What we at Icetips are doing
Today on BitsDuJour - "True BoxShot" software with 60% discount! Sue uses this software and loves it! "Box shot software for lazy people" she calls it! It comes with a lot of nice images and backgrounds, plenty of nice font effects etc. I.e. it allows you to design the image, not just take a ready made image from PhotoShop and make it into a box shot.
They are also running a 60% special on "TBS Cover Editor"
Arnor Baldvinsson
Out of milk is one of those apps that you can't understand how you lived without!!! It was one of the first apps that I got for my phone. Now I don't know how I could function without it! One of my favorite features is the ability to use the camera in the phone to scan bar codes on products to get them into the shopping list. So far it has pulled about 90 percent out of its database. It also has a to-do list and a pantry list, but I haven't used either of those much so I can't comment on those features. But I would strongly recommend that you check it out for yourself:-)
At $ 4.99 it's not free, but to me it has been worth every single cent!
Arnor Baldvinsson
During a skype discussion this application, PC Monitor, came up and I thought I would share this with you. Please visit http://www.mobilepcmonitor.com/ for the product website.
PC Monitor is a an application for your iPhone, Android or Windows Phone 7, that can monitor computers running Windows, Linux or Mac OS. It is free for up to 5 computers and for more than 5 computers you can buy annual subscriptions that start at US$ 49.95 for up to 10 computers and US$299 for up to 100 computers.
If you monitor or manage computers, then this is definitely an app you should take a look at. I can also see this app used as a safety device to monitor computers in an office or at home when you are not at the same location as the computers.
You can also send commands to the computers you monitor and get notifications when something happens on the computer, such as when the computer is rebooted, low on battery, when user logs in or out, etc.
Arnor Baldvinsson
I have been called a Frugal Goddess by friends - my husband just calls me cheap. (Note, this is Arnor's wife writing!) Whatever you call it, I love saving a few dollars (gives me more to spend later).
This week at my favorite bargain software website, they are running specials on Outlook tools, all at 50% off.
Today, you can get SynchPST Professional, powerful software that lets you synchronize Outlook between multiple computers. I use this to sync my desktop and netbook computers. I use the desktop at the office Monday-Friday, sync the netbook Friday afternoon, then have the netbook at home to check email on the weekends. Monday morning, I run the sync again, and my desktop is current. Way, way cool. Highly recommended. $34.28 today, normally $69.95.
On Tuesday, you can get "NoMoreDupes for Outlook" for just $14.68. I don't have a problem with duplicate emails in Outlook, so I'm not interested in this, but if I did, I'd buy it.
Wednesday you can get "OutlookPrinter" for $14.68. I've thought about getting this, because I'm not really fond of the way Outlook formats emails for printing - but I print so few emails these days, I dunno. If I printed more emails, I'd definitely grab it.
Thursday is "TaskToCal" for Outlook. If you use Outlook tasks and want them displayed in your Outlook calendar, there you go. $14.68.
And last, on Friday, you can get "BackupOutlook" for (you guessed it!) $14.68. I'm going to grab this. While I do backup the Outlook files, my adventures in trying to copy them between one computer and another (before I bought SynchPST) taught me that Outlook is abysmally byzantine in the way it stores things. Arnor and I are both going to pick up a copy of this one. If we lost our Outlook database, or worse yet, had it but couldn't get to it because of missing some obscure config file, we'd just about shoot ourselves. I figure $15 is cheap insurance. 🙂
By the way, these tools are all from one software company, Wisco Computing, which is ran by Thomas Wetzel and based in Germany. I've met Thomas at various conferences - he is a nice guy, very responsible, and I trust his tools.
If you need Outlook stuff, check out BitsDuJour this week. But remember, the software is offered at these great discounts for only one day, so if you're a frugal geek, don't procrastinate. If you do procrastinate and miss the sales, you can always get the software from Wisco's website.
Susan Pichotta
Dave Harms, the editor of Clarion Magazine, published an article appropriately titled The future of Clarion.NET (subscription required).
