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I bought Coder to Developer: Tools and Strategies for Delivering Your Software with vouchers I was given for my birthday – i.e. it’s bought-and-paid-for and this review reflects that..

I first discovered this book via Joel Spolsky’s post about his foreword for it. Based on his recommendation, and the reviews on Amazon I decided to buy it.

The author does a good job of breaking down the software development process into managable chunks, and how to tackle these chunks. I didn’t really learn anything new from the book – it is essentially a compilation of best practices, almost all of which are covered in various places on the web, but it’s nice to see them in one place.

My only real criticism is that when discussing various tools to help with the various tasks, the emphasis is placed on the author’s favourite commercial tools over the Free/Open alternatives. While this may suit some people, I disagreed with it and made me feel as though parts of the book are more advert than advice.

I would recommend it to all people looking for an overview of the software development process, but they should be warned of the focus on .NET and commercial bias towards development and tools. That said, a few OSS projects could benefit from reading it simply to learn the basics of developing software – to paraphrase the book:

Don’t confuse writing good code with developing good software.

Mat came round yesterday and we spent most of last night playing Star Wars: Battlefront on his Xbox in splitscreen mode. It’s a truly excellent game that really captures the feeling of ‘being there¹’, and I can’t wait to try it on Xbox Live when I finally get broadband.

Gameplay is similar to other squad based shooters – pick a class and try and meet objectives. In all of the missions I played, the objectives are essentially ‘Domination’ from Unreal Tournament – convert all the ‘bases’ to your colour. Like UT, you have to hang around the bases (or command posts) for while to capture then convert it to your side.

As usual with these sort of games, the ‘grunt classes’ are the best all rounders, but you can make use of the other classes, especially the snipers. I can imagine the classes being more use on Live where you’re actually playing with people and can plan attacks.

You also get to control vehicles, from AT-STs to Snowspeeders to Speeder Bikes.

We mainly played the ‘Historic Campaign – Galactic Civil War’ which is episodes IV – VI. You get to play set pieces from the films – routing the rebels from Mos Eisley, the battle for the shield generator on Endor etc. – which are intermixed with footage from the films. The Hoth battle is fantastic, with Snow Speeders flying between the legs of the AT-ATs and Tauntauns running around.

In campaign mode, your side is chosen for you – one level you may be the Imperial Forces, the next the Rebels.

I recommend playing it, especially if you’re a fan of the films.

Update

Got a bit confused between my UT game types – in Domination you just had to run over the base to capture it, in Onslaught you had to destroy and build the base to capture it (and build a link). Battlefront is more like Domination in that you have capture the bases, not link them, but also like Onslaught in that you have to ‘destroy’ and ‘build’ the bases by hanging around them, rather than just ‘touching’ them.

¹ As best as you can capture the feeling of being in an imaginary world using imaginary weapons to fight imaginary enemies

I have six Gmail invites available. Contact me or leave a comment if you want one.

If I have any left at the end of the week, I’ll post them to the invite spooler.

Mono 1.0.2 has been released¹. Descriptions of the changes are noticably lacking, but the biggy for me is that there is now a package for mod_mono provided. Lack of this has put me off playing with Mono’s implementation of ASP.NET, but now…

One quick upgrade later…

Copied an ASP.NET app off my IIS box, and although I had to play with a few paths to get it working correctly it worked! Sort of. The application itself worked, but it appears that some of the backend logic fails…

Still, it’s promising, and now I can seriously look at developing sites on Linux on Mono. Cool.

Multiple applications with mod_mono

I didn’t twig this straight away (I didn’t read the docs, just the examples), but if you want to host multiple mod_mono applications you need to separate them with a comma in your MonoApplications directive.

E.g.

 Alias /app1 "/path/to/app1"
 Alias /app2 "/path/to/app2"

 MonoApplications "/app1:/path/to/app1,/app2:/path/to/app2"

 <Directory /path/to/app1>
     SetHandler mono
     DirectoryIndex Default.aspx
 </Directory>

 <Directory /path/to/app2>
     SetHandler mono
     DirectoryIndex SomePage.aspx
 </Directory>

Will enable both http://servername/app1 and http://servername/app2 to work.

¹ The release notes refer to installing 1.1.1² though…

² Mono 1.1.1 (development) has also been released – I’ve not looked at it yet though.

Just updated my Textpattern install to 1.0rc1 – seems to have gone okay, but let me know if you spot any problems…

It appears that some nice spammer has decided to start spoofing my domain name – I’ve just deleted ~110 non-delivery bounces. They’re making it through my Spamassassin as well.

Grrrrr….

Thanks to Knoppix 3.6 (thanks Russ & Jen) and its inclusion of NdisWrapper I have been able to test my D-Link DWL-650+ under Linux.

It works!

That’s one less obstacle to running Linux on my work laptop and hosting my MS Windows development environment(s) in VMWare

I know I could/should try the acx100 project but a) NdisWrapper (in this instance) was painless and b) I’m upgrading to 802.11g shortly so NdisWrapper may be my best/only option…

Oh, and seeing as the day is almost over – Happy Birthday Jono

Thanks to my friend Adam I now have a Gmail account¹. As soon as get some invites, I’ll start dishing them out – in the meantime…

Gmail invites to spare?

Found the Gmail invite spooler via Forever Geek. If you’ve got invites to spare, send ‘em to it. If you want one, give them your address.

Unfortunately I can’t vouch for how well it works as I registered for mine shortly before my domain disappeared and hence my email was MIA as well. Then by co-incidence Adam sent me one. Good man.

First impressions

Good. Very good in fact.

Nice clean interface. I like the way conversations are threaded (although it confused me at first). The ads aren’t obtrusive/annoying and are relevant to your email. Not had chance to play with search due to having very few emails in there, but all-in-all a nice webmail system.

If you’re using Gmail with Firefox² you owe it to yourself to use the Gmail Notifier extension.

¹ See if you can figure out my address…

² 1.0 PR1 is out and is good. Try it

Had a bit of downtime whlst my domain name provider moved registrars. Unplanned and most annoying…

Just booked my train tickets and registered for the LinuxWorld Expo 2004. I’m only going down for the first day, and not planning on attending the conferences (unless I can get them cheap on the day), but it should be good fun.

Let me know if you’re planning on attending…

Google Hacks

I was browsing in Ottakar’s in Carlisle yesterday, and I picked up the O’Reilly Google Hacks book – I already have their Wireless Hacks and wondered how they managed to fill an entire book about Google – as I was flicking through the pages a familiar URL caught my eye. Once I found the page again I discovered the Google Art Creator by Aq. It’s weird seeing people you know in books…

On which note…

I also picked up the latest Linux Format (mainly for Gentoo 2004.2 on the cover DVD – I can finally buy magazines with DVDs!) and amongst the rest of a very good issue there was Jono’s latest part of his ‘KDE Development’ series where I spotted a picture of Jono and Digit0 at LUDEx 2004 (pg.87). Then in the thumbnails to the left I saw some more of his LUDEx photos including two ( 1 2 ) of me (the last one was cut in half though). Freaky…