This Month in 2000: AOL
Posted on March 10, 2008, under Tools and Services.
Courtesy of the Wayback Machine, it’s AOL in March of 2000.
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G-Archiver Is a Scam, Don’t Blame Shareware
Posted on March 10, 2008, under Development, Software, Tools and Services.
Originating from Jeff Attwood’s blog, Coding Horror about G-Archiver being a scam. The application, meant to backup your GMail account apparently emails your username and password to the developers GMail account. You can read more about it at Coding Horror, a great blog I and many follow, but what struck me was the backlash on shareware. It hit me a little personal, being a developer myself and relying on paid software to make a living. And honestly if anyone would have taken two minutes to take a look at the companies site, it would have rubbed them the wrong way and they probably would not have installed the software. Take a minute and research the company, just as you would before you purchase something.
This kind of lash out really rubs me the wrong way, for several reasons:
1) Yes, there are spyware ridden shareware applications out there, just as there is bad everywhere there is good.
2) As a company sometime you do not even list the application on the shareware site yourself, an affiliate does.
3) We have become a society expecting everything free; from ad blockers, movies and music pirating, everyone is looking for the free tool for them to use and in turn make money off with whatever they do for a living.
I am no angel, so please do not take this the wrong way. I am simply saying that there are software developers out there that put a lot of time, money, resources, etc, into making good software. Your purchasing the software helps the development of future versions with better features that make your life easier and more productive.
The same thing can be said about web sites that you turn over a username and password to. The majority of people use the same username and password for most all of their needs. You do not know what, if any, encryption or data storage methods these web sites are using. What kind of security they have on their servers. If any employee can get into the database and look up a username and password. This type of stuff can happen with web sites, you just do not know about it because you can not reverse engineer the source code on the server.
Don’t blacklist everything just because there is one bad egg.
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Eliminating the Need for Common Desktop Apps
Posted on March 6, 2008, under Adobe AIR, Browsers, Development, Software, Tools and Services, Windows.
As a desktop software developer, it is hard to admit that I have enjoyed moving my common applications to web services. Like many these days, I am not tied to just one computer. A desktop, laptop, and computer at work are just some. I eliminated the need for Outlook, as I use Google Apps for all of my mail, calendar, and most documents. The convenience of having access to your data from anywhere is huge. However, when I am at the desktop I want to use some of my web services like a desktop app.
For example Meebo. I have been using Meebo for my IM needs for some time, I love it. However having a full screen browser open all the time kind of sucks. There is a project called mebone written in Adobe Air, however it looks like it has since been abandoned. I ran into a version restriction of Air, an annoyance I have highlighted before about Air. I am not going to go and install a beta version of Air just to run a specific Air application.
I ran across a link to Prism, a project from the Mozilla folks. At it’s current state, Prism is little more than an isolated Firefox browser. You can install any URL as a "Web App" and run it stand alone. The road map looks really good for the project, and I can’t wait to see what comes. There is a lot of potential there. I like Prism for several reasons. The main reason is it allows me to run my mail, calendar, docs in a stand alone quick to launch browser that acts like a desktop application. This works great for Meebo, and my mail.
There are some applications that I personally would never see feasible to use as an online service. Photoshop, podcatchers, backup software, are some on my list. But the connection from the desktop to web services via applications like Prism are priceless.
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How To Add a System Tray Icon For TortoiseSVN
Posted on February 27, 2008, under Development, How To, Software, Tools and Services.
TortoiseSVN is arguably the best SVN client for Windows, my favorite for sure. The only negative aspect he program comes with is that TSVNCache.exe becomes very large in memory over time. This process keeps a cached state of your folders under source code control.
There is a way of putting an icon in the system tray which allows you to gracefully exit this app from time to time, not allowing it to get that large. This trick is documented in the hidden registry features of TortoiseSVN.
Fairly simple if you know your way around the registry. All you have to do is create a DWORD value under "HKCU\Software\TortoiseSVN\CacheTrayIcon" and set it to 1.
Presto! A System tray icon.
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Easy MySQL Backups on a Windows Server
Posted on February 27, 2008, under Code Snippets, How To, IIS, Software, Windows.
During the re-launch of BlueCrestStudios we moved to a Windows server. It was part of our initiative to take things back to our roots, and make things simpler. Because we run a fair amount of PHP applications we went with MySQL as our database. MySQL comes with a great little application called "mysqldump" which simply enough dumps your data to a SQL file. This little tool, combined with the free and great 7Zip makes for simple and great database backups. It’s best to dump your database onto a separate drive then where the data is stored, offers a little redundancy.
Now before we get started, I know some of you are thinking there is no need for this if you hosting company does backups. True, yes any good hosting company should do regular backups of all your data. However, I find it good to have a dump of our databases for that oops situation, and not involve the hosting company if we need to recover a database or table or row. In addition, you can schedule dump every other hour, or more regularly then your hosting company does backups.
So here is our script, let’s see what we are doing here:
1: set ARCHIVE=E:\Backups\MySQL\%DATE%.zip
2: set FILE=E:\Backups\MySQL\Backup.sql
3: DEL %ARCHIVE% /f /q
4: "C:\Program Files\MySQL\bin\mysqldump.exe" –all-databases –user=YOURMYSQLUSER –password=YOURMYSQLPASS > %FILE%
5: "C:\Program Files\7-Zip\7z.exe" a -tzip %ARCHIVE% %FILE%
6: DEL %FILE% /f /q
Basically we are dumping the database daily here, to an archive that holds the day of the week. The variable "ARCHIVE" holds to archive for today that will be created. The "FILE" variable holds the temporary dump file before we compress it, it is deleted after the compression just to clean up after ourselves.
