Don Kitchen

programming, technology, fatherhood and life

Archive for the ‘software’ category

Windows 7 Beta – get yours now before it’s gone!

January 30th, 2009

Microsoft is offering free downloads of Windows 7′s Beta release. You can get your copy here. They were originally going to keep the beta open until sometime in March I think but due to the overwhelming number of people that have signed up they’re going to be ending it very soon (actually according to the site, in the next few days).

So far I’ve been very happy with it. I am running it on my Macbook Pro with VMware Fusion 2. Even though VMWare doesn’t officially support it yet it went on automatically when I picked Windows Server 2008 64-bit as my operating system when I setup a new VM for it. All I had to do was put in the product key that Microsoft emailed me when I signed up for the beta and it was up and running in no time.

I only allocated 40GB of Hard Drive space to the VM and 1GB Ram (I have 4GB total). So far it has been running great on that and seems to be much quicker than the Vista VM I had setup before. From everything that I’ve been hearing Windows 7 is basically a cleaned up and more stable version of Vista. So far I agree.

The next steps for me will be to install Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008. Since Windows 7 comes pre-loaded with Internet Explorer 8. One odd/annoying thing that I’m finding is that the Beta version of IE 8 that comes can’t be upgraded to the RC1 version they just put out this week.

For those of you that don’t know. RC means Release Candidate, and is the final testing version before a software product is released with it’s final version. The release cycles are typically:

Alpha
Beta
RC (Release Candidate)
RTM (Release to Manufacturing or Release to Marketing)
GA (General Availability)

Here’s my advice to you as far as Internet Explorer 8 goes. If you insist on using IE, make sure you’re using at least IE 7. I would not start using IE 8 until it’s released in a final version. If you’re only using IE because that’s what came with your computer, do yourself a favor and go and download Firefox (for free) right now. It is way faster than IE, much more secure, and will give you a much getter browsing experience.

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Posted in mac, software, windows

Tags: Firefox Internet Explorer VMWare windows 7

Picasa for Mac, finally!

January 11th, 2009

Google has finally released a version of their Picasa desktop application for Mac. I have been waiting for this for a while and it couldn’t come a minute sooner.

Our iPhoto library here at home is over 63GB and has almost 16,000 items (photos and movies) and gave me a big scare a few weeks ago when the library wouldn’t show any pictures except for the ones that I had imported from my camera in December 2008 (this was still in December). Luckily I was able to copy the library off to another hard drive, open the backup copy and do some maintenance to get it working. But we did lost the pictures that had worked from that December upload.

I think what I would need to do with iPhoto is break our 1 big library into smaller libraries, maybe by year to keep that running more smoothly. I think I’m going to work on pulling everything out of iPhoto and moving it into Picasa. This is also because our Flickr service is up for renewal and I don’t think I want to continue with it. I have been putting pictures on Picasa’s Web Albums lately and I like that much more than Flickr.

Between Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Picasa, I really must say that I’ve been very impressed with all of the Google products that are now a part of my daily life.

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Posted in mac, software

Tags: google mac picasa software

Manage your finances with Mint

January 8th, 2009

If you looking for a great program for managing your personal finances, you should check out Mint. Not only does it have great tools to help you understand where you’re spending your money it offers you ways that it can help you save money. It syncs up with pretty much all financial institutions and can pull in transactions from your banks, credit cards, investment accounts and even loans (auto, mortgage, etc).

I’ve had pretty good luck with it keeping in sync with all of my accounts. The only ones that it has had problems with are with my Emigrant direct savings account and my Maryland College Savings accounts. With options to handle pretty much every security question that each institution deals with, you only have to setup your accounts with them once and it syncs automatically from there on out.

Here’s what I really like about Mint:

It’s free
It’s secure
Offers automated budgeting
Comprehensive drill-down reports and graphs showing where your money is going
Tons of alert options and automated reports (i.e. tells you if a credit card changes your interest rate)

Honestly, I could go on and on. And to top it all off, they just released an iPhone app that’s free too! Considering that I will be swapping out my Blackberry at work for an iPhone in the next few days I couldn’t be more excited (that’s a whole separate post in itself).

Mint’s been around for maybe a year and a half now and seems to have worked out all of the issues I encountered back in September 2007 when I was using the Beta version. To be honest, it had a bunch of quirks back then and lacked the ability to add custom categories. I didn’t stick with the Beta long and closed my account. But a few months ago they came out of their Beta and had a bunch of new features available compared to when I had been a user before, so I decided to give it another whirl. I’m glad that I did because I use it almost daily now and I couldn’t be happier.

I’ve tried Quicken Online (which used to be like $2.95 a month but is free now), Quicken for the Mac, Microsoft Money, Mvelopes (not free) and a few others that I don’t even remember now and when it was all said and done Mint seemed to have the most to offer and the obvious right price. If you’re looking for a way to get started with wrangling your spending, sticking to a budget, or even just trying to figure out where your money is going you should definitely give it a try.

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Posted in software

Tags: finances mint software

Songbird – a new iTunes rival on the block

December 3rd, 2008

Mozilla today released Songbird, a new cross-platform open-source media player to rival iTunes. It’s based on the same software engine as Firefox and much like Firefox, it’s extensible via add-ons. It was quick and easy to download and setup and looks a lot like iTunes. You can get the free download here.

You can check out a more extensive review of it here.

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Posted in software

Tags: itunes music songbird

SQL Server 2008 RTM released!

August 8th, 2008

Not that I think I’m breaking any news here, but SQL Server 2008 has been officially RTM (released to manufacturing). So far I’ve been very pleased working with SQL Server 2008 and am excited to get my RC0 version updated to an official release.

