell music.

I watched the Mirrors Edge story trailer on my XBOX 360 the other night and noted at the end of the trailer it mentioned the music was from an artist by the name of Solar Fields.  The music in the trailer being nice low key ambient trance had me interested in finding out more about the artist.  A quick Google had me at his home page and MySpace profile listening to a couple of tracks which were nice.  A quick search of the iTunes Music store had me buying the 2007 album EarthShine.  I would probably have picked up others if they had been available as DRM-free iTunes Plus tracks.

The album, by the way is very good.  The sort of dance/trance that I enjoy a lot.  I also notice that Solar Fields is playing the Earthcore festival here in Melbourne in November.

Filed under: Entertainment , Music, video games

The rumours are true.

It seems the rumours are true.  Apple announced their new MacBook and MacBook Pro line on the 14th of October.  Solid aluminum bodies and nVidia based graphics.

I have to say that these new notebooks are dead sexy.  I think I’ll definitely be upgrading.

Filed under: Computing , apple, mac

Plex. XBMC for Macs.

I just downloaded and had a brief play with Plex on my Macbook.  It is basically a direct port of XBMC (Xbox Media Center) to the Mac platform.  This makes me want to buy another Mac to plug into the telly to replace my current XBMC.

The trust old XBOX is getting a little underpowered.  It can’t output HD and it can’t decode HD content on its puny 700Mhz Celeron processor.

Now, where can I find a cheap Intel Mac Mini when I need one.

Filed under: Asides, Computing, Entertainment , mac, plex, xbmc