Articles tagged 'tech'
Hi-Def: highly, and definitely, confusing Jun 17 2006
So I’ve been toying with this post in my head for a few days. I recently bought a Samsung HD Ready 32" LCD TV, and so a week or two ago I decided to get my Mac Mini hooked up to it, using Front Row as a super-duper media center. I soon realised that while the TV touts HDMI/DVI connectors, it really just means HDMI. I’m well aware that essentially, HDMI and DVI are the same signal with different connectors. Why we need two connectors I’m not sure, but certainly DVI-D (completely digital signal) and HDMI are one and the same and so a DVI output from a PC into an HDMI connector will result in a totally digital signal from start to finish.
Now, after my initial disappointment that there wasn’t in fact a DVI connector on the back of the TV, I stuck with VGA (it has a PC input too) until I researched cables and connectors further. I assumed therefore that running using VGA, that HD output from Mac Mini to TV wasn’t possible. I skipped over the fact that the TV picked up on the PC signal, with the Mac switching resolutions to the TV’s native 1366x768 (720p). It didn’t dawn on me that HD could still be possible, as I assumed it needed a digital, not analogue connection.
So onward and upwards… after laughing so hard I thought I was going to break my spleen at the idea of 60 (just over $100 for those across the pond) to buy a gold connector DVI->HDMI cable, I was thinking I’d just give up on the idea, til a trip to eBay came up trumps. 8 (around $14) for a gold connector 2m cable for running from a DVI source to an HDMI connector on a TV. However upon plugging this in and hooking it up to the Mac, it became apparent that the TV and Mac had decided to stop communicating, instead deciding to only offer me some default resolutions (1280x768, 720p, and 1924x1344 or something, equivalent to 1080i). I’ve read that the Intel Mac Mini’s now allow slightly non-default resolutions in order to cater for the native resolutions of TV’s, however I’m out of luck with my PPC Mini (I’ve read about various display tools to achieve the same thing, but am well aware that the wrong settings, especially when talking about refresh rates, can break monitors and TVs).
Long story short, the HD space is crowded with confusion. I’m still not 100% on my thesis that HD will work over VGA or DVI, because its simply based on resolution, so whatever is supported by the TV and output source,will determine if HD is a possibility. I’m still currently using the DVI->HDMI cable, running at 1280x768 (720p), however am not sure if the VGA might provide better quality. And of course, when my Sky HD installation eventually happens (now delayed a further 11 days because of a shortage of boxes), it’ll require the HDMI input, and so I’ll be out of luck unless I buy a switch.
I intended to keep this post shorter than I have, but that pretty much sums up my experience with the integration between HD capable computers and TVs - after all of this, I discovered while playing the test H.264 HD QuickTime videos available from Apple’s website that really my PPC Mac Mini isn’t powerful enough to play HD content anyway - sometimes it just about struggles through, often it chugs and stops and starts making the video, while incredibly detailed, totally unwatchable. I’m now thinking of either a newer Mac Mini, or perhaps even a Windows based media center, more on this later.
It should be said though that Front Row is awesome, and with the Mac also hooked up to my home theatre, I have a simple, elegant way to access and play all of my music collection, as well as the movies, TV shows etc I have stored. It looks truly beautiful on a 32" widescreen TV too.
Technorati Tags: el, eldiablo, hd, “high definition”, mac, h.264, “front row”, hdmi, dvi
Stacked Actors Apr 25 2006
So, day two of the UML course, and it’s starting to get useful. Use cases, leading on to class diagrams, has me intrigued as a coder. I want to get cracking now trying it out on a system I’m designing (designing before coding, wowee!), but upon looking for some decent UML software, preferably a plug-in for VS 2005, I’m most disappointed. Now I understand VS 2005 has some class diagram tools built-in, but while it looks like UML, it doesn’t smell quite like UML (am I missing something?). I really want something that lets me create any of the different types of UML diagrams (such as use case, class diagrams etc), however the only software I’ve so far come across (such as Borland’s Together plug-in for VS 2003/2005) costs a shitload of money. So, I’m going to keep digging, but my options look limited…
1) personal, “free but only for non commercial” or trial versions - basically yucky cut-down tools
2) NetBeans 5, or at least the latest alpha/beta whatever, seems to have some UML diagramming tools - but come on, a different IDE just for diagrams?
