Blog transition finished.

22Aug07

After moving from Blogger to WordPress, I’ve accomplished the final step which is getting everything toghether in one single hosted domain: www.cyberguijarro.com. The site is still in its early stage but at least the blog and the download links seem to work fine.

In addition, the old Blogger website (worldofinfoscape.blogspot.com) has been completely removed. Please update your bookmarks:

• Blog address (general): http://softaholic.cyberguijarro.com
• Blog address (infoscape): http://infoscape.cyberguijarro.com
• Feed address: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Softaholic or http://feeds.feedburner.com/Infoscape

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Continuous integration.

21Aug07

I’ve been lately working on a project which employed continuous integration as a day-to-day development tool. In brief, continuous integration means sistematically building (and testing) a project to ensure that common problems such as broken builds or unit test crashes are detected as early as possible.

Of course, this doesn’t make too much sense in personal projects, because one itself is the only contributor to the source code base (and we all now how to behave ourselves in private). But in collaborative projects, where many people checks out and in source code on a regular basis, a centraliced build system raising alarms when someone screws up is of great help.

Do you like the idea? well, here’s my suggestion for a cool pants free continuous integration scheme: Perforce (free up to 2 users) for source code control, CruiseControl (open source) for schedulling builds and gathering all the data, and finally infoscape (free, check it out on this website) to get round-the-clock notifications on build events via RSS.

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New screenshots of infoscape for OS X.

14Aug07

Folks, here are a few more screenshots showing how the baby looks. Expect something you can actually download & run before en of the month.

infoscape for OS X

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Code monkeys (too good to be true)

05Aug07

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First screenshot of infoscape for OS X.

23Jul07

Current status: memory management is still a complete mess and there is a lot of testing to be done. A thousand miles away from beta quality level.

More to come, stay tuned.

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Hotmail and the shrinking feature set.

21Jul07

In opposite to many other crazy desktop and web applications, Hotmail knows how to deal with features over time: instead of increasing and enhancing them day after day (or year after year), Hotmail actually decreases the number and quality of its abilities.

A clear example is the new Windows Live Hotmail. I will not talk about how they stole the “live” suffix from infoscape because I stole it from Vodafone and, hum, well, the word sucks anyways.

The point is, they dropped important features such as automatic mail forwarding and autoresponse, unless you sign up to the premium service (which also unleashes the amazing POP3 access technology: sweet deal). Now I’m stuck with two @hotmail.com email accounts people uses to contact me in a regular basis, and I want to drop, but there is no way to bridge them with my main GMail address.

Hotmail in combination with Messenger was once a good communication platform, but now it is too limited, too full of ads and the name isn’t cool anymore. Microsoft, please move on.

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Summer breakz.

21Jul07

Google bots should not be having a hard time tracking my website changes lately… I’ve been in vacation for one week now and I only hit my desktop to check (personal) email and chat with my buddies.

mmmm… summer…

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Coming soon: infoscape for Mac OS X.

13Jul07

Yes! I knew you would love this… I finally got sick of the Mail-alike RSS readers and decided to do things my own way, again.

infoscape will be a Cocoa application running on Mac OS X 10.3 and higher. It will probably have less features than its Windows counterpart (infoscape Live! and podcast support are out for the moment) but I’ll do my best to preserve the spirit of the original application.

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24 hours after the iPhone.

01Jul07

This morning I decided to unleash the freak any good tech freak carries inside and visit the Apple store in Valley Fair (San Jose, where Steve Wozniak happened to buy his very own iPhone the day before, hot chicks sold separately) to find out what’s going on in the field, like in a 1st person 3D shooter, but less funny because I carried no guns.

The store was pretty crowded and everyone had the word iPhone in its mouth (employees, customers, janitors…): groups of people were sorrounding proud Apple sales(wo)men who proudly opened and closed mouths with the crap we all have seen during the past months: youtube, google maps and glossy dialpads. I requested to see the monthly fee for the voice/data plan but no one offerer help (dodge this, AT&T).

Rumor has it that an European 3G version of the phone will be announced soon, and shipped before end of year by Vodafone and T-Mobile.

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Compiler warning horror show.

24Jun07

Many developers are comfortable slipping code which flags compiler warnings into group projects. After all, they know what they’re doing: they know what the warning means, why the compiler is spitting it and why it is harmless.

Well, this is to all of you bastards out there: if everyone leaves its own well-known-and-harmless bunch of warnings in the team builds, after months or even weeks none is going to pay attention at them and that is a problem, because sometime these warning are really meaningful and can prevent potential flaws. Be aware.

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