Sci-Fi Must Read Shortlist: Part The Second

The bookclub didn't really work. Well, it was an EED project after all. Actually, that's not quite true... it didn't work in it's stated aim to get us all reading and discussing books (blame: Spiny) but it did succeed in getting your old pal Dave reading again. Since our foray into the world of the high brow, I've found my baths getting longer and longer, and even spent long afternoons ploughing through more books than I've read in the last two years.

Okay, I'm still in my comfort zone, 800 page Sci-Fi page turners, but I figure that at least it ain't no Bronte, dig?

I've just finished the last Hyperion book, Rise of Endymion, which I found to be utterly excellent, and the latest Peter F. Hamilton void trilogy novel, The Temporal Void, which I found to be hard work in places.

So now I'm looking for a recommend-me-do, in a similar vein to the well-trod but long dead blog "Scifi Must Read Shortlist". What's good scifi reading at the moment?

Glacial IE8 Tabs?

 
I had a problem with new tabs & links in IE8 taking aaaages to open. 15 seconds or so.

Turns out the problem is the Java addins, even with the latest at the time of writing (6.0.140.8). Disable these and it’s back to being nearly as quick as firefox ;)

 

Ex Directory your mobile

118800 is a site some may find useful, but I personally feel is taking things a bit far. A directory listing mobile phone numbers for the UK, it boasts. I'm not in favour however, so to the nitty gritty. Short and sweet.

Enter your mobile on this page , then the code is sent to your phone by text message.

Put that in the box and you're exempt from their effectively unathorised publication of your mobile number.

Safari So Goody

Being the OCD sort for trying out new stuff, I downloaded & installed Safari 4 for Windows final, even though I found the beta, utter utter rubbish.

And you know what? It isn't half bad.

 

Things I like:

• It’s quick. Noticeably so over Firefox & especially IE8. It makes Google Reader & mail a whiz.
• It’s sleek. Typically Apple, the UI is very good, much more visually appealing than other browsers.
• No more crappy Apple font rendering, it defaults to Windows rendering. Although you can still choose the Apple one if you’re weird.
• Top Sites. This is a special page that comprises of your most visited sites, presented in a flashy pseudo 3d curve. It makes a nice compromise between having one home page and multiple home pages like FF & IE and means your frequent sites are just 2 clicks away.
• Page Search. Works very well. On finding a match Safari dims the page and highlights where the matches are in white, the current position in the search is yellow. Caret hunting when searching is something that continually frustrates me in FF & IE.
• RSS. Handling is pretty good & better than other in-browser viewers. If you have a small number of subscriptions it would be really good, but for RSS addicts it’s, still no match for Google Reader. I’d go so far as to say it would be worth using for some high priority feeds (that have full text) in addition for using Google reader for the others. No sharing mechanism though.
• Search Results SnapBack. If you Google something (forgetting to open a new tab), follow a link browse around a bit, whacking SnapBack jumps you straight back to your search results page. Neat!
• Installation recognised I was British & the dictionary spells “colour” !
• Cover-Flow. I thought this was a bit of a gimmick, but… Cover-Flow. I thought this was a bit of a gimmick, but… it’s absolutely fantastic for browsing your history, especially when you can’t remember the URL you’re looking for.

“Not so much”:

• No add-ins. On Windows anyway. There are some on Mac, but they’re mostly pay-for, yuck. So no add-block, X-Marks etc ;( Although poking about in the installation folder does reveal a Java plug-ins JAR.
• Password saving, not a handy-dandy one like in FF anyway.
• Search bar. You are limited to google.com, & yahoo.com in the search bar. I heard somewhere before that there were other countries besides the US, but I think it was just a rumour. You can’t  change it to google.co.uk, www.google.se or whatever.  You can’t add your own search providers. Steve Jobs uses google.com, so you should use google.com Doing things your own way is not the Apple way. You do things Steve’s way or you are not cool. </sarcasm> Retarded.

For me, it’s very nearly a Firefox-killer. Lack of extra search providers being the main deal-breakers. If you’re not fussed about this it’s well worth a look.

I did find a way of synchronising bookmarks, but it’s a bit of a faff. You have to create a sync folder using either Dropbox or Mesh and also locally sync your Safari bookmarks file with copies in these folders using something like PureSync.

You don’t really want to sync the whole Safari data folder (%appdata%\Apple Computer\Safari) as that will sync your cookies and history too, and I doubt your boss would appreciate your seeing adult sites list :) It would also trigger Mesh or Dropbox to sync every time a cookie landed or your history changed.

Public Safety

Dave posted a link to a new V trailer on facebook. Sure, looks nice enough, but only about 19 seconds in i see something very important. Public Safety important.

A bookshelf falling.

Now i am as crazy as the next guy, but not anchoring bookshelves to the wall? Thats institution crazy right there. Its very common for all of us to think about our homes and offices as someplace safe, a slowmoving area. But reality can be cruel, reality can surprise us, and thats when we will find ourselfes quite unwillingly in the emergencyroom, bleeding and whining in shock and in pain.

Now i bet you start thinking about what a hassle anchoring a bookshelf would be. But i assure you, its not that bad. It doesnt involve heavy duty wallsurgery or even that much work. Since most everyone has atleast one bookshelf from ikea you will have what you need at home. Its a simple little strap. Yes, thats right, the little plastic bag with things you ignored when you put it together. If you have thrown it away use a L-bracket of your choice, it really doesnt need to be that big, just make sure you fasten it properly in the wall behind the shelf.

