technology and stuff

How to use branches

technorandom — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 17:02:23 +0000

You only need a branch when you’re making changes that will take longer than one publish cycle to build. You need to deploy all the changes at the same time. To avoid your commits from your half-completed change getting published from trunk in the regular deployments, use a branch.

As soon as you have a feature than can be deployed, you must merge back to trunk.

You must also regularly merge from trunk to the branch so your branch doesn’t get out of sync.

Things BlackBerry does better than Android

technorandom — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 16:00:18 +0000

BlackBerry software is stagnating, and there are some very long standing bugs.

But BlackBerry still beats Android in many areas:

Much better battery life
Allows you to easily control the LED as part of notification profiles
Good sound/notification profiles are built in (and apps registered with it)
Cached web page requests in your inbox for later, when you have no signal
While connected, easily save any webpage for viewing offline
Alt-tab between apps, with all open apps listed (not just 6)
Built-in notes app, very easy to search
Easily forward an SMS as an email

Windows 7 File Explorer has less features than XP

technorandom — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 14:48:10 +0000

In XP I used to be able to type Alt+Enter while a folder was selected in File Explorer, and the Properties dialog would appear. Can’t do that anymore.
In XP when I selected a drive letter in File Explorer, I would see the space free on that drive, in the status bar. Not there anymore.
In XP I could quickly close windows by right-clicking on them in the taskbar and pressing C for ‘close’. That feature is missing from Windows 7.

Argh Orange!

technorandom — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 13:56:47 +0000

They stopped sending me paper bills without me agreeing or even realising.
They informed of this badly unwanted decision in some inscrutable marketing speak on one of my bills.
They secretly charged £11/month for a travel bundle for 8 months when they assured me it would be stopped after one month.
When I called up to find out how many minutes and texts I had in my package, the Indian call centre gave me the utterly wrong information.
They send me a text message every month saying they have checked, and I’m on the best package for my phone usage, but then I find out I’m only using on average 114 minutes out of 600 free, and about 5 of my unlimited texts. So they lied.
They cancelled my online account without warning because they said I didn’t use it often enough. Despite sending me multiple texts about other issue, they failed to warn me about this (ludicrous) policy.

Eclipse difficulty

technorandom — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 18:22:58 +0000

I’ve heard Eclipse is a useful IDE. It looks very powerful, extensible and an active project.

Yet I can’t get the features I want to work. I’ve failed several times to set up these features:

XML syntax highlighting
Perl plugin “EPIC”

There’s a killer feature I’d love to get working as well:

Step-through XSLT debugging

There seems to be an XSLT debugger in the WebTools package but I’m damned if I can understand how to get WebTools running.

Update: Oxygen IDE at least does syntax highlighting and keyword-completion. However, the syntax highlighting doesn’t seem quite as sophisticated and configurable as vim’s is. I also haven’t figured out how to turn off all the other annoying pop-up features.

Word 2007 language stupidity

technorandom — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 21:59:34 +0000

I’m using Word 2007 on Windows Vista. I have two documents that are both set to the language: English (United Kingdom) all the way through.

I copy and paste text from one to the other.

Word changes it into the language English (United States).

WTF!?

IMAP access to Gmail on your Blackberry

technorandom — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 17:39:09 +0000

Orange told me that Gmail IMAP on the Blackberry Pearl they sold me is “not supported”, and couldn’t tell me how to set it up. In fact, it can be configured to work.

What you need to do is set up a new email account with an email such as anything_at_all @ site about nothing .com. The “site about nothing” part needs to be a domain that has a mail record set up, but don’t use gmail, hotmail or yahoo for this because the blackberry will set the mail server automatically without giving you the chance to choose IMAP.

It will tell you it cannot configure the email account for you, and offer the option of configuring it yourself. You will have to follow through 3 or 4 pages saying the same thing, but you will reach a form that lets you enter all the fields you need to. Go on to enter the true details of your Gmail account, using mail server: imap.googlemail.com, port: 993.

It might be a little slow for your email actions to be synchronised between your blackberry device and your Gmail account, but it really does work! Now when I mark an email as read on my blackberry, it is also marked as read in my main Gmail account.

Crunch

technorandom — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 12:09:34 +0000

The credit crunch. I thought this was just a media invention until Lehman Brothers closed down.

Then I started to read about sub-prime loans, NINAs and NINJAs, world savings of 70 trillion usd, and I realised that there was a housing bubble, and it just burst.

There is a very informative and humorous piece at thislife.com called The Giant Pool Of Money. Go and read it or listen to the recording.

http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=355

Blackberry Pearl review

technorandom — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 12:06:37 +0000

This phone is great! Just get one, it does everything. Well, almost everything. It’s a million times better than Windows phones. The brilliant predictive text software makes sure you don’t even notice you’re using a new half-qwerty style keyboard.

But I must complain anyway:

the email message system is a bit too ‘automatic’. By that I mean all received, sent and drafted emails are all in the same place: your inbox. Why they couldn’t have separate folders for sent and drafted email is beyond me. There is an SMS outbox but no email outbox. But there is a good customisable ‘saved search’ function. So to see only mail you’ve sent, is as simple as typing alt-s, once you’ve set it up. If you don’t mind all that then its pretty cool because you can have your work and personal email, along with SMS, MMS, instant message conversations and saved web pages all in one list.

you can’t easily save attachments. Well you can save the email they’re attached to, but not the individual files. There’s some commercial software called BeamBerry, of which I have a 10-day trial, but its says that .htm and .jpg are “unsupported types”. So it’s not really possible to organise your files like we’re used to doing in a graphical file explorer program.
I can’t figure out how to get the IMAP feature of synchronising ‘read message’ status from the phone to my web gmail account. Orange tell me it’s “not supported”. Maybe I can make my own IMAP proxy server that could do it!

Moonfruit flash

technorandom — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 11:13:38 +0000

Moonfruit seems to be a way to build websites entirely from Flash.

It’s a good thing Google now indexes Flash!

But how good is Google’s Flash indexer, really?