Maven Release Plugin

April 9th, 2010 § 0

Maven Release Plugin. This is just a note for me, I usually use this and I always forget it.

Execute a dummy run, no commits or tags created:

mvn release:prepare -DdryRun=true

Execute the prepare goal. It updates the pom, creates a tag and increases the version number:

mvn release:clean release:prepare

Checout the release that was tagged, build, test and deploy:

mvn release:perform

In order to skip tests, not recommended but sometimes needed, the arguments tag must be added to the plugin configuration:

<arguments>-Dmaven.test.skip</arguments>

Thematic Theme Framework

April 7th, 2010 § 0

I have been recently working in the development/redesign of a website that was previously using static HTML files but now I am moving it to WordPress as a CMS. After doing my homework I decided that the best way to go was to take one of the existing WP Frameworks as a base to develop the website and the chosen one was Thematic.

Thematic according to the site is:

a free, open-source, highly extensible, search-engine optimized WordPress Theme Framework featuring 13 widget-ready areas, grid-based layout samples, styling for popular plugins, and a whole community behind it. It’s perfect for beginner bloggers and WordPress development professionals.

I tried a lot of frameworks, even used a commercial theme as a base for my tests but in the end I decided that Thematic was the best of all because it has the best documentation, is usually updated, is free and open source.

So if you need to build a site around WordPress, you don’t want to start from scratch, you feel comfortable with PHP and coding then Thematic is for you.

Western Digital Scorpio Blue

April 7th, 2010 § 0

I just bought a WD Scorpio Blue for my MacBook because I was running out of space in my Windows 7 partition.

The HD is 320GB, double the size I had previously, and I am happy with it. You can barely hear it and the temperature is around the same as the Fujitsu that came with it but the speed is better or at least that’s what the Windows Experience Index says (5.5). Before changing my HD I had 4.9 because of my hard drive but now the lowest rating is my GPU with 5.3.

The price was $919.00 Mexican pesos plus shipping in PC en Línea and was delivered to my house 24 hours after I made the payment so it was definitely a great service.

My only problem installing the hard drive is that you need a T6 Torx Screwdriver in order to place it properly inside the MacBook. You can install it without one but the disk may move a little bit while you are in the move. You can find one of these screwdrivers in Home Depot or Sears.

Sleep not working on Windows 7 – MacBook

February 25th, 2010 § 0

While running Windows 7 on my MacBook I discovered that I forgot to disable the sleep mode when I’m not using my battery so after I came back later everything was turned off.

I could clearly see that it was in sleep mode because my MacBook has a small led that keeps blinking when it is sleeping in OSX or Windows. I tried pressing the keyboard to see if it turned on and it seemed to do so but the display was off in both the internal and external displays. I couldn’t bring it back.

I googled the problem and it was a known issue with the NVIDIA drivers included with Boot Camp so I downloaded the latest version from the NVIDIA site and the problem was solved.

MonoTouch – iPhone development without Objective-C

February 22nd, 2010 § 1

I have been working as an independent software developer for some months and recently got some free time after finishing a project I was working on so I decided to install the iPhone SDK back again in my Mac.

After installing the SDK I started to read books and documentation about developing for the iPhone but one thing was really bugging me and it was Objective-C. It is not a bad language and it is not that difficult after you keep using it for a while but in my case I wanted to focus on learning all the concepts instead of learning a new language so after reading some tweets and blog posts by @migueldeicaza about developing with Mono and C# I  decided to give it a try.

I decided to give MonoTouch a chance so I went to http://monotouch.net/ and read all the documentation. I also got Mono, MonoDevelop and MonoTouch SDK installed  as all of them are requirements.

After I installed everything I created a new iPhone project in MonoDevelop and tried to compile but I couldn’t. The problem was that I only installed the iPhone SDK 3.1.3 but MonoTouch requires 3.1 so I had to ran the installation again and select the missing versions. Once I installed the missing versions of the SDK I was ready to go and everything compiled as expected.

Working with C# and .NET APIs is awesome as you can do the same as you can with Objective-C but with less lines of code and faster.

The experience is great and don’t get me wrong Objective-C is a great language but as I said before I am more interested in understanding all the concepts than anything else.

The only drawback with MonoTouch is that it isn’t free, there is a free version but you can’t deploy your app to the simulator or generate an App Store ready binary. The “cheapest” version is US$399 for 1 year of updates and 1 developer. If you are serious about developing for the platform and have a .NET background or even code that you want to reuse then it is a no brainer as you can easily get them back if your app is good.

I will definitely keep playing with it for a while but I will also get back to Objective-C.