3) a separate tool, such as an open source tool - again, I’d prefer it within my main IDE, but oh well…. *sigh*
Anyone have any ideas? As some may have guessed, this is one of the reasons I quickly cobbled together the ability to add basic comments again tonight, benching all of the big ideas I’ve got for my blogging software in favour of quickly deploying a way for my loyal readers (both of you, including that Google search bot) to post any suggestions they may have!
More UML tidbits soon hopefully…
Technorati Tags: el, eldiablo, uml, modelling, “use case diagrams”, “class diagrams”
Fragile Development Apr 24 2006
Today I did a bit of modelling - data modelling that is. I started my five-day UML course, as I’m attempting to learn the deadly art of analysis. It was actually quite interesting - after Getting Real recently (must get round to finishing that book) I was starting to dispense more with documentation/design diagrams and all that in favour of writing the damn code. However there are times when I need to crystallize my thoughts, gather design details, and really plan more complex concepts. It seems after today that UML, and design analysis, is a good way of doing that. In many ways, the course I’m doing (which is actually object-oriented design and analysis, specialising in UML) does tie in with a few agile concepts - in particular, the idea of smaller iterations of development, and an especially agile process for coping with design/requirement changes. On top of this, the idea of use cases defining functionality, doubling up nicely as easy scenarios for testing, ties in with test-driven development. So while I initially poo-poo’d heavy-handed design, analysis, and UML, I’m finding it refreshing to look at a project from a far more architectural point-of-view - especially when the model-view-controller pattern was brought up as being a Good Thing ™ - something I’ve spent a lot of my spare time working on recently. Over-all: interesting stuff, and expect a few more thought provoking posts (with hopefully even more amusing titles).
Technorati Tags: el, eldiablo, uml, design, analysis, coding, programming, unit-testing
Intriguing Apr 18 2006
Catching up on some of the weekends tidbits, I noticed RSSBus - this looks quite interesting, and reading through the whitepaper brings up some intriguing ideas - however until I can play with the actual product, I’m not sure how useful it’ll actually end up being. Not sure I count as an “early adopter” or “influencer” either ;-)
Technorati Tags: el, eldiablo, rssbus, rss, “web services”, ws
scanR Apr 18 2006
This is pretty cool, with my 2-megapixel Sony K750i, who needs a scanner now? I might have to give it a go a little later, let’s see how I get on.
Technorati Tags: el, eldiablo, scanr, scanning, “camera phone”, “sony k750i”
It makes phone calls, too Apr 12 2006
Yesterday I took delivery of my new handset upgrade - the Sony Ericsson K750i. I had originally wanted a Nokia N70, but decided to go for the K750i because I realised I probably didn’t need the extra features the N70 had, and I certainly didn’t need the extra cost that goes with it. So after playing around with the handset last night, I’m pretty pleased. I was upgrading from a Samsung D500, which I enjoyed using, and my biggest gripe was that I couldn’t set the alarm to use mp3s that were stored on the phone - with the K750i, I can ;-)
On top of this, there are plenty of neat features. PC integration is a lot smarter, and while the usage of the Memory Stick Duo will annoy some people I’m sure - being as I own a PSP, and had a spare 1GB card lying around, I was most pleased. This is the first phone I’ve ever owned with over a gig of memory in it, and because it’s got a fairly nice media player in it, a decent set of headphones (that double as a hands-free kit) I’m tempted to use it as my portable music player. I don’t find time to listen to a lot of music out and about (well I do, but that’s why I bought a decent car stereo), but whenever I think “I could do with an iPod right now” I usually don’t have mine with me. However almost always I’ll have my phone on me - if I can remember to stick the headphones in my pocket, I’ll be sorted.
