a7p's » complaining

Django Developer Toolbar

A7P — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 22:34:57 +0000

A really nice tool for everyone developing Django. Together with virtual-env, django-evolution, fabric, pip and pydev it’s a pretty nice development environment. Get it here.

Well – pydev is currently living a dangerous life – spent my whole afternoon hunting down some well hidden problems – might be I’ll switch to vim for python development really soon … well normally pydev is great – eclipse just isn’t.

Wrong Choices

A7P — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 17:00:30 +0000

*schnief* python chose the “wrong” VCS. Tell me why Guido – I don’t want to learn using another VCS.

Almost lost my sanity over Flex+Bitmap Fonts

A7P — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 18:13:13 +0000

An (unbelievable ugly, but nevertheless life saving solution) is to be found here. ADOBE, this SUCKS! How the hell am I supposed to use bitmap fonts (and please don’t tell me I should not).

If anyone knows a sane way to suppress anti-aliasing for fonts, using Actionscript3 only – TELL ME – I’ll be grateful forever.

Needful Things

A7P — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 01:47:14 +0000

I am enthusiastic, I am astonished, I am amazed – this little German company shows how Apps should look (on the Mac). I’ve never ever seen a single simple App that I enjoyed using sooo much.
Things is an application created for managing ToDo-Lists … I love ToDo-Lists. But not the ordinary ones, I’m totally into the GTD-methodology. Using this very well tuned App with my shiny new iPhone on my (too small, but also shiny) iMac makes getting things done a great expirience.
Do I sound too enthusiastic? – I know, I certainly am, but I’ve got no idea how they made me so. There is some usability-magic in the App.
Well may be taking 39EUR (was a limited discount for early adaptors or users of the iPhone app – don’t remember – now it is 49,90EUR *eg*) for the desktop version and 7,99EUR for the iPhone app forced me into being satisfied, cause I could not stand wasting so much money on commercial software.
Btw. I also bought Adobe FlexBuilder3 … much more expensive, eventhough I choose the UK-version, which was about 50EUR cheaper than the German one. BUT FlexBuilder3 is far from being perfect, there are sharp cornors everywhere.
To name just a few (I just remember):

stupid autoindention (= vim’s autoindent – should be like cindent)
sometimes projects don’t build – restart nessecary
syntax and underlining breaks
somewhat strange run-dialogs
… some other things which I will deliver on a later stage.

All in all it’s better for ActionScript3 coding (which is what I use it for exclusivly) than vim – but FDT-3, I heard shall be clearly superior (but it is also more expensive). I will finish my current project using FlexBuilder, but I will definitly give FDT-3 a try then – there is a time limited test-version available. Well and I hope FlexBuilder4 will recieve some serious polishment (and I hope it’ll be cheap for updaters).

Resume: Things is extremly polished and to the point a solution for one (serious) problem – FlexBuilder3 is neighter of both (sorry, it’s late and I’m unfair).

Setting up a WindowsPC – Part II

A7P — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 20:55:23 +0000

puhhh … I finished setting up the WindowsPC. The disk migration finally worked via liveview and VMwareServer, but the PC was not fast enought – it worked, but I was not (very) satisfied.
Now everything is installed manually – the only thing left to do is writing backupskripts – I will use DVD-RAMs since there is not much data generated.
I really do not like working with/for Windows – having a repository and a fully integrated distribution is something I really don’t want to miss.

Setting up a WindowsPC – Part I (hope it’ll be only a triology)

A7P — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 23:11:53 +0000

/me has to set up a WindowsPC – has been a long time since I was last forced into this. I feel a bit rusty concerning Windows matters.
Here I will list what I’ve done so far:

installed Antivir
system updates (including all the restriction stuff)
activating – via telephone (yeah, this sucks), since I’ve installed this version too often (used it for VM-experiments heavily)
installed Mozilla Firefox 3
installed Mozilla Thunderbird
installed OpenOffice 3
installed 7zip (free compressor)
installed Flash (and felt bad about it)
installed AcrobateReader (and felt bad about it too)
installed VirtualBox
installed Console 2 (latest beta)
concated my partimage-files (I want to virtualize an old W2k-installation with lot’s of ugly software which needs to get activated) – did not install ‘cat’, but tried: copy /b ++
used 7zip to uncompress the resulting file
used VBoxManage.exe convertfromraw to generate a VirtualBox disk image.

Then I got struck – my newly generated image simply did not boot – more on this later.

Currently everything to step 9 would be a simple aptitude update && aptitude dist-upgrade && aptitude install under Linux.

Things I did not install:

Palm Desktop (this PC will be used with an old Garmin): I hope it will work from the virtual machine … this software and it’s drivers are at least a pain.
M$-Office: only got an old very old version and don’t feel like buying a new one. Excel and co will be available in the VM as a fallback option – OpenOffice should do the job.

Happyness and the Other Side

A7P — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 22:19:52 +0000

As happy as I am with my iPhone, as unhappy I am with it’s podcasting features. I am especially unhappy with iTunes and the possiblities it offers to configure podcast-synchronisation!

TAPI & managed code

A7P — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 21:11:24 +0000

I solved my TAPI-problem using C#s excellent COM binding – BUT my solution does not work reliable. Recently I discovered this knowledge article – M$ recomends against using TAPI from managed code, which made me searching for another solution to invoke calls from a python script. TAPI handling is really really ugly if you do not want to dive into Windows COM-programming and using the older C-interface also is the opposit of fun.

TAPI SUCKS!

DHL online stamps

A7P — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 17:27:23 +0000

… and once again the Deutsche Post managed it to really annoy me. Their online-stamp-system uses PDFs with embedded JavaScript .. you have to click away about 5 warning messages, about remote connections, printing etc and you can print it only ONCE… of course you can print test pages from their PDF-JS-”Application” … I just hate it – it’s so stupid.

Hating the “Deutsche Post”

A7P — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 12:12:49 +0000

I just spend about an hour to print some stamps which I bought from the “Deutsche Post”.

my PDF-Reader (evince) does not execute JavaScript (which I appreciate very much – it’s a f**king PDF-displayer, not a turing machine)
the Deutsche Post java-webapplet successfully rebootet my computer twice and crashed my X-Server twice too. The problem only occurs when compiz is used – metacity runs flawless.
After all this trouble suddenly I was not able to print one of my stamps, since it was “already printed” as the Acrobate Reader (but only the windows version – the linux version did not get that far) and the web-applet claimed. This was fixed in 10 secs by an online-chat-support-guy (I was really supprised).

After all this trouble something came two my mind: Why the hack do they all this to try to keep me from printing some sheet of paper twice? If this is, what their online-stamp-system is secured by, they’ve probably did not realize, how a computer works (these days) – we are not (yet?) living in a TCPA-World.

… my mother would be able to hack their system by simply using a copying machine.