Dropbox works on all three of the major OSes.

As anyone that reads this blog should realise (that’s if anyone is actually reading it, comment people please!), I am a Applications Developer.  I work for a large law firm writing Visual Basic .NET applications, along with a fair amount of SQL work.  However I also do a lot of personal development outside of work, building websites and applications for private contracts.  I wanted a similar Source Control solution to the one that we use at work (Source Gear’s SourceVault), but I wanted one extra feature!! Distributed Source Control!

For those that are not 100% on what Source Control is here is a little explanation.  Source Control systems are designed to keep a historical copy of your source files; whether they be source code, websites or even documentation. The crux of the matter is you “check” files in and out of the repository (the source control container), most systems also give you the option of tagging comments to your “check ins” so that you can remember what changes you made to your code!! The whole purpose of a SourceControl solution is to save you from disaster when it all goes wrong! Should you make a change that breaks your application, or need to roll back when the plan changes, you can simply pull out an historical copy of your file from a previous check in!

The other major benefit of Source Control systems is that they allow for collaboration between multiple developers. When Developer A checks out a source file to work on, the repository allows Developer B to access the file but it prevents him from checking the change in until Developer A has finished with the file.  Once both Developer A and B have both finished with the files, the repository offers to merge the changes together.  Some Source Control solutions store the details and content of the source files in an SQL database (as SourceVault does), however the tradition is to use a file structure (like SubVersion and Microsoft’s SourceSafe).

My custom SourceControl solution is SubVersion and Dropbox running on Windows 7!! Read More for instructions on how to re-create it!

Dropbox is an on-line file hosting solution, which takes a users files and stores them in the cloud, allowing the files to be accessed from anywhere on the internet and from almost every operating system.  It is free for a basic account, which should be more than enough for most private developers (2GB).  As dropbox is designed to store files, it is ideal for SubVersion, as it also stores your source code in lots of small files rather than one big SQL data file.

The downside to SubVersion aka SVN is that it can often be complex to set up, requiring a knowledge of SSH and the Linux Shell (not a problem for me, but I am a Windows Developer in the main so my SVN system is going to be windows based!). Luckly for those who don’t want to use a Linux server for their source, there is a free (to individuals) solution in the form of VisualSVN Server.

VisualSVN Server is free to individuals

VisualSVN Server automates the installation of the SVN Server for you, including the creation of the repository and security details.  Once installed you get a helpful management plug-in that allows you to manage the repository, create folders and manage forks (will explain that another time!).

When you install VisualSVN Server you are asked where you wish the repository to be stored, and that’s the important trick! This is where dropbox comes in, when you install VisualSVN ensure that you pick a place within your “My Dropbox” folder to store the repository, I would recomend a “SVN_Repository” folder.

Now each time you check something into the repository it is syncronised upto DropBox, and back down to your other development machines!!  A Source Control repository with automated backup, and distributional as well!

I hope that I have explained myself relatively well in all the above, but I did write this over three days ( I get easily distracted, in fact this was a distraction to start with!), if not let me know and I will try to help!

UPDATE: A good SVN Add-on for Visual Studio is AnkhSVN, which is a free plug-in that binds Visual Studio projects to your SVN repository.

Momentus XT Hybrid Drive

I don’t normally do hardware reviews, but I decided that this was worth while.  I recently purchased a Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid Drive, not the best named piece of hardware but it does the job.

The Momentus XT, as the name implies,  is a hybrid hard disk drive. It combines a standard hard drive with some NAND flash memory, not that you can tell once you are booted into your Operating System.  The Momentus XT comes in three flavours 250GB, 320GB and 500GB.  Each flavour includes 4GB of NAND flash memory, which is used to hold all your most regularly used files.

4GB may not sound like a lot of space, but when it’s only being used to store the files which the OS uses the most it’s more than enough. In the case of Windows, it stores some of the page file and lots of DLLs (especialy the .NET ones!).  So my main problem, the speed at which Visual Studio worked, was solved just by caching the .NET frameworks!

One of the plus points of the HDD looking after the Flash storage within firmware, is that this drive will work on any machine that supports SATA! There are no special drivers so it will work with Windows, Linux, etc etc.

Now down to the numbers,  over a standard Laptop drive running at 5400 RPM I get around an 18% performance increase.  Where as an SSD would give me around a 20% increase, but for an extra £250 (for the most basic 250GB SSD)!!

My boot time is now around a minute, and resume from hibernate is a matter of seconds.   The proof that this drive gives a speed increase is my task bar on a clean boot. Normally you see Windows Boot, and then your Virus Scanner loads, followed by the firewall and slowly the rest of the tray icons. With the Momentus XT drive, the all load at once, and the system is booted as soon as you can see the desktop!!

