The Buck Starts (and Stops) Here

Not been posting much recently (make that about 15 months1) so that technorati ranking just went out the window! I've been very busy and not had much time for the stuff I usually blog about (new versions of ide's like Netbeans and Visual Studio and mobile development etc).

I came upon this post by accident , opened up word 2007 to do a new doc and noticed the create blog post option thought I would give it a try , then set out on a half hour quest to get back into my blogger account , I couldn't remember my user name and the standard option to recover passwords doesn't help , but reading the help fully found an option to enter your main email and that got me going , blogger have now switched to using google accounts which suits me fine one less account to worry about! – I'm still loving gmail and google calendar , between those and 37 signals highrise http://www.highrisehq.com , I can pretty much run my business remotely now.

It seems like only yesterday when I downloaded the first beta of Netbeans 5.0 and started working with it and testing the new features, but now the NetCat program is complete, the code is finalized , t-shirts dispatched and received*, and we can all get ready for the next release whilst enjoying this one!

[*Thanks for the shirt Jiri its a cool light blue color , I've just started back at the gym so I'll be wearing it with pride.]

Seriously though NetBeans 5.0 is a great IDE , and the one I use by choice, I used to use Eclipse and its IBM/Rational cousins , but for me now NetBeans does a better job, does it faster and in a much smaller memory footprint and remains responsive throughout the day.

I recommend anyone who hasn't tried NetBeans before or who hasn't tried it since the early days (whatever you hated will have gone now!) to head on over to netbeans.org and download a copy you won't regret it.

What I think is cool in NetBeans 5.0 in no particular order and I've probably left out a bunch of stuff;

• Great new CVS support out of the box.
• Bundled Tomcat server and integration
• Fully integrated Ant Builds
• New Matisse GUI builder brings Java visual dev up to and probably ahead of VB/C#
• Mobility pack makes J2Me developing a breeze and it looks really cool
• Excellent Re-factoring support
• Available with (free) Sun Appserver 8.2 complete with easy installation
  
• Bundled chat collaboration
• Brilliant profiler
  

To paraphrase the British Chancellor of the exchequer, I commend this release to the java developers of the world!

Been a little while since I updated the progress on Netbeans 5.0 , Firstly I must say I love the product and have pretty much ceased using Eclipse and WSAD (My main bugbears have been the lousy and worsening performance and poor app server in eclipse itself with WSAD stuck at an older version of eclipse and who wants the complexity of the newer rad 6 product?).

What do I like in the new version;

The new cvs support finally makes netbeans plug and play for cvs users , cool.
The editor still looks great (I always preferred the look of the netbeans editor over eclipse going back years) and has great auto completion , and refactoring options.
Tomcat support is the best yet.
Mobility pack looks super cool , though I have yet to get much time on it

What don't I like

There are still quite a lot of bugs (the daily builds seem to have got a bit flakier recently) so you can find odd things happening eg files from different projects appearing in an importing project - was it me or the ide or hadn't I flushed out a previous install properly ? but hey its a beta !

What's missing

I think the biggest thing I miss over eclipse is the lack of a local history which is great for winding back after trying something , sometimes you don't want to check in code yet still need a way of going back intermittently , you can get around this with regular backups and it's probably a reason netbeans is so much quicker.


I've been using Netbeans on both windows XP and Solaris 10 x64 , it is really something on solaris , I have an Ultra 20 (Opteron 2.2 ghz, 1 gig ram) and it flies compared to an Athlon clocked at 2.3 ghz with 1gig ram running windows - I would say it does builds twice as quickly , I actually see differences of about four times but this particular xp build is a bit tired so not a fair comparison.

I have always been a bit cynical about 64 bit as I have been using 64 bit powerpc AS/400's for nearly 10 years the AS/400 went from 48bit cisc processors to 64 bit and overnight all programs doubled in size needed twice as much ram and basically the whole platform stood still or went backwards for a few years until the prices of ram and disk speeds improved enough to handle it.

I've been working on the NetBeans 5.0 Beta fro a few days now as part of the netcat5 project , I am very impressed so far and am well on the way to switching over from eclipse for a lot of our development , The tomcat integration is a real boon better integrated than eclipse with plugins and without the memory load of WSAD.

Had to interrupt my coding today to locate a manhole cover so Dyno-Rod could unblock one of our drains. Turns out a previous occupant of the house had thought it would be a good idea to bury a manhole cover under 6 inches of tarmac! A camera down the drain proved there was an inspection chamber but we couldn't see anything on the surface the dyno-rod guy had a good bit of technology after using a metal detector to roughly pinpoint the man-hole cover he then used a bullet shaped sled pushed down the drain which has a transmitter in it , a receiver can then pinpoint exactly where the sled is and crucially what angle its at - that just left me wielding a pickaxe to rip up the tarmac and dig down to the man-hole cover. I can highly recommend dyno-rod as very efficient and helpful , I also recommend plumbing and drains insurance I have mine through British Gas (or try this if that link doesn't work it had a session id in the url)and they've been great.

