MacBook and world’s smallest screwdriver

So my memory arrives from Crucial for my MacBook. Great I think to myself. I'll just pop that in and go run PhotoShop at full speed. I open my tiny Apple users's guide and flip to the section on replacing memory. The booklet tells me that I should use a size 00 Philips screwdriver. What's that? I look all over the house and come up with the smallest possible Philips screwdriver I can find and its way too enormous and I'm paranoid that I'm going to strip one of the screws trying to remove the memory cover. Tomorrow I'll find out if the local hardware store has such a size 00 Philips screwdriver. I sure hope so.

beta testing

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We wrote TopEverything in .Net and started using Mono to write it. It became clear that Mono was really going to slow us down and that it is dirt cheap to host a site on a shared Windows box anyway. We went back to developing on Windows.

After working in Java, one thing about .Net I have trouble getting used to is the concept of not having an MVC framework out of the box. My colleague has his own for .Net so that problem is solved. Since .NEt lends itself to favor using stored procedures, we quickly started making use of MySQL's stored procedures functionality. At first we had a tough time with permissions and keeping our development environment synchronized. We ended up using Sqlyog because it allows easy script export/synchronization.

Since the site was heavy on stored procedure use, I wrote a small tool to reverse engineer the stored procedure declarations in MySQL and construct .Net method calls to correspond to each MySQL store procedure. This saved a lot of tedious coding.

Look for more to come on our experience adding AJAX controls.

Oh, and here we are on Digg.

MacBook and thoughts on accessibility

I have now been using my MacBook for almost a week. One of the features of the Mac that is bringing me over from the PC is the accessibility options provided in the Mac OS. I have poor eyesight and have always considered the options offered by Windows for high contrast to be primitive at best. It wasn’t until about a year ago that I realized how far superior the features are for the Mac OS in this area. With one single keystroke the Mac OS will swap contrast on the entire screen. As far as I know this isn’t fully provided on Windows. My guess is that it goes back to the old school device context concept from early 16 bit Windows days. Anyway, I normally have to adjust my editor colors to get a black background, but no more. This comes with one single keystroke. This one feature alone is worth the price of admission for me. Beyond this the Mac OS has so cool voice over and magnifier stuff. I’d love to be proven wrong though that Windows is just as robust in this area since I still have to use a Windows machine extensively.

Since I’m on this topic, I’ve never understood why so few editors support the simple concept of a color profile. I believe that many developers, color blind or not, prefer looking at a black background or a blue background. Most of the big editors in use today lack the concept of a color profile. I know Eclipse does and so does Visual Studio. JBuilder however is one of the few that has a color profile. I’ve been known to have a copy of JBuilder on my computer just for this simple feature. I think the schemes in JBuilder are called Midnight and Ocean.

Still another application that deserves mention in this area is Adobe Acrobat. I did not notice this until recently but Acrobat allows you to change the default background color when viewing a document. This is such a relief when having to digest lengthy technical documentation. As far as I know Word doesn’t offer this.

The last thing I’ll mention on this subject is that there is a very handy FireFox plugin for manipulating the CSS and configuring FireFox for high contrast viewing. Here’s the web site to get the plugin and more information: http://cita.disability.uiuc.edu/software/mozilla/

Something I like about .Net

After spening an intensive month in January writing asite using the Spring MVC, I then was assigned to a project to build a similar web site using .Net 2.0.

There's lots to compare but one thing I like about .Net is that it is VERY easy to cobble together a page that simply displays query results. I know this is the stuff that demos are made of but its true. For admin sites or report pages the .Net framework, especially 2.0 is hard to beat. Take a look at this little sample.

<asp:SqlDataSource ID="SqlDataSource3" runat="server" ConnectionString="<%$ ConnectionStrings:devConnection %>"
SelectCommand="GetSiteUser" SelectCommandType="StoredProcedure">
<SelectParameters>
<asp:ControlParameter Name="email" ControlID="TextBox1" PropertyName="Text" />
</SelectParameters>
</asp:SqlDataSource>

Essentially this dynamically connects a form element, TextBox1, with an input parameter to a stored procedure. I like this. I can build a page out of tags that performs a query and dumps the results into a table. I didn't have to touch the codebehind.  I am sure this concept can be taken much further but too me this is about as far as it should go. It would be a slippery slope to be any more involved with keeping logic intricately wired into the page and not clearly coded in C# in the codebehind.

Which Office?

Which is the better choice on the Mac? OpenOffice or NeoOffice?

MacBook Pro

Yes I'm moving to the MacBook Pro for Java development. I ordered the standard system on Wednesday and should receive it on Friday. Expect a couple of blogs detailing the move from Windows. I won't be running Microsoft Office since I can't afford it so I'll be looking into OpenOffice.

I read an article in the WSJ this morning regarding hardware suggestions for Windows Vista. The author's suggestion was to actually wait until January if possible for buying a new PC. It has been quite some time now since Microsoft wrote the original Windows NT which was somewhat of a departure from 16 bit Windows but not a full paradigm shift. What if Microsoft were to shed all of its baggage and develop a completely new operating system? In my opinion sticking with the core Windows system for all of these years must be a huge headache for the engineers at Microsoft. It must be extremely frustrating to have to deal with all the legacy baggage that built into the OS. Yikes.