All in all, the Seagate Momentus XT drive gave a massive performance increase to my Dell XPS M1530, and it only cost me £79 (delivered!) from www.scan.co.uk. Rather than £100s of pounds for the same size SSD.

For more info about the Momentus XT range take a look at Seagate’s Momentus XT Range.

Typically Ubuntu boots in around 15-45 seconds out of the box, but overtime this can change as you add more applications and the init scripts get bloated.  So here are a few quick tips to help you speed up Ubuntu’s boot time (I am using Ubuntu 10.04).

Start up

Remove unwanted items to speed up boot time

The easiest tweeks to make can be found in the “System > Preferences > Start-up Applications” menu.  On a desktop machine you are unlikely to need a few of the services, and on a server you are likely to need even fewer.

The applications which I have disabled are:

• Blue-tooth Manager: If you don’t use blue-tooth then this service is a waste of resources!
• Evolution Alarm Notifier: Personally I do not use evolution as a mail client, so there is no need for the notifier. Even if you do use evolution, you may not need the reminders!
• GNOME Login Sound: As nice as that sound is, the monkey in the jungle gets annoying very quickly!
• Visual Assistance: I don’t need the “accessibility” features.

You may find others that you don’t need, such as “Ubuntu One” which you might not make use of.

A good kick up the BUM

BUM or Boot Up Manager is a useful program that takes controlling start-up programs and services one step further.  You can use it to completly stop the CUPS (Printing) services and any other laptop only items if you are running a desktop or server.  It can be installed with the following apt-get command:

sudo apt-get install bum

I will leave you to decided which items to disable, as everyone’s Ubuntu installs can be different.

If you have any other speed-up tips please comment!!

How many of us have got more than one computer on our desks? The answer is almost certainly a lot of us!  I have just set up my office in my new apartment (I moved on Monday!), and I decided that I didnt need to have to two keyboards and mice.

I have used synergy before, and have decided to use it again.  For those that have not seen synergy before, it is akin to a KVM (keyboard, video, mouse sharing hardware) but is purely software.  I can share a keyboard and mouse with any other machines on my network, they don’t even need to be in the same room (although what use that would be I don’t know!).  The best bit is that synergy is free, and runs on Linux, Windows and Mac, and takes moments to set up.

I have a Windows 7 laptop and an Ubuntu 10.04 desktop, synergy runs as a server on the laptop allowing the desktop to connect to it.  Installing Synergy on the desktop is easy, just download the installer from the Synergy website, as for Ubuntu just type:

sudo apt-get install synergy quicksynergy

Once installed you set up the server (in my case on the Windows machine) with a few simple clicks:

Synergy Screenshots

All you have to do is add the “screens” aka machines to the top list (Badwolf is my laptop, Paladon is my desktop : guess the naming convention!), then tell Synergy where the screens are in the links pane. You can get posh and set up the vertical positioning of the screens, e.g. 50% of the left of one is to the right of another, but I don’t see the need unless you have several machines.  This screen is accessed via the “Configure” button on the right hand screen shot.  Once set up click “Start”.

To set up the client on Ubuntu, chose “Quick Synergy” from the applications menu, and pick the “use” menu. All you have to do is type the server’s IP address, and the name that you wish the machine to be called (the client’s name not the server you are connecting to).

Synergy on Ubuntu

Once you click “Execute” you can close the QuickSynergy window, and you are done!

Now you can use your keyboard and mouse to control all your machines at once, just slide off the screen and onto the next!!

Any comments are always welcome.

Thanks

jamesakadamingo

Well I’m writing this from the wordpress for iPhone application, as I currently do not have Internet access (apart from GPRS). I moved into a new house yesterday, with my lovely girlfriend Emma.

Last week I contacted Virgin Broadband’s “Home Movers Team” to inform that I was about to move house. I spoke to a very kind lady called Katherine l, who told me hat she would arrange for my service to be cut off from my old property in the morning and it to be connected in the afternoon. She also found that the previous tenants had not ended their contract, so she would get that sorted and call me if there were any problems. Simple aye?? Unfortunately not so.

Yesterday early afternoon I called Virgin’s “Quick Activation” team to get everything going. It seams I was with wrong team, so the put me through to Customer Support who spoke to me q while and put me back again.

Apparently Katherine never did anything, my service was still connected to my old flat, and the previous tenants service had no been removed. So the “man from India” (no racial slight intended) told me he “would submit the form, and contact me most quickly when he had the response from the requested form he had sent just now”.

An hours worth of phone calls later and I am told that the property has no Virgin Service (so what did they waste my morning disconnecting) and they must send round an engineer. Regardless of the fact that I have already connected everything and just need them to “flick the switch”. So I get Internet on Wednesday, and intend to get at least a months refund on Thursday once I speak to their complaints department!!!

Sorry if this post rambled but it’s hard to type a good one via an iPhone!!