To quote Dave: "Six years ago this month, at the only Florida DevCon of the decade, SoftVelocity's president Bob Zaunere announced Clarion.NET, the company's upcoming flagship product for Microsoft's .NET framework. "
Dave's conclusion is "Yes, Clarion.NET has a future, but at present it's not a very bright one. There's no AppGen yet, and past performance suggests that even if one does appear shortly it will take a long time before it is usable, particularly for newer technologies such as WPF."
From my perspective Clarion.NET doesn't exist. I bought a license a couple of years ago or so (don't remember exactly) and nothing much has happened since. I have not even bothered downloading the new builds. There is no application generator, no templates, just an IDE and a Clarion# compiler. I can just as well use Visual Studio and compile in C# or VB.NET. To me there are only two reasons to use Clarion#: Support for TPS files and queues. On the other hand, I don't want TPS files in .NET and from what I understand, collections and LINQ in .NET can easily be used instead of queues. So the advantages of Clarion# for me just aren't there.
Will SoftVelocity ever deliver Clarion.NET? I don't know. The product was developed outside of SoftVelocity and it feels like there is no communication about it. SoftVelocity deletes any threads from the ClarionSharp newsgroup that queries into the status of Clarion.NET. No information at all escapes except what SoftVelocity posts on their blog-site, the last one from just over a month ago, showing one screen-shot from the data pad and one screen-shot from the "Embed interface" which quite frankly is not looking like anything that is going to materialize anytime soon.
It is a well known secret by now that the Clarion.NET product was developed by Arcadia, a company in St. Petersburg, Russia. Arcadia has long experience in software development in Scandinavia. The contract was supposed to start in mid-2004 and take 4.5 years (or 500 man months) with a team of 10 developers. I don't see anything wrong with this, but something has definitely gone wrong in this relationship and one has to wonder if this project is dead. The absolute lack of public communication from SoftVelocity regarding Clarion.NET is worrisome - the silence is indeed deafening.
In the beginning of 2010 I decided to write off my investment in Clarion.NET and not have any expectation of it ever being released. This was actually a relieving decision as it transferred me out of a black hole that the Clarion.NET world had become and into the very exciting other .NET world! I went from negative to positive:) My commitment to the other .NET development environment was further strengthened as I started thinking about what benefits there would be to use Clarion.NET - and I found the benefits were precious little.
While I would miss some of the Clarion functions and syntax, I have done enough programming in both C and PHP to be able to embrace the syntax structure and case sensitivity of C#. I also have some BASIC programming in my background, BASIC being the first computer dialect I learned almost 25 years ago, so I would be Ok with VB.NET. I will blog later on what the initial pros and cons of C# vs VB.NET are for me.
Don't get me wrong: Just looking at all the stuff that is available for all the different options in .NET is an absolutely daunting task! But at the same time, it is energizing and fills me with optimism about programming because I see all those things that I can do! There are all those tools and products available in the .NET world for just about every conceivable task. And the millions of articles and blog posts about the various technical aspects are out there, too. Thousands up on thousands of detailed examples on sites such as Code Project. All right at my fingertips, ready for me when I need them.
Does my decision to move to Visual Studio instead of Clarion.NET affect my support for Clarion as a desktop programming environment? Absolutely not! I will continue to work actively with Clarion, support my Clarion third party products, and add to those products, for a long time to come. I have absolutely no intention to stop using Clarion for desktop development, but I'm simply not waiting for Clarion.NET any more.
If you are considering looking into .NET - and in my opinion you should - you can download the free Visual Studio 2010 Express version right now and start playing with it! For the time being, I'm not sure what exactly the limitations are in the Express edition, but it looks like database access is limited to SQL Server Express and Access databases. Which admittedly should be just fine to start with, although it will not give you much freedom in accessing your existing databases unless they are in either of the supported formats.
