Just got an email about the 6.0 version of the VMWare Workstation and all I can say is “Wow!”  These are the features I am mainly interested in:

• Multiple monitor display – You can configure a VM to span multiple monitors, or multiple VMs to each display on separate monitors.
• Integrated Virtual Debugger – Workstation integrates with Visual Studio and Eclipse so you can deploy, run, and debug programs in a VM directly from your preferred IDE
• Headless mode – You can run VMs in the background without the Workstation UI

These new features will help me at work as it really does fit into my work style.  The next PC I get I’m going to install a base system then VM’s for everything else, all development will be done in a VM sandboxes.

The question now becomes:  Will VMServer have these features?

I actually got a MythTV machine up and running yesterday!  Man I was so excited, I have tried several times in the past but with no luck.  However after finding a good How-To on the Ubuntu web site I was up and running in (almost) no time.

I have tried using MythDora but I could not get it to work.  I think the reason was because of the stupid pain in the ass to set up ATI All-In-One card.  This card has never worked right for me, either in Linux or Windows so it is time to chunk it.

This past week I came across a How-To site using Fedora Core 6 which I was prepared to follow.  But then I got to thinking that there should be something similar for Ubuntu, which I prefer over Fedora.  Sure enough the community site had one so I was in business.

The first attempt I made failed.  It failed because I attempted to install the proprietary drivers for that stupid $%^@ ATI card, something I will never attempt again with this card as it is going in the trash soon.  So I wiped out the install and tried again, my x config file was so screwed at that point that I felt a fresh install was better.

The second time was much better.  I added the TV capture card with no issues, installed the MythTV server and frontend on the same machine, got my Zap2It setup and was watching TV on my PC.  I tried to set it up to record a couple of shows as a test but that did not work.  I’m not sure why but this is a test install any way so I’m not too worried about it working 100%.

I showed my wife and she thought it was cool.  This is important as the all important Wife Buy-In factor needs to be way high in order to take this project to the ultimate conclusion.  Once I show her how to login from work and set up the server to record shows she will be good with buying some more hardware.  Then there is the video, picture and music library that will be accessible from any where in the house once I wire the house then she will be sold.

MythTV Rocks.

I have several Open Source projects I am following and to facilitate downloading the code I created a simple NAnt script.  The script worked great until the other day one of the projects started failing to update.

Most of the projects I’m tracking are in Subversion.  All I’m doing is checking out the trunk then about once or twice a week doing an update.  So when the project started failing to update I figured it would be a simple matter of deleting the project folder and just checking it out again.

Wasn’t going to happen.  One of the directories would no delete, no matter what I tried.  I tracked it down to a couple of file in hidden _svn folders.  I could delete every other file in this folder except for these.  Nothing seemed to work.

I finally dropped to a command window and attempted to DEL the file, that is when I got the first real clue what the problem was:  the file name  was too long.  The root folder of all the projects I was updating was on my Desktop so the path was already super long: C:\Documents and blah blah buried deep in the bowls of the hard drive long\Desktop.

So I moved the root folder to my c:\ and sure enough I was able to delete the folders.

Funny how that works.

And that easy solution must work in a similar way to this:

1. Via a GUI app found on the /Administration menu that lists the 10 most wanted proprietary applications and asks the user to check the boxes of the apps he wants to install. Show a license agreement that waives the distro off any legal problems and then download and install the requested software.

2. When a user tries to load an mp3 or a .wmv, have patched your multimedia apps (e.g. Sound Juicer, Rhythmbox, Banshee, XMMS, Totem) to inform the user why they can’t play these files and ask if he/she wants to download the codecs. If the user says “yes”, show the license agreement that waives the distro from any legal problems and download/install the requested software. If installing the MP3 codec, also install the required Gnome mp3 profile so users can actually rip in MP3 with Sound Juicer.

Source: A Call to Distros: Give Users What They Want – OSNews.com

I couldn’t agree more with this.  When I go to install a Distro the last thing I want to have to do is search the web to find out how to watch YouTube.

Linux should just work and I shouldn’t have to notice it.

I’ve been playing around with VMWare and vitalization for a while now and I have to say I really like it.  I have a virtual Ubuntu image that I am using to learn Ruby on Rails with.  I installed VMWare’s server on my file server so I can run VM’s from any PC in my house.

So last night I was working on my gateway PC when the thought hit me:  Why not create my own virtual domain?  I could create an image and install IPCop on it, add three virtual Ethernet cards to the VM and bridge the fourth to a real NIC and viola - Instant Domain.  Just add more servers.

From there I could add servers to the Green, Orange and Blue Virtual zones and just play around with configurations.  I could create a mini-web farm, play around with MySQL replication, a virtual cluster, anything.

Granted I would bump into a Hardware wall pretty quick, I dumped all my old PC’s so now I don’t have that many to play with.  But I bet I could still but together something pretty cool.

I am working on automating our build process and one of the things I am trying to do now is to add FxCop to the mix.  There are a couple of ways to run the process, one using an exec task to call the executable directly, the other is through a Contrib task <fxcop>.

I tried the first method with no success.  For some reason I couldn’t get the output file name to be recognized by the executable.  I eventually had to switch to the <fxcop> task but I had to set a system envitonment variable to the executable first.  It eventually looked like this:

<target name="analyze.fxcop" description="Runs FxCop on build output">

   <setenv name="PATH" value="${tools.dir}\fxcop;%PATH%" />

   <mkdir dir="${build.dir}\\fxcop" />

   <fxcop directOutputToConsole="false" analysisReportFilename="${build.dir}\\fxcop\\fxcop.xml" failonerror="false">
      <targets>
         <include name="${build.dir}\\release\\bin\\*.dll" />
      </targets>
      <dependencyDirectories refid="referenceComponents" />
   </fxcop>

</target>

A lot of work was involved just to find this out.  Oh well, I got it working so now I share my results.