UPDATE: Virgin Media tweeted back at me!! They said,

@jamesakadamingo Really sorry about the problems James, moving house is stressful enough. Do get in touch if you need further help. ST

I will get in contact with them, and see what ST can do to stop me being angry!!

Oh and look it’s a virgin service point in my flat how did thy get there, maybe it was ALREADY here?!?!

In the wake of Apple’s WWDC 2010 conference, it appears that network providers around the globe are now dropping their unlimited data packages (and not just for the iPhone). It seamed that only minutes after Steve Jobs sat down, AT&T dropped their package, and the next day @O2 did the same in the UK.

This instantly angered me and my fellow O2 iPhone friends, being limited to 500MB a month seamed painful. It got me thinking about how I use my phone, as I see myself as a relatively heavy user. I use my phone regularly to check Twitter, The Register, SlashDot, Google Blogs, Twitter Blogs, the BBC and much much more. And of course the odd bit of YouTube and WeRule (sad I know). I thought that this would surely mount up to a lot of data usage.

To my surprise I have only used 2.1GB of data since I got my iPhone (in October 2009), however the surprise was short lived. When I am at home, I have WiFi, when I am at work/the cafe/my Girlfriends/etc I have WiFi, so it all comes down the pipes rather than over the air!

So yes O2 are about to limit us, but as they say most of us won’t even notice!! My only concern is that with the incoming iPhone 4 (and iOS4 for the 3GS) some of us will start having streaming programs running in the background as we walk from A to B (listening to spotify or similar), so perhaps O2 should use a different model than just limiting us all! They say that the problem is the 1% that use crazy amounts of data, perhaps just put it in the fair use, and charge them rather than limiting us all!

Backups Backups and more Backups, always an important mantra. I was surprised to find that a fellow geek wasn’t backing up his MySQL database that runs his website. Yea he has backups for all the code files, but not for his content!

It frightened me when I found out how many people don’t backup their websites SQL databases. Every WordPress blog runs off of a SQL (normally MySQL) database, if you use a WP-Hosted blog then your safe as they back it up for you. If you host your own WP blog (or geeklog, drupal, etc, etc) then your backups are up to you!

It is for that reason that I have just finished knocking together a page detailing how my simple Linux script backups up my databases at regular intervals (some hourly, some every two, some once a day!) zips them and emails the smaller ones to me!

Check out the article on “Backing up MySQL databases automatically in Linux“.

Twitter for iPhone App Icon

So here it is the long promised Official Twitter iPhone Application, first impression upon loading it from the Apple AppStore was that the icon needs a bit of work, almost like it had been rushed.

But more importantly what is the application like? Opening the app up for the first time presented me with a screen showing the latest tweets of interest and trends. I would show you a screen shot, but stupidly I rushed passed that page and logged in (you get a similar page once logged in).  What did surprise me was the basic authentication method that was used, “please enter your username and password”. Surely the official Twitter app should be using oAuth? If someone like me can slave over a PHP oAuth system, then Twitter’s dev team can create a layer for the iPhone!??

But what do my tweets look like I hear you shout (or I might be imagining it), well they look like this.

Official Twitter iPhone App - Timeline

They appear to have taken the standard layout, author image to the left (unless its your’s, then its to the right). @kaivana ‘s tweet is shown with a blue background I presume because it is tweeted at me! Oh and @Tony_Hillier is trying the new app also, hence the random “Tweet Tweet”.

My current iPhone Twitter client is TwitBird Pro, and the only thing that I feel this page is missing is the background image feature that TwitBird Pro offers.  Perhaps @Twitter will take notice and do an update!

The icons along the bottom of the screen provide a few extra views,

• Speach bubble provides your standard home timeline.
• @ symbol unsprisingly provides a list of tweets in which you are mentioned.
• Letter provides your direct messages, grouped by user which is a nice touch.
• The hand glass provides the more interesting feature allowing for trending topics and searches.
• The triple dots gives access to the settings and your favourite tweets and lists.

Clicking onto a tweet performs the usual action of showing the tweet along with and links for #hashtags and @usernames. If the tweet is geo-tagged then it will also show a nice little map which can be extended with a click to a full screen view.  The normal access to a users bio is also available when you click on their name, which gives a funky feature allowing you to import their info into an iPhone contact!

Tweet Views

The tweet view gives the normall set of functions to Star / reply / retweet or in the case that it is your’s delete it.  Which is a function missed out of many applications!

Clicking on a users picture as I mentioned above brings up a account view, which not only gives the normal set of  tweet “counts” but also some new menus which give you access to the users retweets / retweeted-statuses / lists and a whole load of services that many may not know exist!