I haven't posted for a while so this is a bit of a catch up entry....

Some updates on things mentioned previously in the blog;
1. I'm taking part in the community acceptance testing process of NetBeans 5.0 , which kicks off next week , I'm glad to be putting something back after being a bit hard on NetBeans over the years , I'm going to be testing the new cvs stuff , eclipse project importing and Mobile. Looking forward to it!!

2.Gmail still Rocks!!! I'm so pleased with gmail , I've uninstalled inboxer - there's just no need for a client side spam filter when gmail zaps all but one or two a day. I still get a few good emails marked as spam but you have a month to retrieve them before they are zapped for ever. The ability to bring up my email wherever I can find a browser is just awesome , and with it's Ajax features it is responsive.

3. An update on my current projects (what am I coding basically!)

I'm getting really stuck in to Ajax (I think of a cleaning product which used to be sold in the UK when I hear the name !)- a fair few years ago I tried various iFrame hacks, dhtml and javascript ad nauseum to try and build some interactivity and flair into my web apps with limited success - things tended to work on only one specific flavour of browser at a time ie not just it works on IE but it works on ie 5.5 build xxx or mozilla 1.1 etc. This coupled with the pain of debugging javascript kept me away from the area. Now we have a level playing field with good browser support for style sheets javascript and xmlHttpRequest. So far I'm building ajax into java (servlet/jsp) web applications and a new Ruby on Rails front end to Quest the ror framework has ruby built in which is excellent I've found it useful for sanity checking stuff I'm doing in the java space. I'll post more later on both my ajax experience and my Ruby on Rails journey.

I'm also getting stuck into JFreeCharts , which is going great , I went down a bit of a dead end with EasyCharts , which as its name implies is easy to get up and running , but for us hasn't delivered on performance when compared with JFreeChart , so I bit the bullet and switched over to JFreeChart - as we had put our own intermediate layer between Quest and the charting engine it has meant the transition has been pretty painless - most of the difficulties have been because of shifting and increasing customer demands for different types of charts - all good fun.

Lastly I'm finishing off our Windows mobile apps (Quest Mobile will be out in a week or two and the other one which is still secret will be announced before the end of the year) , Visual Studio 2005 has really made this a lot faster than it would have been with the older toolset and is worth a post in its own right.

4. Have been trying to work smarter not harder recently , making sure I go for a walk at lunchtime , get to the gym a couple of times a week and so on - there's more to life than coding. Get as much out of each day as you can because life is what we do between the great holidays , evenings out , days in the sun.

I have seen the light and it's the Googleicious Gmail.... I know I'm just catching up with the rest of the planet here and some of you probably heard about the relief of Mafeking via gmail.

As regular readers will know I have been out and about a lot this year and have needed 'email to go' , my initial solution was to leave my office pc running Outlook , which downloaded my pop emails then inboxer & popboxer zapped the spam and forwarded the good stuff onto another pop mail account which I retrieved using the external accounts feature in my contenlo.net mail address on a paid email service I had set up with lycos a while ago.

This was working reasonably effectively for most of this year , inboxer and popboxer are very effective and recommended for mobile phone or blackberry use, the lycos web client is a bit slow and clunky with lousy spam filtering, and the retrieve on external accounts only works once each time you log in, but it works or at least it did until I renewed my subscription - I was a little late renewing due to the fact that they sent the mail reminding me to the admin account (yep the one you're not likely to use on a daily basis) without copying it to my main lycos one or my main email account. Anyway they renewed my service , but didn't renew my contenlo.net domain - the excuse being 'there's a backlog as we're switching from network solutions to united domains'

So any emails replying to my contenlo.net address bounced which was irritating , It occured to me to see If I could get a google mail account (partly to see what I was missing as a 'non-favoured netizen' , I have used Google for years and years and was onboard with adwords from the start yet no invite ..... I'm not bitter though!) , so I went to bytetest and using their googlemail inviter and was up and running in minutes .....

.... I have now configured my system very simply , on my main email domain , I simply forward to my gmail.com account , and then pull the gmail.com stuff down into outlook in the office or use the web client on the road. What the previous sentence doesn't even begin to say is that the process is very quick , the web client is amazingly easy to use and well thought through (The conversation metaphor , lots of records on a page , and the nice auto-refresh) , the spam filtering is top notch, you get nearly 2.5 Gigs, pop3 download and its FREE , I was paying more than $50 a year for the lycos service which apart from offering 10GB was inferior in every respect. Some people whinge that it doesn't support IMAP , but I have yet to see any use for IMAP that can't be achived more easily with webmail , I like to have an up to date copy of all my email on my laptop at the start of the week (synced from exchange) and then keep up to date via gmail.com.