Why waste everyone’s time with a bunch of meaningless just-in-case wrapper code? Start with the simplest thing that works– a public variable. You can always refactor this later into a property if it turns out additional work needs to be done when the name value is set. If you truly need a property, then use a property. Otherwise, KISS! Update: As many commenters have pointed out, there are valid reasons to make a trivial property, exactly as depicted above:

* Reflection works differently on variables vs. properties, so if you rely on reflection, it’s easier to use all properties.

* You can’t databind against a variable.

* Changing a variable to a property is a breaking change.

Source: Coding Horror: Properties vs. Public Variables

So this answers the question on why you use properties in .NET and not just public variables.

I’ve always used properties but on occasion of used public variables. Small object, needed it quick so didn’t bother with the getter or setters.

I work with a Java developer who abhors getters and setters, says it is Microsoft’s way of disguising method calls. I disagree since I don’t think the overhead involved is that great.

As far as creating the getters and setters, hey, that is what code snippets is for.

Ok, so I found another alternative to BlogJet: Performancing.  This is an extension of FireFox so I have to have that installed.

So far it looks like it is easy to use.  It can’t seem to be able to insert an image like Live Writer but I think it will be easier to blog about something I found on the web.

I have a feeling I will keep using Live Writer and only use this on occasion.

powered by performancing firefox  OK I don’t like that Performancing does self promoting.  That is a big minus.

So I just heard about the Windows Live Writer Beta.  I am a big fan of BlogJet so when I heard about this new Microsoft program I was skeptical.  So far I like it.

Now if it uploads this picute then I will have a reason to start using it and not use BlogJet.

I am always on the lookout for new and better tools.  If this does what I need it to do then I will switch to it.

The other day, though, I stumbled over yet another software quality assessment tool: Lattix LDM. And what impressed me immediately was it´s easy to understand output based on the intuitive concept of the Dependency Structure Matrix (DSM).

Ralf’s Sudelbücher : .NET naked – See these hitherto unpublished pictures of the .NET Framework architecture.

Ralf demonstrates how a Dependency Structure Matrix can reveal the overall architecture quality of a product.  A very cool concept and another tool to add to the toolbox.

Craig Shoemaker over at The Polymorphic Podcast is giving away a free book.

Note to Craig:  Pick Me!  Pick Me!

I have been listening to Craig since he started his podcast and have been thourhly impressed with the show.  He always has some good info and does not come across as being self important.  He sounds like a humble programmer who is working hard and trying to give back to the community that he works in.  When he interviews other people he basically gives them the floor and lets the guest do most of the talking, which is very nice.

Currently I only religously listen to three podcasts:  Hanselminutes, Ockham’s Razor and The Polymorphic Podcast.

So Craig, keep up the good work.  Oh, and Pick Me!

While rebuilding our home file server I realized that I had about .5 TB of disk space.  This is spread across four different sized harddrives but if you add up the total space it is over 600 GB.  It is not the full Terabyte server that I’ve been wanting to build but it is a step in that direction. 

And I’m not doing any RAID.  I will be doing rsync snapshot backups to one of the harddrives so I am loosing already half my space.  When I get enough $$$ I will get more drives and attempt some RAID or Linux LVM.

I am using Ubuntu on the machine.  I started down the road of using straight Debian but soon got real tired of trying to figure out how to make things work.  With Ubuntu I would say that 80 to 90% of my hardware problems went away and I didn’t have to hunt down any drivers or figure out why I couldn’t get a higher screen resolution.  My last file server I used Gentoo which rocks, by the way, but I have gotten to the point where I don’t want to spend days just setting up the OS.  As it is it has taken me a while and multiple installs of Ubuntu just to get the server into a state that I like it.

Next is setting up a Subversion instance on the machine.  It would be a great thing to have my own SVN server that I can get to when ever I need.  After that I need to clean up my tech library.

It just never ends.

Welcome to G-Ding.TV, home of MythDora. MythDora is a Fedora Core and MythTV “All-In-One” CD. The CD will load a preconfigured Fedora Core 4 installation on your computer as well as install and configure MythTV-0.19. There are extras included with MythDora such as MythBurn, MediaMVP and MythStreamTV for some extra fun. Enjoy!

G-Ding.TV | Viewing Linux in a whole new way.

Looks like I have a weekend project to get started on.

I just found a few aggragator sites that look cool.  Of course I found them thourgh a Digg.com post.

• PopUrls
• Digg View
• OriginalSignal
• PopDeal

So when you want to see what the latest buzz is but don’t want to visit ALL the social sites, check out the aggragators.

If you are serious about the practice of software development, you should avoid SourceSafe.

SourceSafe poisons the minds of software developers.

Coding Horror: Source Control: Anything But SourceSafe.

Visual Source Safe sucks.  Jeff Atwood explains in no uncertain terms why it sucks and I just want to get my vote in.  The two most important issues he points out is that VSS gives the illusion of safety and VSS users DON’T BRANCH!

They fear branching because it takes so much time and it is just a foreign concept to them.

Do yourself a favor, get a real tool.  Be a real programmer.

I have been saying for the last couple of years that once we get true TV on demand we will stop becoming slaves to the networks. YouTube and Google Video are the start of that phenomena.

The thing I just found out about YouTube is that you can embed videos in any post and not worry about actaully hosting the video.  See my post on the Blue Man Group for an example.