Ghostzilla
June 13, 2008
Have you ever wanted to be looking at something on the web that you do not have anyone walking past to see what it is ? Or do you want a browser always integrated with the application you are running ?
Ghostzilla is a browser that integrates with the application window you are currently working on. As soon as you move the cursor away from the window the browser is hidden. Ghostzilla has heaps of hot keys for not displaying images, zoom in and out, making color black and white etc. IT is very hard for someone walking past to even tell it is a browser window and not an application like word or outlook.
I use Ghostzilla a lot in visual studio to switch back between the code window and a webpage I am using as a development resource.
Ghostzilla also runs from a usb key and leaves no trace on the host os.
Gnuwin32
June 13, 2008
Windows has always lacked all those nice little tools that unix people take for granted. I am always using commands like tail -f to display log files, grep to search for a string, ls for listing files and the list goes on. Download the following port of these legendary unix tools and add them to your path. It is inevitable that linux will become the dominant os over the coming years so you might as well get use to some of the command line tools now.
http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/
ApexScript
June 13, 2008
We have been a big fan of the apexsql family of tools for sql server. They are one of the core tools we get management to buy when we are doing a sql server project. ApexScript is a tool that can script a database schema and or data out to several formats. It has been very useful for us when we have the configuration of a vendor application that is configured through a ui and stored in a database. In general the vendors do not supply a practical way to move this configuration from one environment to another. With apexscript we have been able to create some sql scripts to apply changes a developer had made to their local instance of the vendor application. We were then able to put these scripts through our build process to promote through test, stage and production environments. Apex script can also be very useful to create sql scripts for test data.
It is available from the link below
http://www.apexsql.com/sql_tools_script.asp
Bluetooth Laser Virtual Keyboard
June 12, 2008
One of my favorite sites to browse around is http://www.thinkgeek.com . They have lots of cool stuff like wifi detecting t-shirts. As all geeks I like to have a computer at the breakfast bar while I eat my cereal but space is at a bit of a premium and kids love to use keyboards as cricket bats. I am going to try one of these bluetooth keyboards. A great way to impress the non-geek world out there at only $159 USD.
http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/cellphone/8193/
Eating the Elephant
June 12, 2008
Our current engagement with a funds management company in Sydney, Australia is a large and complex beast, involving more moving parts than a swiss chronometer, an incredibly demanding business and the Eagle PACE Operational Data Store. The entire program will run for approximately 4 years, involve over 100 consultants, vendors and staff, and burn over $100 Million. We are interfacing with 3 front office trading systems (Charles River, Imagine and Blackrock Alladin), several downstream systems (Smartstream TLM, CoAcs and StatPro) and exchanging market data with Bloomberg, Reuters, Factset and S&P - Phew!
It’s taken nearly a year to truly appreciate the size of our ‘Elephant’ and learn that there’s only one way to eat it…one small piece at a time. Short term, realistic goals are the key to success, which fits beautifully into our development methodology - SCRUM. Read more
Autohotkey
June 10, 2008
Want to automate a third party app that does not supply a command line interface or just create some keyboard shortcuts then you must try autohotkey. We originally came across this tool when creating a build and deployment process for microsoft crm. The problem we had was that there were a lot of gui wizards of different quality to run when you upgrade between environments or refreshing a developers box with the latest production databases. We were able to use autohotkey to take a day long manual intensive process down to about 30 minutes which only needed a single click to kick it off.
Another example was when the infrastructure manager asked me how he could apply some changes that required a lot of clicks, running scripts, editing the registry to 50 servers consistently. I gave him a quick tutorial on autohotkey and he was sold. He also loved how a autohotkey script could compile down to a single exe.
have a look at some of the great things people have achieved with autohotkey
you can download it from http://www.autohotkey.com/
there is also a fork of the code that has a lot more support for internet explorer at http://www.autoitscript.com/
Textpad
June 10, 2008
In the financial industry you deal with a lot of flat positional or delimited files. Not many places have been able to make the leap to xml and messaging. So there is not a day goes buy where I have the need for a good text editor. Some of the cool features I find in textpad are
- Portable - runs on a usb key
- Opens large files quickly and does not seam to suffer that much in performance as the files get larger
- Regular expression search and replace. I am always replacing a delimiter for a tab, (\t ), then pasting into excel.
- cut and paste columns is a must have. Just right click on a document and select block select mode then you can cut and paste columns of text between documents. Saves many hours building sample files or using it as a adhoc code gen utility whe you have to take a list of fields from a spec and turn it into some code.
- And for repetitive tasks there is a macro recorder which has saved me many hours of coding.
I have even converted the vi and emacs experts over to the power of textpad. I once worked at a fund manager here in Sydney back in 99 and was amazed that there was about 20 developers slugging it out writing cobol programs in vi on a telnet session. They did not even have xwindows running. So I downloaded textpad and added a button to the toolbar to sync the cobol source up with the unix server. I started to scream through the work and fairly soon 95% of the developers, (except a few die hard vi guys), were coding in textpad. Soon after that they stopped asking vi questions in the job interviews.
By the way the vi guys did eventually come around and make the swap.
Do you WANT it or NEED it?
June 9, 2008
“The dates can’t change but the scope can and will”
June 5, 2008
It’s the age old problem of managing change effectively on an IT project. The business have expectations of what functionality will be delivered, the joint testing with external parties has been locked in and the go-live weekend has been booked BUT the detailed requirements are incomplete and the functional designs are only half finished (at best).
Of course some contingency was built into the original schedule, but that was 3 months ago and the world has changed alot since then.
The same thing happens every time, just to different degrees, it’s just the nature of our business. The key to success in my view is not to get too bogged down and stay ‘Agile’. The fact is that no one is really to blame, the project plan is just a guide. If the dates can’t change and the scope creeps then the inevitable result is that what gets delivered on the ‘immovable’ date is not quite ready, a little under-cooked. Is this a problem? in some cases yes, but how big a problem can be managed.
At the end of the day the business is the one that gets affected - but remember, the immovable dates and incomplete requirements are ultimately down to the nature of THE BUSINESS and the ability of THE BUSINESS to be able to state their requirements accurately in the first place.
We’re all in it together, business and IT. When things don’t go to plan we make a new plan. It’s as simple as that!
TiddlyWiki
June 5, 2008
Wiki’s have been around for a while. We use screwturn wiki for our internal development team but having a personal wiki is also very handy. What about if you could have your own personal wiki on a USB key and take it with you. Tiddly wiki is really cool. It uses html, css and javascript to give you a personal wiki on a stick. You can also host your tiddlywiki at http://www.tiddlyspot.com
Also if you have trouble Getting things done check out MonkeyGTD which uses TiddlyWiki for its base.
http://monkeygtd.tiddlyspot.com/#MonkeyGTD
