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Do people at Microsoft actually use SourceSafe?

May 18, 2007 By Bruce Kroeze 4 Comments

Working for one of my clients this afternoon, I had to figure out a reasonable way to work with Visual SourceSafe. I program on a Mac, and my only access to Windows is via a Parallels installation of Windows Vista.

That’s not really the problem, Parallels is a stunningly good piece of software, and I think Vista is the least annoying of the Microsoft Operating Systems. So I can access VSS fairly easily. The problem is what an incredible hunk of junk that software is.

So really, if any Windows programmers read this, could you tell me if people at Microsoft are honestly forced to use that software? Why? Have you ever used good source control software? BitKeeper? SVN? GIT? What is it that is good about VSS? Is it just the trivial integration with Microsoft’s dev tools?

Look, I hate operating system wars. I just don’t care anymore, they aren’t worth fighting for me. But I simply don’t understand how VSS is still in the world and still used by anyone. Not when even ancient, cruddy old CVS is better, faster, and easier to use. VSS has absolutely no advantages I can see.

It makes me happy that this particular job was bid as an hourly gig. VSS overhead is adding significantly to the time I’m using and thus charging. Fine by me. If you are going to insist I use a moron tool, then you’ll need to pay for the time wasted.

[tags]vss,sourcesafe,version control[/tags]

Filed Under: Rants

Mac Memorization Software: Genius

May 13, 2007 By Bruce Kroeze 4 Comments

genius256 Mac Memorization Software: GeniusI’m taking a Spanish language class, in prep for an extended trip next year, and I’ve been wanting a great flashcard program. I found it in Genius (Mac only), which is Freeware and exactly what I wanted.

I had been using iFlash which was good except for the fact that it sometimes chokes on importing accented characters. It was particularly nice to use the integrated flashcard library with thousands of premade flashcard decks. However, it was just a flashcard program. Very straightforward.

Genius uses a spaced repetition system to coax recall. It keeps asking you the same cards, spacing them out longer and longer the more you get them correct. What’s more it uses a “fuzzy” matching system, so you can ignore punctuation and accented characters when you type the responses.

I really see some progress in my language vocabulary acquisition now, in a very short period of practice. This is exactly the program I wanted.

[tags]language,flashcard,icard,genius,mac[/tags]

Filed Under: Macintosh, Reviews

Mass Import Yojimbo Passwords

May 12, 2007 By Bruce Kroeze 2 Comments

yojimbo Mass Import Yojimbo PasswordsI searched all over the place last night and I couldn’t find anything that could import passwords into Yojimbo for me. I did see a lot of complaining about the lack of ability to do so, however.

Since I really like the app in most ways except for its lame import capabilities, I whipped one up to import my 250+ password entries from a different program.

Get the program: Yojimbo Importer 1

Read on for discussion of how to use it, or else just look at the instructions provided in the download.

[Read more...]

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Filed Under: Macintosh, Open Source, Python, Tips Tagged With: applescript, passwords

Avoiding the dreaded Duplicate Content Penalty in Drupal

May 9, 2007 By Bruce Kroeze 3 Comments

droplet branch Avoiding the dreaded Duplicate Content Penalty in DrupalDrupal, along with a decent CSS based theme, makes it much easier to build and maintain a well optimized site which Search engines can read with the greatest of ease.

That’s one of the jealously guarded "secrets" of the SEO elites. Basically, just take the viewpoint of the search engine or a blind person. Is it easy to figure out what is going on without scripting, Flash or images? A good CMS handles that part for you, allowing you to concentrate on the content rather than the framework.

Duplicate content

One problem shared by many sites is that the search engine finds the same content on more than one page. Where should it send clicks? At best you are diluting your ranking by 50%, and some engines appear to penalize you more than that.

By default, all Drupal sites with "clean urls"have this problem on every page. Both http://example.com/node/21 and http://example.com/info could resolve to exactly the same page if one was a Drupal "alias" for the other.

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Filed Under: Drupal

Apps That Fit Into OSX

May 8, 2007 By Bruce Kroeze 2 Comments

houses row Apps That Fit Into OSXI’ve been using a Mac as my primary development and personal operating system since OSX 10.1, a few years. In that time, I’ve tried a lot of software, and I’ve developed my own working style. But what is really interesting is how I’ve come to appreciate the services the operating system and its stock apps all work together.

With the glue of Applescript, well defined APIs, and more recently the incredible Quicksilver, my standard working environment has become a cloud of apps that interoperate surprisingly well. Since I realized this was happening a while ago, I’ve been watching and investigating apps that seem to "get" this design ethic.

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Filed Under: Macintosh, Reviews

Tricky Drupal Javascript Loading Problem

May 7, 2007 By Bruce Kroeze 2 Comments

drop Tricky Drupal Javascript Loading ProblemA short tale about squashing a bug.

You see, my mistrust for IE made me miss the real problem. What was happening was that in IE 7 on Vista, a site I’m building for a client was not loading any Javascript. It wasn’t even loading the base Javascript "jquery.js" and "drupal.js", so my site theme Javascript wasn’t working at all.

I dug in and began tracing code using my typical technique of embedding "drupal_set_message()" calls in the suspect areas. Sure enough, no Javascript was getting loaded, but only when I used my IE test machine.

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Filed Under: Drupal, Tips

New record, three patches accepted in one week.

May 7, 2007 By Bruce Kroeze Leave a Comment

I have this wonderful client who hired me to build a world-class e-commerce site for him. He gave me carte blanche to use whatever framework I wished, so I chose Satchmo, an ecommerce app for Django.

This was a bit gutsy, as I don’t think there are any live Satchmo stores in the wild just yet, but I’m confident it was a good choice. Every existing system I’ve explored has been either wild spaghetti code (looking at you OsCommerce) or else inflexible in ways that would be unacceptable to my client.

So, I’ve been working flat-out on his site, and in so doing I’ve been doing my best to help the framework along. Just this last week, I set a personal record for contributions to an Open Source app, with three distinct patchsets. All were accepted, woohoo!

[tags]Satchmo,Django,python,e-commerce[/tags]

Filed Under: Django, Satchmo

Django auto_now Removal Gotcha

May 6, 2007 By Bruce Kroeze 3 Comments

classical guitar Django auto now Removal GotchaThe latest Django revisions have removed the shortcut handlers "auto_now&quot and "auto_now_add". This didn’t look like a very big deal to replace. I simply did what was suggested in a django-users thread.

The problem was that after I did that, my live code seemed to work fine, but my test cases had several repeatable errors that I just couldn’t reproduce on the live server or at the command line.

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Filed Under: Django, Python, Tips