Google App Engine

The guys at Redmond must be very upset... Yahoo keeps saying no, Google keeps sending jabs to the lower torso...

the plan to conquer the world is getting bigger...
Official Google Blog: Developers, start your engines

Rip Palm T5

My palm T5 is no more.

It has ceased to be, bereft of life, it rests in peace, it has kicked the bucket, hopped the twig, bit the dust, snuffed it, it has expired and gone to meet its maker, it has shuffled off its mortal coil.

It is an ex-palm.

I have an history of almost 9 years using palm devices. From IIIx to Zire 71 and from there to Tungsten T5.
The IIIx endured a lot, I used it for 4 years, before an unfortunate accident between the screen and my fist ended its life.
The Zire was the replacement, and it worked great, util another unfortunate accident, this time completely accidental, between my elbow and the screen (again the screen). Lessons learned: don't have you PDA laying around in the middle of papers; buy a hard case)
I bought my refurbished T5 on ebay in 2005, and I've been using it until now, allways having a mediocre battery life.

Last week, my palm refused to leave the logo screen, with a dreaded line blinking on top of the screen. I've even tried the peculiar way of doing a cold reset; there are two ways, one is easy, the other is good for aliens with 12 fingers and 3 hands. But nothing worked. A quick search and I found that I was not alone, and there were no hope.

So now I have a dilema... what to do?

As for palm platform, I think I got to the end of the line. The OS is outdated, the divices all have keyboards, the applications are getting expensive. Time to move on.
As for pocket pc, there are more options in terms of hardware. The compact framework makes it simpler to develop applications, but the core OS is still windows...
As for symbian, I know very little about it... and the little I know, I don't like... I want to develop what I want in my mobile, and don't want anyone to sign it for me...
As for android, it doesn't exists yet...

So, do you have any recomendations?

Google Maps vs Live Search Maps vs Yahoo Maps

Microsoft finally became an option on mapping solutions in your browser, for people living in Portugal. And it came to business with a bang, giving you Bird's eye view for all of Lisbon and surroundings! It is very cool!!!
For that it deserves a peek. Go search your house, and see it in different angles!

but if you want to calculate routes, search for things, Google is still the king. But they have the most outdated route info!!! THEY ARE STILL MISSING MY ROAD!!! GO GET SOME DECENT DATA!!!! GET NAVTEQ!!!

And what about Yahoo? To me, it looks like it is getting behind... let's see what the future brings.

Clarifying things about CI Factory

For the first time I annoyed someone in my blog. And for starters, such an high profile person as Jay Flowers.
He was a little annoyed about my last post.

Just to clarify things, because I don't want to annoy anyone, here is a little more explanation into the problems I found:

• before the installation:
• We don't use Subversion. We are a Microsoft shop, so we are still using Visual Source Safe. I hate it, but that's how it is. CI Factory supports VSS, but it assumes you have a database per project. That is not our case, we have a central database with all the projects. I resolved this problem with a simple hacking into a couple of files. Problem resolved.
• CI Factory relies on Winrar to create packages to deploy to the project folder. We don't have a license of Winrar. I didn't want to use it, so I wanted to replace it with a free alternative. Enter 7Zip. This took a lot more work, because 7Zip has less options than Winrar and has a curious way of creating SFX, but eventually i managed to do it. Problem resolved.

Edit: None of these are CI Factory problems. They were my problems, and I adapted CI Factory to work the way I wanted. Long live Open Source.

• after the installation:
• Trash on the source control - before I even put my source files under source control, I already had 32.498.777 bytes in 507 files under 282 folders. This looks like a lot. In my humble opinion, most of this should not be under source control. Only build scripts, config files and similar things should be there.
  
• Project Structure messy - this is tied to the previous item. CI Factory creates the following structure:
• /<Project name>
  
• /Current
• /Build
• /lots of folders
  
• /Product
• /Install
• /Production
• /Unit Test
• /Third Party

• Your code should go under /<project name>/Current/Product/Production. It's just my opinion, but it looks a little hidden. With time you get used to it, but for starters looks like you are digging for your source. And under /<project name>/Current/Build is where I think things get messy. Under this folder are the executables to several programs (CCNet, nAnt, Simian, etc), temporary folders, log files, reports, etc. I know everything is related to build, but it is not organized. If it is not organized, it is messy. And I think support tools should be in Third Party, or something similar.
  

• One CCNet server for every project - if you have 30 projects under Cruise Control (as we have), having a CCNet for every project makes it a little hard to maintain everything, if you want to upgrade your server the task is going to take longer and is more prone to error. I know there is upgrade.bat, but I have to run it for every project I have...
  
• Replication - taking the example of our 30+ projects, you get several hundred megabytes of replicated stuff across projects. I know hard disk is cheap, but I personally don't like to have things replicated in that manner (and it is a burden to maintain).

In conclusion, if you are starting a new project, you don't have old projects to maintain and you are creating a new structure, give CI Factory a try.
If you already have lots of projects to maintain, CI Factory is not for you.

And that is my opinion.
I think now it is clearly explained.



PS: this reminded me that I forgot to add info about me. Now you can know my face.

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CI Factory

I tried to get CI Factory to work on my project, but I found some problems...

To help setup me project, I followed this very nice show on dnrTV by Scott Hanselman and Jay Flowers.

Problems encountered:

• Using VSS and not having my project on the root of the source control
• Not using WinRAR
  

For the first problem, I had to hack into Properties.xml and SourceControl.Target.xml under Packages/VisualSourceSafe folder to add a new properties with the full path under VSS.

For the second problem, I hacked into a lot of files to replace WinRAR with 7Zip. As 7Zip has a peculiar way to create SFX files, I had to create 3 batch files to help 7Zip do the task.

After a lot of testing, the project finally build!

But when I say "the project", I should have said "the project skeleton". Without my source code, I'm already worth almost 30MB on disk... no code, only build scripts and support tools. And only Simian!

Problems:

• you get lots of trash on your source control (build scripts is one thing but the binaries of nAnt, Simian, etc, is a bit overkill)
• the project structure looks a little messy
• you have one CCNet server for every project
• you have lots os replicated things across projects

I decided to quit CI Factory. I think it is too complicated to maintain. There are loads of third party tools to watch out, and you have to change a lot if you already have some projects going.

In a future post, I'll write about our CCNet.

PS: if you want to see the changes I made to CI Factory, drop me a line.

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