The Professional Edition costs $549 if I'm reading things correctly. You can compare the various commercial versions to see what is included in each one. I have the BizSpark package from MS which is free to start, is valid for 3 years and costs $100 at the end and it includes a license for VS 2010 Ultimate so I'm good to go.
The really cool thing about Visual Studio and .NET is that there are more resources available out there than any one of us can even imagine! As an example here is just one tutorial website for Windows Presentation Foundation at http://www.wpftutorial.net/
So where does this leave you? Where do you stand? What are you looking to get out of programming in .NET? What do you want to accomplish? Food for thought...
I have not done any .NET work yet. My plan is to start easing into it in the next month or so. I have some small stuff I can start with. Setting up a mySQL .NET provider, hooking up to my remote database and creating a browse using WPF will be my first step. I'll see if I can glue all the pieces together to make one browse app. I'm going to start messing with ASP.NET, set up a domain to test with online and see how it works. Then I'll take it from there. What are you going to do? Think about it:)
In the coming months I will be taking a journey, studying .NET, experimenting with it and learning how to use it. I will blog about my experiences and perhaps I can help you along on your journey. I will shortly be setting up a new domain that I will use exclusively for exploring ASP.NET and SilverLight, which are my primary targets for .NET at this moment. I will also be exploring WPF, like I said, for some in-house programs, which quite frankly will mostly be to cut my teeth on WPF and desktop programming in .NET. My plan is to have something that connects to a database up and running before September 20!
Arnor Baldvinsson
I was doing some php research yesterday and stumbled on this online php book that had some very good information and examples that I could put to use right away. Check it out at http://www.tuxradar.com/practicalphp It's all online in html format, so there is no PDF etc. but it is easy to navigate with links to previous and next chapter as well as a "Jump to" drop down and a link to the table of contents.
The book has been updated for php 5.2 so it is kept fairly current, which is always a plus with online content!
So, if you are looking for good, free, text on php stuff, check this book out - it doesn't cost you anything:)
Arnor Baldvinsson
In my last blog I described my experience with the 1.5TB Seagate FreeAgent Desk external drive that I bought from Costco.
Instead I ordered a Coolmax CD-391T-U2 enclosure from TigerDirect and a 1.5TB Western Digtial drive. Wednesday I received the enclosures and the drive and immediately put the drive in. It was a bit tricky to put this together and the USB cable that came with it was only about 14-16" long. I plugged it in and the first thing I noticed was how loud the fan was. It was disturbingly loud!
First thing was to partition and format the drive and I knew that would take a while so I set it to do that over night. The morning after it was still formatting and I realized something was not right, so I stopped the formatting process and reconnected the drive to another USB port with another cable in case it was a cable/port problem.
8 hours later it was finally done with the format process so yesterday afternoon I started a backup process. I immediately realized that something was not right. It was barely getting 1MB pr. second transfer rate to the new drive. After messing around with it I realized that the enclosure seems to be having an issue with the USB to SATA conversion OR that it is actually designed for USB 1.1 not USB 2.0! So I decided to not mess with this and I am returning those to Tiger Direct.
After hours of checking things out I decided on my next enclosure to test out, a Vantec NexStar 3 NST-360SU-BL enclosure that supports both USB 2.0 and eSATA which supports up to 3Gbps (Gigabits per second) transfer rate compared to 480Mbps (Megabits per second) for USB 2.0 and only 12Mbps for USB 1.1! I should have those sometime next week and will report my experience with those. The Vantec does not have a fan so it should be quiet. It does come with both USB and eSATA cables (unfortunately the machine I'm using this with doesn't have an eSATA port, but more on that later) and get's 4.7 stars out of 5 available in 94 reviews on TigerDirect. The price is (currently) the same as the CoolMax, or US$29.99.
Arnor Baldvinsson
In September I bought a 1.5TB Seagate FreeAgent Desk external drive from costco.com. I had been looking for an external drive solution for backup purposes for a while and the FreeAgent drives looked good and we had previously bought two 500GB drives that performed without a single problem.