I know it's fashionable in some circles to knock Google , but frankly in this case they have innovated everyone else out of the ballpark , not to mention delivering on the service , the only reason it is still in beta must be that everyone using email would want an account!!

Ps. If I get any gmail invites I will be passing some back to bytetest.

Sorry it's taken a while to test this out , but Roumen Strobl kindly commented on my previous Net Beans CVS rant that improved support was coming and available at that time on dev builds of 4.1. I had tried just after that to test it out whilst at a customer site , but due to me not entering the proxy server settings correctly (Note don't put http:// in front of your proxy server if you're not using an ip address) I couldn't get through to the Net Beans update center and thus couldn't load the new cvs nbm's (Maybe there is a way to separately download those outside of the update center ? if there isn't it would be handy for some corporate situations).

Anyway today I'm back in my office so gave it a go downloading the 4.2 daily build for 28/7 , I assumed the new cvs stuff would be built in to 4.2 , but it isn't so don't forget to go to the update center and download it (its under 'versioning') , it installs easily , you restart the IDE , then it rather unnecessarily asks you if you really want to remove the old vcs stuff ,

yes I do I've waited three or four years to get rid of that!

- to be fair the warning is there because the whole vcs framework is removed you now have a whole CVS menu now rather than selecting your versioning method.

Once installed it works just as you'd want it to simply select 'ext' enter your server name , user name , path to repository etc , and you can then check out / check-in as normal. As Roumen says there are some cool features I really like the diffing its very fast and has good use of colors to highlight differences.

I'll blog more when I've played around a bit more with it but meantime thanks guys its just what this developer has been waiting for from NetBeans!

This is one of my pet peeves I know but it must effect some other people out there ??

I loaded up Netbeans 4.1 today in the (forlorn) hope that it would finally have extssh support out of the box for cvs , but no despite all the talk about cvs among other features you still have to fiddle around outside netbeans (and install cygwin if you're using windows) if you don't want to use pserver. Eclipse has had extssh support from the word go so I fail to see why it isn't deemed necessary for netbeans , one of the cool features about eclipse is that you can download it install and connect to your cvs repository and get coding in a matter of minutes , with netbeans you won't be talking to the outside world in a hurry!

It's a shame I have watched both Eclipse and NetBeans ebb and flow over the years and currently both have their plus points ;

Eclipse + : Great cvs support , great look and feel on linux or Windows, good refactoring & junit integration, swt shows what java could have become if the awt/swing disasters hadn't happened.

Eclipse - : Performance can be atrocious periodic 'hangs' though improved on the 3.x versions - it's WebSphere cousins are still stuck at 2.x

NetBeans + : State of the art J2Me support , out of the box JSP/Servlets/JavaServer faces support, A lot of improvements and J2Se 5.0 support, quirky project mounting gone now ,Look and feel has improved the icons were always neat, but swing look has gone now (good riddance).

NetBeans -: No ssh cvs support , project explorer still quirky , and did I mention no ssh cvs support!!

If the above seems a little harsh on Netbeans don't get me wrong I think it has it uses the J2Me support and JSP stuff etc are good and I will certainly be using those features it's just a pity I'll have to export code back to eclipse to get it into cvs though.

I use Eclipse and Visual Studio 2003 on a daily basis so I'm glad to say that the progress of these two ide's (Eclipse & NetBeans) will benefit Visual Studio users too as a great many of the cooler features of these two are in Visual Studio 2005 , addressing the deficiencies of VS2003 which whilst fast, light on memory and very usable didn't really advance the ide much beyond the VB5/6 level and that was a long time ago!

Rumours of the demise of 'Rip-off' Britain are obviously untrue (For those of you outside the UK a quick aside , the UK used to be a famously cheap country, when I was growing up it was always New York, Paris and Tokyo that were the expensive cities; now people fly to New York to save money on their shopping! and the only thing still cheap in the UK is the weather. We typically pay in pounds whatever the dollar price is for something so if something is $200 it will be £200 which is worth nearly $400 , and our petrol is the world's dearest at nearly $8 , unbelievably some people are so desparate to come to britain and pay these prices that they will hide in lorries or hang on to trains)

- I've been looking at data prices for GPRS/3G cards from the main UK suppliers , most are still charging in excess of £1 per megabyte and many won't roll-over unused data (that you've paid for) from one month to the next - If you can commit to £70-80 a month then you can get 1000Mb a month , but even that wouldn't be much use if you wanted to download the new Beta of Visual Studio 2005 for example. Until you can treat a service as 'just there' like electricity it will never become pervasive outside narrow corporate markets.