I’ve also tried a few apps on the phone, more on this later - but let it be said though that Opera Mini is pretty awesome, and I’ve got an SSH client on there too - I’m always pleased by the nice range of apps available for Java based phones, and whenever I get a new phone I tend to re-investigate - so I’m still playing with this side of things.
The thing I use my phone most for is probably txting (just shades actually making calls) and it’s intuitive to use and feels nice and easy. Unlike before, where seemingly every time I changed my phone I had to re-learn where all the symbols and special txting keys were, the layout on the K750i is almost identical to the D500 (space key, caps key all in the same place). As such it feels right at home, and the actual interface for writing a text is much much nicer.
Overall, it’s a sweet sweet phone, even if I do have to get used to locking the keypad again! It even allows me to make and receive calls which is a bonus ;-)
Technorati Tags: el, eldiablo, “sony ericsson”, k750i, samsung, d500, “mobile phone”, “cellular phone”
Ooh, embarassing Apr 10 2006
Hows that for cross-browser compliance? Just realised (thanks to my bro) that when viewing this very blog using Internet Explorer it appears it was asking users to download the page as a file. This will be down to the work I was doing on accept types and content types a while back, and it must have snuck by my rigourous multi-browser regression testing system ;-)
Anyway, one quick fix later and even IE users can see the content now :-)
Technorati Tags: el, eldiablo, “internet explorer”, firefox, “accept types”, “content types”
Building blocks Apr 10 2006
So before I get cracking with a few ideas I’ve got going on, I wanted to get my base framework and build environment sorted. After taking xFramework offline and turning all of the useful code I wrote into a more condensed, useful set of libraries, I then decided to work on a few build tools.
First up was to refine the unit-testing libs and console tool that was part of xFramework. Re-named, and re-built, I made it leaner and faster. Previously, there was one core library - this was the same one the console tool used to execute tests, and the client library containing the unit-tests referenced to tag unit-test classes. Now, it’s two separate libraries - a client framework lib referenced to mark up unit-test classes with attributes, and a console tool with core library (and a reference to the framework lib) to execute unit-tests themselves.
Secondly, I wanted a build server. I searched a while back, and came up short. There are plenty out there, but the criteria I’m after is:
- Automated build setup, with an easy-to-use configuration structure
- Plugin interface for a totally extensible build and reporting process
- Cross-platform, runs on both Linux and Windows, and preferably Mac OS X too
- Checkout a working copy from a Subversion repository, either using the “file” or the “svn+ssh” protocol. I’ll write further SCM support as and when I need it.
- Build the project, so far the only supported plugin is an MSBuild plugin, for building MSBuild project files such as Visual Studio 2005 solutions and projects (of course the API should be fairly similar to the XBuild tool for Mono, which was a port of MSBuild, and I’m thinking about a NAnt provider somewhere down the line)
- Run some code metrics, so far just a simple line counter for each file meeting the configured criteria, and a total line count
- Run unit-tests on the code, using my unit-testing framework, and a bridging plugin for the build system
- Generate some documentation, using my own documentation engine (see below)
- Cleanup after itself
Now that this is done, and tested, there are a few other plugins I want to write for it, but on the whole it’s good enough for me to develop with now. The build reports are also extendable - an interface is defined so that plugins can be written to deal with the build report, and so far I’ve written one provider that saves this report to file, and one that mails it to me, both of which I use. This means I now have my project building nightly, with everything automated, and me being notified of the results.