The Tweet View in the new Twitter iPhone application

• Tweet Blocker – A service giving your tweeps a mark on how spam like they are! I got an A+ so I must be a good boy!
• Follow Cost – A service that lets you know how painful it might be to follow a certain tweep (@jeffjarvis i’m looking at you and your serial retweeting)
• Favstar.fm – ‘A site tracking what you, your friends, and everyone else is favoriting on Twitter.’
• Overlapr - A service to compare two tweeps and see what they have in common
• Tweeteorites - A list of the most favourite’d tweets in the last 24 Hours.

Along with access to search the user on the above services, you can also set the app to provide notifications for that user or even block/report them for spam!

Tweet Entry

Naturally one of the more important parts of a twitter client is the input screen!

If it isn’t easy to type out a tweet then you arn’t likely to stick with it! As you can see the input screen is clean and tidy.  Tapping the little letter counter pops up the tweet options, with picture uploading, geotaging, username and hashtags. The only feature it seams to be missing is a twit-shrink like Tweetdeck which turns my long winded tweet into a shorter one!

Now I could talk for ever about this application but I will stop now before I bore everyone to death.  Just to finnish here is the list of tweet-services that are supported.

Images: yFrog, TwitPic, TweetPhoto, Mobypictures, Twitgoo, Posterous, img.ly and custom ones!

Video: yFrog, TwitVid, Mobypicture, Posterous, Vodpod.

Official Twitter iPhone App - Input

Read It Later: Instapaper, Read it Later.

So that is it for now! Bye Bye!!

jamesakadamingo

Well it has now happened, I have deleted my @Facebook account (and yes I am aware how fitting it is for me to use facebook’s @twitter address!). There are a few factors which have driven me to this, some more basic than others. In recent weeks I realised that I was only using facebook for one purpose, and that was the events features. All I did was check if my friends were holding a party or a pub trip and then log off.  One thing that I did notice each time that I logged in was the shear amount of rubbish that was in my news feed, why would I care if so and so only needed two more bricks to build their barn!! Add the fact that people were always bulk inviting me to their bands gig on the other side of the country and I got fed up!

The bigger issue of course is (or now was!) their stance on history, I really dont want every website I visit to know everything about me just because I happened to be logged into facebook at the time. There is also the issue regarding  the “facebook-positive”, and yes I did just coin that term. On facebook (and for that matter any site which uses facebook) you can only “like” something, you can’t dislike it. As such with facebook’s iFrames (seariously iFrames in this day and age!), any website I visit is instantly “liked” and “liked” even more if I choose to click the “like” button.

So the process of actually deleting my account! A quick search of the internet gave me enough impotus to actually delete all my data before I even deleted my account! It appears that facebook does not actually delete your data when you close the account, it simply lies dormant on their servers. As such I removed all traces of my facebook life first:

Remove two Email addresses (having to type my password each time!)

• Set up a fake email and add it to FB allowing me to delete my other email address (another two password inputs!)
• Remove my Mobile Number.
• Remove all 37 applications that somehow had found their way into my profile.
• Trash the content of my profile page (including my picture!).
• Delete all my likes and dislikes (three clicks for each one!!).
• Remove my contact information.
• Delete my photo albums.
• Delete my links and notes.

I started the process at 15:30 and finished 63 minutes later, every action I took to delete something was slow, and many times facebook just crashed out and I had to login again. So not a quick fix.

The last few stages were easyier, however I did like the “please don’t leave us” page.  It picked three friends and told me how much they would miss me, needless to say it didn’t stop me from leaving!  Following that I got a simple captcha and another password request, I was amused to see the captcha text it was rather fitting.

Leaving Facebook Captcha

All in all leaving facebook wasn’t that hard, taking the extra precaution of removing all my data too a little longer but should be worth it.

Now I just need someone to re-create facebook’s events system via twitter and all will be sorted! Perhaps I could write it myself!

Evening everyone, it’s been one hell of a long week this week.  I have been working on a major project which is going live in the UK Legal sector tomorrow morning at 6am, my part is ready but everyone else’s isn’t!  So having only just eaten my tea, I really can’t be bothered to do any work or continue with the PHP oAuth Twitter scripts that I am working on!

So I am listening to This Week in Google (TWiG), and taking a look at @Google ‘s latest offering in the maps department.  Google Maps has now integrated Google Earth into the web browser interface.  Meaning that you get all the great Google Earth items via your browser with out the need to install and run Google Earth.  I will point out however that there is a plugin that is required, it works in @Firefox / Google Chrome and IE on Windows, and Firefox / Safari on mac.

The reason that I post about this is because I was amazed how many 3D buildings have been sketched up in Bristol (UK).

Google Earth via the Browser, 3d buildings in Bristol

For those that do not know, that is the centre of Bristol.  Not only is a building that is only a few months old there, but even the little pillars down the middle of the parade are there!  Who ever sketched these up, thank you!!

The only down point of this, is now I can easily use Google Earth when I am meant to be doing something else!

Signing Off another pointless post!

jamesakadamingo