Windows 7 x64 with Boot Camp

February 21st, 2010 § 0

Today I installed Windows 7 on a MacBook 13″ Aluminum in order to do .NET development with Visual Studio as my Virtual Machine was getting slow. The experience was painful, first because I had to free a lot of space from my hard drive and second because Boot Camp 3.x x64 is not officially supported in my Mac.

I wanted a Windows partition with a size around 50GB so I had to free some space on my hard drive. After I got 70GB free I decided to start the Boot Camp assistant and to my surprise I couldn’t make it complete the first time due to an error: “Files cannot be moved…”. The only solution recommended by Apple was to backup everything and reinstall OSX and I was not happy so I decided to google for an answer until I found two that worked:

  1. Free more space, I got 100GB free.
  2. Defragment the hard disk with iDefrag

I tried the first one and it didn’t work until I did a quick (online) defrag with iDefrag.

After doing both steps I was able to create the new partition and install Windows 7 x64 and when I tried to install the Boot Camp drivers and utilities in Windows 7 I got another error saying that my MacBook wasn’t supported with any 64bits version, WTF? I had to run the BootCamp64.msi manually as Administrator from my Snow Leopard DVD and in order to update it I had to first decompress the BootCamp 3.1 Update and do the same with it.

Now everything is running fine even though my MacBook is “unsupported”.

Dell G2410 LCD

June 6th, 2009 § 0

I bought this monitor a couple of months ago because I needed a cheap but reliable LCD monitor to work because 1280×800 pixels is just not enough for software development, at least in my case, and because I wanted to connect my XBOX360 to the same display as I don’t have a TV on my room.

This is a 24″ LED display with VGA and DVI inputs so I can easily connect my laptop or my XBOX with a HDMI to DVI adapter. The colors are not the best so if you are doing graphics you should get an UltraSharp model instead but as I am not doing anything graphics related it is not a problem for me. The resolution is full HD 1920×1080 so it is plenty of space and if you combine this with OS X spaces feature then you have a great workspace.

One small problem is that you can’t adjust it vertically as the stand has a fixed size but you can adjust the viewing angle. Again it was not a problem for me because the height of my desk helps a lot and also my chair is adjustable.

Overall I am statisfied with it and I can’t ask for more considering I got a discount from Dell and it was a lot cheaper than other monitors in the market (in México City).

Entrepreneurs Can Change the World

May 21st, 2009 § 0

This is a great video made by Grasshopper to motivate entrepreneurs and everybody else. It was great for me, specially now that I’m working on a startup.

Sketching apps

May 18th, 2009 § 0

I have been looking for an application to sketch the UI of an application I am working on and I finally have the perfect solution for me:

  • Application – OmniGraffle for OS X.
  • Stencil – Konigi.com OmniGraffle Sketch Stencils.

I am currently using the OmniGraffle trial version but I will definitely buy the commercial version as soon as the trial expires although I still don’t know if it will be the standard or pro version. This app is like Visio for OS X but better.

The Konigi.com stencils that I am using are not free either but the price is really cheap, only US$10 bucks. They have a free version but is not as complete as the paid one and it only contains one sketch stencil and a few others that are not really sketches. The customer service is also great as  yesterday I sent a suggestion to request a couple of controls that are missing and I received an answer today with the answer I was expecting – the controls are going to be included in the next version. I recommend these stencils for anyone that design/develop UIs and needs an easy and fast way to do draft prototypes.

I know I can use paper but I don’t like wasting it when I can do it in my PC and only print the draft when needed.

BTW in my previous work they should have used something like this instead of NetBeans which is what A&D used to create the sketches that we, the developers, received to start our development tasks.

MacBook RAM

May 12th, 2009 § 0

I recently  bought memory for my MacBook from Crucial even though some reviews said that some third party memory modules didn’t work well with the Aluminum MacBook, including Crucial, but my experience is completely different.

First I want to say that the memory was cheap compared to the prices I received from some Apple resellers and also from other shops that sell RAM. I got a 4GB kit for $65 dollars vs. $150 dollars for each 2GB module at the local shops so for me it was a great deal. I had to pay $20 dollars for shipping and a few more for taxes to UPS for importing it but I also bought memory for other computers so it was a reasonable price.

My advice for Mexican buyers is to pay with Paypal as the order is processed immediately and the product is ready to be shipped the same day. I ordered on Thursday and my package was in my door on Monday.

So far so good the memory has been working great and my MacBook feels faster and more responsive. I really recommend Crucial if you plan to buy memory and it doesn’t matter if it is a Mac or a PC.

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