It’s that time of year again. Goals for 2010. Short and sweet so hopefully I can knock them out this time around.
Professional
Personnel
Written by Tim on January 4th, 2010 with 8 comments.
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Going to a 64 bit OS this afternoon so here is the latest list for you and me 
Firefox
Chrome
iTunes – export your podcast list
Office 2007
Visio 2007
CCleaner
Fences (new)
mRemote
FireWorks
FileZilla – export site list
Navicat – export site list
BitNami
SQL Server 2008
Picasa 3
RocketDock
Notepad++
Pidgin
Surround SCM
TestTrack Pro
QA Wizard Pro
TweetDeck
VisualSVN
Free Monitor for Google
SSMS tool pack
SketchPatch
MemCached
Display Fusion
Balsamiq Mockups
Putty
Resharper
Written by Tim on December 21st, 2009 with no comments.
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It’s been about 3 years since I’ve been running with my trusty Blackberry 8830. I’ve had it replaced once because of the track ball, otherwise it’s been more then solid. No other blackberry impressed me enough to upgrade in that time. Besides the lack of a camera the 8830 was great. But like many BB users I’ve longed for the coolness & impressive apps of the iPhone. BB simply doesn’t stand up in these categories. Problem is AT&T. Their network isn’t the best around here & all of my friends & family are on Verizon so my calls are free. I really didn’t want to switch carries & so I waited for a device on Verizon…and waited…and waited…you get the picture
It’s soft, not metal-like the 8830. It took me 2 days to get use to but I’m doing pretty good now. Harder to use while driving then the blackberry but give me a few months & I think I’ll improve.
Droid – 7 | BB 9
Awesome, really awesome. Now I know what all these iphone users are surfing all day, their app store. I’ve (my kids) played games, IM apps, pandora, etc… The only thing is the download part only seems to work with wifi turned off.
Droid 9 | BB 2
1.5 days of pretty hard usage with the wifi on. My BB easily went 2.5 – 3 days.
Droid 6 | BB 9
You can tell Google made this because, it’s very fast, kinda ugly, & they left some cool debugging apps right in the phone. Search is enabled everywhere in the os & makes it easy to find things, very Windows 7ish. All & all a much better experience then the BB.
Droid 8 | BB 5
They got this right. Interface is simple & fast, clarity is rock solid, & speakers are great. This is where the BB & iPhone fall down.
Droid 9 | BB 5
You get a fast webkit (yeah for standards!) browser. Zoom in/out & scrolling work great. Only BB users know what a truly bad browser is.
Droid 8 | BB 1
Again, clarity is rock solid & speakers sound great.
Droid 7 | BB 2
No one outdoes BB when it comes to Email & Notifications. Droid has interesting concept of “notifications task bar” which I’m getting use to. But BB users will kinda miss this their BB. Droid exchange support is pretty good including synching of calendar & contacts. You don’t get the Global Address book, though there is an app to do this but it doesn’t integrate fully with the email client. Gmail users get a first class email experience with basically a full functionality gmail client (labels, stars, filters, etc..)
Droid 7 | BB 9
Good bye TomTom. This is as good or better. You see why Google has been involved with mapping technologies for a long time.
Love when you touch it vibrates a little, very nice.
Why micro USB?
I’ve attended some android sdk & iphone seminars. I remember my impressions of the android sdk much better then iphone.
So far I am super impressed with the droid. I give it a 8/10.
Written by Tim on November 9th, 2009 with 3 comments.
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Written by Tim on September 24th, 2009 with 1 comment.
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I’ve been writing a new web application at work lately, very web 2.0 ish with lots of jQuery & ajax calls being made on every page. After doing some performance testing, it’s very apparent that the various browsers fall into 1 of 3 categories, fast, medium, & slow for how fast they render. Chrome & Safari are seriously blazing fast compared to the rest, so much so, I’ve started to dump Firefox for Chrome as my browser of choice. But one major element is stopping me from being a full time chrome users – Debugging. That’s right, Firefox isn’t a browser to me anymore, it’s a freaking IDE. Firebug for dom and css inspection/manipulation, JavaScript debugging, packet inspection. YSlow & Hammerhead for performance tuning. Colorzilla for design elements. Web developer toolbar for various odds & ends. Fireshoot for screenshot taking. Yes, I know Chrome & IE ship with dom/css inspection but they don’t measure up to Firebug yet. Until Chrome can catch up with these plugins, Firefox is still the default browser.
| Fast |
| Chrome, Safari |
| Medium |
| IE 8, Firefox 3.5 |
| Slow |
| IE 7 |
Written by Tim on July 28th, 2009 with 1 comment.
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My friends at Educator.com recently rolled out their new website. Sufficient to say, they did a great job on the new site design & the content looks very promising. It’s very interesting to see how their business model will work out, $20 a month or $200 a year subscription.
With all of the education budget crisis we are seeing in this country, could a system like this help fill the void? Educator isn’t offering “core” classes, rather advanced Math & Science, in which good teachers are tough to come by & students are of a different nature. Just a thought…
Some of their courses
Written by Tim on July 2nd, 2009 with 4 comments.
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Pear:Log – ELMAH for PHP if you will
In case you don’t know it yet, Seapine is releasing TestTrack RM (Requirements Management) very soon, in fact the beta site was opened last week & you can now go sign up for it.
ASP.NET AJAX testing with Visual Studio 2008 Web Test
Written by Tim on June 29th, 2009 with 1 comment.
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We are building a little something here at work and I needed to throw together a quick UI design before things got heated. In the past I’ve come across Visio designed application or a mix of visio & photoshop. I found some decent visio stencil sets for web applications but I just wasn’t satisfied with the end result and didn’t want to jump into Photoshop to make things prettier. I wanted a something simple, that understood I was building a web application, & a low learning curve. That’s what I found with Balsamiq Mockups. I highly recommend you give it a try.
Written by Tim on June 2nd, 2009 with 5 comments.
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I’m back…
DOMPDF resurrected – PHP PDF library
Written by Tim on May 12th, 2009 with no comments.
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ASP.NET 4.0 & VS 10 – Talk given at Mix 09 about these two
HTML Color OneBox – Google a hex color value and it’ll show you what it looks like
Written by Tim on March 26th, 2009 with 6 comments.
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