chown -R us ./base

Last week I took Bella to the cinemas. While we were queuing to buy our popcorn with a side of movie tickets I spotted a geek wearking the following shirt.

I couldn’t help having a little chuckle to myself as the wearer and I exchanged knowing glances. For those of you reading that don’t get the reference, chown is a common UNIX command for changing the owner of a specified file or directory structure. The command on the T-shirt will recurse the /base directory changing all the owners to “us”.

Its a clever play on the “all your base are belong to us” line from a Japanese video game. You can read more about the history of this phenomenon over at Wikipedia.

Farewell Joseph, happy trails!

Joseph just blogged about his departure from Readify. Its sad to see Joseph leaving us, I remember working with him on a project here in Canberra where he was doing the miles each week by flying from Queensland to Canberra. He once spent a whole night implementing an XML Serializer for the Compact Framework which was pretty much compatible with the desktop serializer.

Happy trails Joseph! And I am sure we’ll see you again!

Becoming one with Windows Vista . . .

I have been running the BETA 2 build of Windows Vista for over four weeks now and I think that today I finally reached the point where I would really suffer from a productivity perspective if I went back to Windows XP.

Whenever I try something new (like an operating system) I deliberately unlearn the way that I have done things in the past. I find that this leaves me open to learn new approaches to solving old problems – like file management.

Over the past twelve months I’ve been uploading most of my important files into my personal site in SharePoint, and I still do, but I made a point of not leaving those files lying around on the hard disk. This made it harder to quickly refer to them whenever I wanted them.

Since installing Windows Vista I’ve been putting them in the stock-standard documents directory, not even taking the time to organise them into folders. Its getting quite crowded in there, but today I think I’ve finally hit the point where I appreciate the “search everywhere” functionality in Vista.

Today already I’ve attached four files from the Documents folder and each time I didn’t even bother scanning for them, I just typed some text into the search box and it came up witht he document I wanted.

Nothing like creating necessity to force myself to start using a new feature more.

Cavemen 1.0.0

A belated congratulations to Thomas White and Walter Haas over at Lightworks Games for shipping their first Pocket PC game, Cavemen. They announced that the Cavemen game had been released on Thursday of last week.

I’ve actually gone out and purchased a copy of the game because I enjoyed playing the BETA so much a few months back. According to the site the new version has 102 levels which I am looking forward to conquering.

For those of you who don’t know about the game, its very much like Lemmings except with Cavemen, the special thing is that it is all squeezed into a Pocket PC form factor. I’m really envious of these two guys who had a vision to start a games company. I hope this release gives them the working capital they need to start working on their next title!

.NET Framework 2.0 Service Pack 1

Please don’t wait twelve months before applying this service pack!

Welcome to the Blogosphere Neville!

Fellow Readifian Neville Mehta has joined the blogosphere! I’m looking forward to seeing some great posts.

Installing Web Application Projects Add-in on Windows Vista BETA 2

If you need to use the Web Application Projects add-in for Visual Studio 2005 and your desktop operating system is Windows Vista BETA 2, then you will need to install the add-in using your UAC administrator token.

The way I did it was run the command-prompt as an administrator then run the MSI. Running the MSI directly and expecting it to elevate correctly doesn’t work (you get an Access is Denied error when trying to write the InstallState file).

Coder Personas

If I had been drinking a glass of milk I would have snorted it whilst reading this classic post by Darren Neimke. Over the years I’ve spent some quality time coding and I reckon I have come across every single one of those developer prototypes, and, perhaps the scary thing is that I can see myself on that list. I’d say that I’m a slightly more pragmatic version of the over-coder and the “I love classses” guy.

Grant Holliday releases Bug Snapper!

I awoke to any e-mail on our internal mailing list this morning from Grant Holliday. Grant has produced a specialised bug capture interface for Team Foundation Server called “TFS Bug Snapper”. Grant told Darren and I about this tool last week and I begged him to post it up so I could link to it.

This tool will really help testers who are testing both Windows and web-based applications where they don’t want to install the whole TFS client or Team Test Edition (CAL still required) and just want a quick way to log bugs outside of Visual Studio.

As an interesting side note, Grant’s program has actually helped me diagnose an issue with Windows Vista (although thats not related to TFS at all).

Dell Latitude D820 running Windows Vista

This week I took delivery of a new laptop (Dell Latitude D820), specifically purchased to get me up to Windows Vista specification. I installed the base operating system last night and spent about an hour fiddling with the video drivers so that the WUXGA screen was fully utilised and the Aero interface features worked. I must say this creates a much more engaging experience, and I think the additional dollars that you pay for a slightly higher end video card will really pay for itself.

One remaining issue I have is a wierd problem where I take a screenshot it gets pasted out like this:

I actually see the window like this if a UAC dialog pops up as well, so I don’t think my graphics driver issues are completely sorted out (if anyone has any suggestions I’d love to hear them).

P.S. I’d like to thank Darren for lugging this all the way from Melbourne for me on Thursday and managing not to replace the contents of the laptop bag with a lump of coal. I don’t think I would have had that much self control.