I plugged the drive in and everything looked good. I set up all my backup processing using the two backup software I use, InSync from Dillobits and Second Copy, both of which have served me well for years.
After I had set everything up and shared the drive, since part of the backup was from another computer, I rebooted my computer to make a clean start. That's when the problems started. During bootup I got an error message about a drive being problematic, don't remember exactly what it was, and the disc diagnostic program insisted to run on my C: drive. Everything checked out and no problems were reported.
I set all my backup processes to start and did some direct copying as well and after about 12 hours all the data was in place. For the next few days everything worked fine, but then one day I got an error message from windows telling me that there was a write error and it couldn't write the Q:\$MT file or something like that, Q:\ being the drive letter of the FreeAgent drive. This persisted for a few days and then everything seemed to be working ok again and for the next 5 weeks or so no problems at all, so I decided this was something for the history books.
About 3 weeks ago I decided to buy another drive of the same type so I can rotate the drives for an off site backup, which I use the removable drives for. I have been very busy lately and I delayed putting up the drive until last weekend.
This new drive started out with write errors from the start. I re-partitioned and re-formatted the drive twice to see if I could get it to work, but no help. I ended up returning it to Costco for a full refund.
So I did some research online to try to find out what the heck is going on with those drives. Well, you don't have to look very long to find people who have had a lot of problems with the 1.5TB FreeAgent drives! One of the websites I found was this one. It claims that the problems are caused by overheating, which I can relate to since there is no ventilation for the enclosure, it is completely closed off! I could also feel it getting pretty hot and someone that posted about this had measured the drive temperature getting up to 250
Several weeks ago someone in the Clarion world mentioned LogMeIn to me as a way to remote control your computers. So I downloaded and installed their freeware version of it on my laptop and the two desktop computers that I work on.
On mornings like today, when the weather is cool and crips, it is very nice to be able to light a fire in our wood stove in the living room and park myself in front of it with my laptop and access my desktop computers. It works pretty well on our LAN (which is mostly 1GB, cat 6, but my laptop is obviously wireless) and it is free! I have not yet experimented with LogMeIn over the internet.
The only problem I have had is that when I connect to my laptop from the desktops, it tends to log off after a few mintues and I have to keep logging in. I'm not sure what that is about but I rarely need to use that so it is not a big deal.
You can run it in full screen or you can run it contained within the browser. The color dept can be determined but beaware that it actually changes the color dept on the machine you are connected to. The color dept is restored when you diconnect from it, but it might cause confusion if you look at the screen you are controling;)
All in all, definitely worth looking into if you need to remote control your computers. They also have Pro2 version and several other products that can be combined to create powerful remote control setup to control external computers and create VPN settings but those products are not free and generally require a monthly or an annual subscription.
Arnor Baldvinsson
I stumbled on a really good deal on a HP LaserJet CP1215 color laser printer I had been looking at it at OfficeDepot and they had it for $199. I was looking it up on the HP website and they had it for a $99 special deal and free shipping so I jumped on it.
The printer arrived it last Saturday and tonight I finally got some time set it up. It was easy to set up. I connected it to my Vista 64 machine and there were no issues or problems and it prints just beautifully! I checked it couple of days after I bought it and it was back up to $299 and I see that they are now out of stock;)
It is rated 12ppm in Black only and 8ppm in color. We are starting to send out printed letters to our customers since we get close to 40% of our emails back with errors of one sort or the other, mostly because people have changed email addresses. So it is getting very difficult for us to keep in direct touch with our customers.
We have already sent out one mailing, about 3 weeks ago, and we got pretty good response so we are definitely going to be using this more and more in the future.
I have two excellent Epson photo printers, an older Epson 2200 workhorse and a more recent R-340. After comparing prices for ink and toner I realized that the difference wasn't much - if any - and the laser is faster and does a pretty good job - images and graphics look crips and details are excellent. Besides I would like to use my photo printers to print photos, which is what they were made for!
I will keep you updated on how this printer works in the long run, but so far it looks pretty impressive!
-- Arnor Baldvinsson