One thing I stumbled across was a warning users to wait for Visual Studio.NET 2008 SP1 to be released BEFORE upgrading to the RTM version of SQL Server 2008. This blog post cites compatibility problems if you don’t have SP1 installed before working with the RTM version of SQL. What I’m not sure about is if this applies to people using beta versions of SQL Server 2008 (RC0), Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and .NET Framework v3.5 SP1 like I am. This uncertainty made me think that it may be best to wait for the final release of SP1 for VS.NET and the 3.5 Framework.

I then came across a nugget here that said:

well….there’s a…ahem…NDA about this topic…but SQL Server 2008 RTM ships with a RTM version of the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 bits…i’ll let you connect the dots.

I guess it’s time to dig around in the RTM version of SQL 2008 to see if it’s there. I also wonder if it’s safe to install over top of my RC0 version of if I should remove RC0 before installing the RTM version. I guess I’ll have to Google more to see what’s required. I’ll provide updates as I find answers and get upgraded.

**** Update:

According to the release notes the beta SP1 isn’t an acceptable solution. And since they’re saying SP1 will be officially released next week anyways, it makes sense just to wait for that I think.

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Posted in programming, software, sql server

2008!!

July 16th, 2008

Wow, it’s been quite a while since I’ve posted. It was just into 2008 back in January. Wow how time flies!

Well, 2008 has brought many new versions of the tools that I use on a daily basis for my job. Visual Studio has a 2008 version out. Microsoft SQL Server has their 2008 version out (well, RTM will be next month so they say). Also the .NET Framework is cranking along with the 3.5 framework which they are almost out with a final release of SP1.

I am excited that my job and the project I’m currently working on has given me the ability to upgrade to the latest versions of these tools. So far I’ve been the most excited with SQL Server 2008 and all of the new features it has to offer. Intellisense for T-SQL, now that’s nice!

I’m also anxiously awaiting Apple’s rumored update of their MacBook Pro laptop line. Once they come out I’m going to get one and beef it up for my .NET Development. I know many .NET developers out there would never think of owning a Mac, but man… once you go Mac you never go back! My desktop at work is a HP workstation with Windows XP and I can’t even tell you how many times I need to reboot to keep things running smoothly. It’s sad that as a Windows user I just am in the habbit now of rebooting when I leave for the day or when I go out to lunch. With the Mac, I’m like “gee, I haven’t rebooted in a few weeks, I should probably just do it for the hell of it.”

Family life has been keeping me busy too. We welcomed our 3rd child this past March and have been knee deep in kids! Our twins turned 2 in June and they’re getting smarter and smarter with each day that passes. It scares me that they’ll no doubt have me/us tied up in a closet at some point as they take over the house.

I am going to make an effort to post more moving forward. God knows I come across enough technical things that would probably be helpful to others. I’m learning to work with LINQ (also, here, scroll down to LINQ section) and can’t wait to get more into that. Also, SubSonic, a great tool, is out with a new version. I’ll be playing with that too when building an application I’m working on for my side-business.

Stay tuned!

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Posted in family, mac, programming, software

Testing email when working with no SMTP server

January 9th, 2008

Happy New Year!

While this tip isn’t my own, it still seems as though it will be very helpful. I know that I do a lot of development locally where I don’t have an SMTP server setup. This tip, courtsey of .NET Tip of the Day, really will eliminate that problem and allow you to work with email without the headaches.

—

Testing code that sends email has always been a pain. You had to set up a SMTP service just to test that your .NET application sends the e-mail correctly.

However, there is a way to send e-mails with no SMTP server set up. Just configure your .NET application to drop e-mails into a specified folder instead of sending them via SMTP server:

<system.net>
<mailSettings>
<smtp deliveryMethod=”SpecifiedPickupDirectory”>
<specifiedPickupDirectory pickupDirectoryLocation=”c:\Test\” />
</smtp>
</mailSettings>
</system.net>

This will instruct SmtpClient class to generate mail message, save it as .eml file and drop it into c:\Test\ folder.

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Posted in programming, software

Tags: email programming visual studio

CMD Email updated

November 27th, 2007

The email command line utility I wrote (and discussed here), CMD Email, has been updated. The latest release supports email attachments.

You can download the latest runtime or source from the project page on CodePlex.

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Posted in CMD Email, programming

Tags: cmd email programming software

CMD Email – command line email utility

October 26th, 2007

I’ve completed my first open source project. I have been wanting to put something out on Codeplex for a while and finally got around to it. The project I released is a small little command line email utility that uses the .NET 2.0 framework. I wrote a more simple version of this years ago to email me when Windows scheduled tasks (batch files) completed. The released version accepts many more options and allows you to store certain data into an application configuration file.

As this post title states, the utility is called CmdEmail and can be found here on codeplex. From the project page you can download the latest (initial) release, see usage information and access the source code too. Here’s a blurb on the usage from the project’s home page:

Usage:

CmdEmail -f nobody@nowhere.com -t you@domain.com -s Subject -b Body

CmdEmail -f "nobody@nowhere.com" -t "you@domain.com" -s "Subject" -b "Body"

CmdEmail -f nobody@nowhere.com -t you@domain.com,me@domain.com -s Subject -b Body

All command switches:

t, to         Required. Recipient (To)
f, from       Required. Sender (From)
b, body       Required. Email Body
s, subject    Required. Email Subject
h, host       SMTP Server - Optional only if provided in app config
p, port       SMTP Port - Optional, can also be provided in app config
u, username   Username - Optional, can also be provided in app config
p, password   Password - Optional, can also be provided in app config
help

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Posted in CMD Email, programming

Tags: cmd email software