A big shout out to Sean True and all the guys at inboxer.com , a spam solution that has saved me so much time on the road. I have been on the road most of this year and for days at a time so I have actually had a need to get at my email whilst out of the office so I found my self wading through hundreds of junk headers to find the important messages - previously in the office I used a mix of mozilla/thunderbird (Effective once trained) , and Outlook with it's junk filter (started off well but tails off prior to the infrequent updates). What I needed was something that could zap the junk and ideally forward the good stuff to another 'clean' account where I could access it using a webmail solution or my MS SmartPhone.

After a bit of a search I found inboxer which is an outlook plugin that zaps spam it uses a bayesian/teach it yourself approach which starts being effective very quickly. inboxer has its own plugins which allow you to do exactly what I wanted the one I use is called popboxer and can forward good email (and usefully review messages so you don't find that an important message has been in your junk pile all week) or delete junk from your pop3 mailbox. There is also a plugin for Blackberry users so they can get clean email too.

The customer service is excellent with a very quick response to questions and frequent new releases with more functionality.

Inboxer is a snip at $50 for inboxer and the popboxer & blackberry plugins , the timesaving alone will pay for itself quickly whilst for those of us here in Europe suffering exorbitant mobile phone data charges ($1.50-$10 a Mb!) will find that a couple of weeks of junk headers saved will pay for it.

Before you all ask I don't work for inboxer and I paid for my copy !!

It's true about blogs having a flurry of activity and then disappearing , I had forgotten my user name to get in and nearly forgotten the name of the blog!

A Lot has happened in the last four months have been working near Sunny Bognor Regis on the south coast of England since mid-january , its been great fun , a long (300 mile) but enjoyable drive , staying away from home a few days each week has really helped me get up to date on some coding , in particular my SmartPhone app and a lot of Java work on Quest tidying/optimizing and a new charting routine using easycharts.

Hope everyone else is having a great year too.

PS Hugo the puppy is alive and well and didn't get eaten by the other dogs!

Richard

As the Blogosphere winds down towards Christmas I'd like to wish everyone who supports the Free World a very Merry Christmas and the Happiest of New Years - May all the rest burn in Hell and leave the rest of us in peace.

It's funny how September 11th really clarified things you're either for us or against us , the liberals can't really cope with that though, they believe everyone is good and even if stabbed by a mugger will worry about his upbringing. Sadly the liberals have been in control for a long time and have weakened the western world maybe 2005 will see some changes.

Woke up to a real hard frost (by yorkshire standards any way about -5 , I know if you live in Alaska that's a heatwave) , had a great walk with Niki and the dogs , saw 3 roe deer and now it's snowing - if it can just keep it up until Boxing day !

I've been putting a toe in the water of the contract market again here in the UK as I have a number of delayed projects and a gap in January and February , it's a few years since I did any contract stuff and I've noticed quite a few changes;
LOW Rates - much lower than 5 years ago and apparently they're better than the last couple of years!
Slow speed of response from clients - every requirement is *urgent* yet the agents are tearing their hair out trying to get responses out of clients.
Odd combinations of skills required complete with long experience - Eg my client requires strength in application servers JBoss, Weblogic , WebSphere and Tomcat together with lots of C++/C# ? no mention of Java at all ! C# is fine as it can be assumed most Java developers will easily pick up c# but C++.

I'll let you know how things progress.

I've been using Nunit and the Nunit addin for quite a while now (and Junit for years) - It's great to see a lot of the open source/Java world stuff coming into the visual studio world which used to be so self contained.

Anyway Nunit addin is now Testdriven.net which also supports Mbunit and Team system testing , I've not tried the latter two yet ,but I can say that the install removes the old Nunit addin neatly before installing itself and it makes a lot of sense having one add-in for all testing frameworks rather than several. To check it out hit the link on the blog sidebar.

I've been using the Google desktop search for a few weeks now and have to say it has become an essential quicker than anything else I have used for years, how many times have you spent ages looking for an old word doc or an email and been frustrated either by your poor memory for directories or how slow windows search is (and no it isn't any easier under linux unless you are very good with grep etc.).

Contrary to some reports GDS *will* search on network drives if you apply the registry fix detailed here see 'files on mapped drives' . It'll take a while as it is careful not to hog your machine but leave it overnight and you'll be able to search your network and machines as easily as the web - sounds weird saying that it should be the other way around that has resonance - but for getting on for 10 years now the web has been a doddle to search unlike the desktop!

I've just rescued Hugo our 10 week old cocker spaniel pup from his two big 'sisters' (two full grown Springer spaniels) after he'd just bitten himself a mouthful of their whiskers - they weren't amused. The joys of working from home you get to babysit puppies !

I'm a developer so the first post has to be "hello world" and no the next one won't be foo something or other.