Its always better to be safe than sorry. The next rainy day, go over your home and/or your workplace, you could even involve the whole family and make a game out of it! Lets find those hidden dangers!

Good Luck, and Happy Hunting!

Gel

Tetris crossed with Pengo! Why hasn't this been done before? Gel on Xbox Live Arcade has got Pengo's sliding and pushing blocks, now in 3d but instead of just matching the special blocks and busting the ice, you've got to get four like colours together to make them dissolve. That's nifty on it's own, but Gel ads combos. The gel blocks don't disappear when you group them, they slowly dissolve. If you can get another same coloured block alongside the gooey mass before it goes pop, it'll dissolve too giving you a combo where the points will climb as you keep adding blocks and the board will clear faster. It takes a mediocre puzzle game up to a fantastic puzzle game, worth trying out for yourself.

Sometimes Free Is Better

If you’ve used Microsoft development products before, you’ve most likely come across Source Safe. It’s “ok” I guess but does suffer from some problems, and I’ve been too close to more than one corrupted database for comfort.

A more robust version control solution is the open source Subversion. Widely used in the Java community it’s also available for use over the Microsoft side of the fence. As well as being very robust, a couple of other features are it’s optimistic Copy-Modify-Merge model and excellent support for distributed teams. All these together make it suitable for use on large projects.

Version control isn’t just for code either. I’ve even heard a few celebrity geeks on TWIT say they use it for a document repository.

 

SVN Install

Grab the SVN installer for the server & client. You’ll want SVN 1.5 as the latest version isn’t supported by AnkhSVN yet.

 

Leave both boxes checked so it installs the subversion server and Apache web server.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Choose the path to your repository. Ideally this should be on another machine, but below I’m choosing a folder under My Documents, so it at least gets backed up with the rest of my stuff.

I’d recommend creating a root folder for SVN then a folder for your first repository under that. As you may want more than one repository in the future. Doing this also makes the setup work without having to tweak the Apache configuration.

 

 

The next setup screen alters some stuff in the Apache configuration for you. You’ll probably want to change the port away from the default of 80. Now, the repository path isn’t the path you put in above, but the root SVN folder. The location prefix tells Apache to pass any URLs starting in “svn” through to the SVN server.

 

 

 

 

If you’re on Vista, I’d also recommend installing elsewhere than “C:\Program Files” to avoid UAC pain.

 

 

 

 

 

 

After the installer' has finished, start the relevant services. (“Apache2.2” and “Subversion Server”).

Then crack open a command prompt and create your repository with

svnadmin create <path to repository>

In this example, the path I gave it was “D:\Users\Brian\Documents\svn\repos”

Badaboom – SVN is all up & running. You can test it by opening a browser and going to http://localhost:81. You should get a page that says “It Works!” – that’s just Apache. To test the SVN server is working & Apache is forwarding requests to it, browse to http://localhost:81/svn/repos/ You’ll get “repos - Revision 0: /”

Apache

This bit’s optional, but you’re better off knowing the relevant bits in the Apache config, just in case you want to change it.

The config is in <Install folder for the subversion software>\httpd\conf\httpd.conf & these are the important bits:

 

LoadModule dav_module modules/mod_dav.so

This tells Apache to load the WebDAV module, so you can access your repository through a web browser.

LoadModule dav_svn_module modules/mod_dav_svn.so

This tells Apache to load the Subversion module.

Listen 81

The port Apache is listening for HTTP requests on.

DocumentRoot "E:\Program Files\CollabNet Subversion Server/httpd/htdocs"

The  root folder for the web site served by this Apache instance. You can serve up HTML pages form here if you like. One thing Apache is really good for though is serving up XML schemas & doing nifty things like URL rewriting.

<Location /svn>
   DAV svn
   SVNParentPath D:\Users\Brian\Documents\svn
</Location>

This tells Apache that if it gets any URLS starting in \svn just to pass them onto the SVN module loaded earlier. SVNParentPath is a bit of configuration for the module. It’s the folder above your repositories. This is handy If you want more than one repository. If you’re sure you only want one, then you can change the directive to SVNPath and the argument to point directly to the repository folder itself, instead of the parent.

AnkhSVN

The installer for Ankh is just a click through. So no sweat. You’ll want version 2.0 if you’re using VS 2008.

 

Adding a Solution

Right click the solution & choose Add Solution to Subversion.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As for where to, you’ll have a couple of choices. If the repository is on your local machine, you can just use the file protocol and give the path to the repository:

file://D:\Users\Brian\Documents\svn\repos\Code

or the Subversion protocol:

svn://localhost/Code/

Alternatively, if it’s on another machine, you can go through the SVN service with the URL:

svn://myotherbox/Code/

or over HTTP:

http://myotherbox:81/svn/repos/Code/

 

 

I’d recommend checking the Add a Trunk folder box. To understand why, have a read of the “Version Control with Subversion” pdf book that was installed with SVN. There is a link on your start menu.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Adding the project doesn't commit the changes straight away, you’ll see the list of changes in the Pending Changes window. It’s fairly obvious how to drive it from here. Check the AnkhSVN site for more details.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Optional – Tortoise SVN

While you’re at it, grab Tortoise SVN, a GUI client for Subversion. You can do everything with the command line tools, but really, why would you? It’ll create and browse repositories, call SVN diff & much more all from a right click in Windows Explorer.