- Line 3, we are deleting the current backup archive just incase.
- Line 4, we are doing the actual dump. You need to set your mysql user and password , a note do not use root!
- Line 5, we are doing the actual creating of the archive. SQL dump files compress very well, so this is a space saver step.
- Line 6, we are deleting the temporary backup file as mentioned above.
The tactics above can be enhanced greatly, as you can do dumps based on database, time, and get very elaborate on this. As an extra step I am using my Windows Home Server to download the dump nightly via FTP. Simple, elegant, fairly robust, and useful.
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Adobe’s AIR: The Good Comes With Bad
Posted on February 25, 2008, under Adobe AIR, Development, Software, Tools and Services.
One my favorite morning reads, ReadWriteWeb has a great article about Adobe’s AIR technology. For those not familiar, AIR stands for Adobe Integrated Runtime, and is a cross platform, code once run everywhere, light weight platform for applications. It holds a lot of advantages over other similar platforms. It’s two strong points in my eyes are: 1) it’s sexy looking, which is always a plus for end users. 2) It is easy to program in, especially for those who have worked with other Adobe products and technologies.
However my first experience with AIR was similar to some of my frustrations with .NET desktop applications. I was on the beta program for Pownce, which is written completely in AIR on the desktop side. I went and downloaded AIR, and naturally got the latest version from Adobe. Went to install the Pownce application and it said I needed an older version of AIR, immediately I was derailed. This happens more often than not with these "platforms", developers compile to a certain version of the platform and managing more than one version is a nightmare. Additionally, the last thing you want for a potential customer or user of your product is one more step before they can use your application; especially if that step is going to download another version of .NET or AIR. It’s the main reason I do not code in .NET for BlueCrestStudios.
I understand that with AIR it is just getting it’s official start out of Adobe labs, so it may not hold much weight here, we will see in the future. I hope that Adobe learns from others mistakes and makes the platform backwards compatible, easily distributable within AIR applications, and able to have more than one version installed if developers are going to be compiling against a certain version.
All in all, I think it has great potential, and will definitely be working it into future projects.
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Is There No "Try" in "Free Trial"?
Posted on February 19, 2008, under Software, Tools and Services.
With the revamp and release of BlueCrestStudios product line right around the corner, I am paying extra detail to user experience as we polish off the corners and get things ready to go. When you are in development mode, user experience can slide a little as you are mainly concerned about just getting the software working. I would rather be late to the market and get it correct, then early or on time and wrong.
Free trials and demos are a key part to new customers, something that I will admit I have taken the wrong approach on over the years. It’s natural to release a trial application that is locked down, doesn’t have all of the features, and only gives you a glimpse of how the application will behave if and when the user becomes a customer.
I recently had this experience with Stamps.com. I have be eyeing up stamps.com for about three months now. Lately I have been backlogged on items I need to mail out. Free welcome package to get me started, free digital scale, and 30 day money back. What could be better? Well then I get the welcome email. My welcome package has been sent, and I should get it in as soon as one business day. The digital scale, however; well I have to wait 30 days for my voucher and then pay shipping and handling. I understand that this is to prevent customers from canceling the service and making off with the scale, but I also find out that even if I wanted to stay a customer and keep using the service happily for years to come; I would still have to wait 30 days to apply for the scale.
Why is this a big deal? Well because I have packages to mail… now… not in 30 days. And in 30 days if I get the scale, and find out it’s a huge pain to mail packages, and the scale doesn’t work, and it killed my dog, and my girlfriend left me; and this whole Stamps.com thing just isn’t working out; I can’t get my money back.
Solution? Send the scale out, get the customer that still has an easy out using and loving the software. Get them thinking that it’s the best thing since slice bread. Then if within 30 days on the off chance that they do not like the service, let them know they have to return the scale or they will be charged for it.
It saves me from having to go to Amazon.com and use my Prime account to get a certified scale sent overnight to me. The only reason I did this was because it was a certified USPS scale vs. the one that Stamps.com gives you, and it had a higher weight tolerance. Still, not something you want customers to have to do.
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Back Up and Running
Posted on February 16, 2008, under Site News.
We are in the final week(s) of relaunching BlueCrestStudios, and I have had some time lately to overhaul Code and Coffee. New theme, and new content to come soon. Looking forward to it.
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Server Change
Posted on February 8, 2008, under Site News.
In the process of relaunching BlueCrestStudios and Code and Coffee there will be a server and DNS change happening in the next week. Thanks.
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Touching Base
Posted on December 10, 2007, under Site News.
I wanted to stop in and touch base, let everyone know how things are going during my hiatus. The side projects are going well, and the readers of Code and Coffee will be in for some cool free stuff soon. We have also been wrapping up the house work, and getting ready for some time off around the holidays.
I did want to give a plug for a great piece of technology I am selling. I am looking to unload my ReadyNas NV+, network attached storage on eBay. The item is hardly used, and a great steal for anyone looking to pick one up. Ping me if you are interested and want to work something out.
Take care.