The third and final tool I’ve written, is a documentation engine. This came about purely because I tried writing an NDoc documentation plugin for my build system, to no avail (it didn’t like my .Net 2.0 assemblies). I browsed around, and found two things: 1) there is little or no activity currently occurring on the NDoc project, and 2) a few users are starting to modify the source themselves to provide a source distribution of NDoc with support for .Net 2.0. I took one look at the Xml documentation files that the C# compiler outputs (the ones that NDoc uses) and decided instead of using unsupportable, possibly unreliable user hacks to get my documentation needs accomplished, I’d write my own little engine, and in this way I’d get exactly what I needed. And so my third development tool in my toolchain, a core library defining a plugin interface for document generation, was born. It allows project files to be configured (defining the Xml document input files to use), and it allows plugin documentation generators that handle the actual output - I wrote one simple plugin to provide Html output for now, more advanced output could be Linux style man files, a Windows style help system, MSDN docs, or a multi-page Html documentation web site solution (currently it chews out one Html file, using JavaScript to allow expanding/collapsing of elements). I have written a console tool to build documentation from the project file, and of course the build server plugin is used to generate documentation directly from within the automated build process.
I now have an end-to-end build process, which, while some tweaking and a bit more code writing is necessary, does the job more than adequately for me. I feel far more confident going on to build upon a lot of my ideas, knowing I have the building blocks in place to write and develop applications more reliably.
Technorati Tags: el, eldiablo, framework, “build tools”, “unit-testing”, “build server”, xframework, subversion, msbuild, xbuild, nant, ndoc Comments
Muby, or Ronad Apr 6 2006
Two interesting points of view on a debate between two technologies that I didn’t think could be so comparable - Monad (MSH), and Ruby. Ted Neward puts forward his case for using Monad, because of its scripting ability, and provides some interesting usage of the scripting syntax to back his views up. Glenn Vanderburg says he’s sticking with Ruby however, and goes on to explain why, cleverly writing the same script that Ted did using Monad, in Ruby - just 17 lines of code, instead of 37 using MSH. Both posts are worth a read, however my opinion? I think Ruby has my vote all the way - it’s cross-platform nature, and the fact that it is a dedicated scripting language (rather than a shell with a neat syntactical scripting language to back it up) are really winning points for me. After all, I’d be happy combining Ruby with Rails to write a fully-fledged web application - but besides utilities/maintenance scripts, I don’t give Bash a run out very often. In the same way, I think at first people may say “look at how cool Monad is, look at what it can do!” but in the long-run, it’s use will be relegated to command line oriented tasks, and the “real code” will be written with languages like Ruby. My $0.02 on an interesting topic of conversation.
UPDATE: it looks like the original script in Ted’s article actually originated from a post by Lee Holmes - and since the debate, he has re-written the script, matching the Ruby version almost line for line - I guess that blows the whole lines of code argument out of the water then. Really it just comes down to what you are trying to write - in this case there’s not a lot between the two, however in other projects there may be a clear advantage to using one or the other. I’m happy to have both at my disposal :-)
Technorati Tags: el, eldiablo, monad, msh, ruby, rails, scripting
I'm getting real Apr 6 2006
I’ve decided to get real - today I went ahead and purchased a copy of Getting Real from 37 Signals, and I plan to get stuck in over the next few days. Expect a review soon.
Technorati Tags: el, eldiablo, “getting real”, “37 signals”, 37s
Beta Boot Camp Apr 5 2006
Apple have launched a public beta of Boot Camp, a package to allow the installation of Windows XP Home, or Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2 or later, on an Intel Mac computer. They have managed to put together what a group of hackers did a few weeks ago, although obviously I assume Apple’s effort comes with the natural style and panache I’ve come to expect from their products :-)
Interesting, none-the-less, however I agree with Dave Winer when he says some the anti-Windows spiel displayed on the Boot Camp pages are in poor taste.
Technorati Tags: el, eldiablo, mac, apple, “boot camp”, “mac os x”, “windows xp”, “intel mac”
n00bie Apr 5 2006
This guy is documenting his switch to a Macintosh, from a Windows machine. Interesting read, and this is something I’m currently considering doing. I’m fairly certain I won’t be able to completely switch, certainly not straight away, but, like MacNewbie, with the reassurance that I could always stick Windows XP on a brand new Intel Mac Mini or Intel MacbookPro, it certainly is getting tempting ;-)
Technorati Tags: el, eldiablo, macnewbie, mac, “mac os x”, “windows xp”, “intel mac”, “mac mini”, “macbook pro”
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