No Long Days

Over the past week or so I have been working on automating a Visual Basic 6 build. My tool of course is Nant. It works very well for the most post.

The build compiles the VB programs and builds the installer. This has been working great. However one of the requirements was to only keep the last 5 Install CD images that the build created.

I prefer to not extend Nant to keep the build scripts as portable as possible. I have done many things using the Nant XML rather than dropping down to C#.

Believe it or not this was not an easy problem to solve.

Dear Microsoft,

According to all reviews Windows 7 is going to be well accepted. However, there is still one barrier to that acceptance and this is the price. The following proposal is based on the following goals for Windows 7 acceptance.

• All customers will opt for Windows 7 pre-installed on new PC purchases.
• Customers will buy retail upgrades for current PCs running Windows XP or Vista.
• Reduce the amount of pirated version of Windows that people are running.

Let's face it, Vista was a retail flop. Even inclusion rates on new PCs was disappointing.

It has now been about 9 months since I have been using an iMac as my home PC. I originally bought it to learn something new and it has been quite a fun journey. There are many things about that Mac which I absolutely love. Of course, as someone who used Windows for years there are some things that are a bit frustrating at first. Of course, once you get used to them it is not a big deal.

One of the best "tools" that I purchased for my Mac was a subscription to [ScreenCastsOnline][]. This is a weekly video podcast about using the Mac and Mac software.

It is surprising to me after ten years of client and server operating system from Microsoft that they still don't know what client-server is all about. I am still amazed every time I copy or delete stuff using Explorer from my PC that is on a server that all the files have to move over the network to my PC then back to the server.

This isn't so bad when I am on the LAN but on the WAN it makes working with folders on the server very slow. The only option is to remote desktop in and work there and I really don't like people remoting into the server console.

I have been a FeedDemon user for many years. I originally bought Newsgator for Outlook in 2004. However, I wanted to read feeds on more than one machine and not have to repeat what I was reading. I think it was back in 2005 when they announced the Newsgator Sync playform. At the time if you subscribed to Newsgator.com you could also d/l the Client readers for free. Well, they weren't free they were included with your subscription.

Since I didn't use outlook at home I opted for FeedDemon on my PC and Newsgator for Outlook at work.

This week I have been tasked with creating an automated build script for one of our legacy Visual Basic 6 applications and putting it under CI.

I planned to use our current build server which is a Xenon 3Ghz machine that currently builds our .Net/VB6 combo projects. It is pretty fast so it works well. The current build is done on an old Dell workstation running Windows 2000 and an old Pentium CPU.

This legacy application has been around for quite a while and uses several 3rd party components like True Grid, Sheridan Data Widgets, BeCubed OLE tools and various other .ocx files...

As the connected world advances we are reaping the benefit of instant communication with our fellow man. Things go started with BBSes. Small message services that allowed you to "dial in" and communicate with friends in your local area. As time went on these BBSes started networking. "Fido" was a protocol that was used for BBSes to exchange messages with each other. So now your reach was extended. As time when on the internet gain traction and became main stream. BBSes turned into online forums with usenet being the first and grand daddy.

As I have been considering moving my XP machine to Windows 7 I have been reading various reviews. I came across this one from PC World written by Robert Strohmeyer.

As you may or may not know User Account Control (UAC) in Vista is a feature that allows the logged in user to elevate to administrator to perform various operations which might require it. The author of the review was discussing the additional option added to the Win7 UAC control.

The Drupal Twitter module will automatically tweet whenever you add content to your web site. This can be set to tweet when you post a page, story or blog content type. However this only occurs when you create content interactively using the create content form on your web site.

My Drupal web site is used primarily as my bloging software and I create my content off line on my Mac using Textmate. The textmate blogging module supports the xmlrpc API very nicely.

As I mentioned in my first post I am the proud owner of a fairly new iMac. This means learning how to do things in a new way. Actually this is one of the main reasons I actually acquired a Mac. I wanted to learn about it. Learn how to develop for it. Etc.

One of the coolest pieces of software for the Mac is textmate. To say this is a text editor is like saying a the Queen Mary is a boat. Yes, Textmate is a text editor. But, it is a whole lot more. Textmate is a framework that allows for the creation of bundles.