Month: April 2015

Microsoft Build

I kept an eye on the news coming out of Microsoft Build yesterday. There’s a good overview at The Next Web. At some point, I’d like to try out Code on my Mac. It’ll be interesting to see if it gets any traction, and how this affects Xamarin Studio. There are a lot of short articles out there on Code, but there’s not much substantial information in any of them. I just checked Scott Hanselman’s site, though, and he has a good post up about it. He makes it clear that this is more of an editor than a full IDE:

This a code-focused and code-optimized lightweight tool, not a complete IDE.

So it’s not exactly a direct competitor to Xamarin Studio. Maybe more of a competitor to Sublime Text? This makes me wonder, though, if they have bigger plans for Mac/Linux, or if this is just a weird little side project that will fade into oblivion a few years from now.

new Evernote pricing and plans

Evernote announced new plans and pricing today. In a nutshell, there’s a new “plus” plan for $25/year, and the “premium” plan is now $50/year. The old premium plan was $45/year, so that’s a fairly minor increase. My premium subscription is up in early 2016. Rather than renew, I’ll probably switch to the “plus” plan, as it seems to be more than adequate for my needs.

I’ve known for a while that they were likely to make some pricing changes this year, but wasn’t sure what they were going to do. I was a little bit afraid that they might decide to make their premium plan $99/year or something like that. I’m glad to see that they haven’t bumped it up too much, and have actually added a cheaper plan that should be more than enough for many people.

setting up a SharePoint 2010 development VM

I’ve blogged previously about my failed attempt to set up a SharePoint dev VM at home, on my laptop. I’ve given up on that for now.

But one of the SharePoint projects at work finally got far enough through the “spec” phase that I could justify asking our IT ops people to help me get a SharePoint dev VM set up at work. The regular help desk guys set up the base image (Windows Server 2008 R2), and the SharePoint admin guys then installed SharePoint 2010 on it, so I don’t have too much insight into that part of the setup.

Having been handed a working VM with SharePoint 2010 Server installed, it was then up to me to get Visual Studio up and running. That wasn’t much of a challenge. I installed VS 2012 Ultimate. The installer actually gives you the option to install the SharePoint tools, so I didn’t even have to do that separately.

I did have a bit of a problem, post-install, in that some Windows Update that came down automatically killed SharePoint. I had to re-run the SharePoint config wizard several times, make a couple of registry patches, restart some app pools in IIS manually, and so on and so forth. In the end, I’m not entirely sure which combination of random trickery was actually responsible for getting things running again, but whatever it was, I seem to have a working environment again.

But that pretty much killed the entire day, so I have to say that setting up a working SharePoint dev VM is not a trivial task, even if you’ve got experienced admin guys doing the bulk of the initial setup work.

Monty Python

I went into New York today, and saw a couple of Monty Python films, as part of the Tribeca Film Festival. I saw Life of Brian (which I hadn’t seen in many years) and The Meaning of Live, which is a new documentary, mostly about the final Python live shows from last year.

Life of Brian had a Q&A afterward with John Cleese and Terry Jones, and Meaning of Live had a Q&A with Cleese, Eric Idle, and Michael Palin. So, now I’ve seen all of the (surviving) Pythons, except for Terry Gilliam.

It would have been fun to go to the Holy Grail screening last night too, but that one was pretty expensive. The Q&A for that one had all the Pythons, though, plus John Oliver, so that would have been awesome!

Seeing these films has made me think about the value of humor, and realize that I’m really not getting enough of it lately. On my way home, I picked up the Weird Al guest-edited issue of Mad Magazine, so that should help restore some balance. (It’s been many years since I picked up an issue of Mad.)

lots of WordPress updates

My site updated to WordPress 4.1.3 automatically this morning, only a few days after updating to 4.1.2. And now, WordPress 4.2 is out. I just went ahead and manually updated to 4.2, and applied a handful of theme and plugin updates.

It’s good to see that everyone is keeping WordPress up to date, patching security issues and adding features. Honestly, though, there have been a lot of updates in the last few weeks. Let’s all take a break for a few days, ok? 🙂

Not at RailsConf

I’m spending a little bit of my spare time right now trying to learn Ruby, and Ruby on Rails. I recently finished a course in Web Application Architecture on Coursera, which used Rails as part of a general overview of modern web apps.

And now I’m working on Michael Hartl’s Rails Tutorial book. The book is free to read online. I’m enjoying it so far, and getting a lot out of it.

Meanwhile, RailsConf 2015 is going on right now, in Atlanta. I should keep an eye on that on Twitter, and see if anything interesting comes up that might be useful for a guy who’s new to Rails.

Not at East Coast Comicon or MoCCA Fest

I’ve somehow managed to skip both East Coast Comicon and MoCCA Fest this weekend. I was more interested in MoCCA Fest, really, but I likely would have enjoyed either one. Instead, I was a responsible adult and went out clothes shopping yesterday, picking up some new shorts that aren’t two sizes too big, like all the old shorts in my dresser. (All of those old shorts are now in plastic bags ready for the Goodwill donation bin.) I also picked up some size L shirts, to replace some size XXL shirts that are a bit too big now. And I’m still working on my Coursera class, and watching Daredevil on Netflix.

Not at WonderCon

I had thought about going to WonderCon this year, but decided against it. I’m not going to say that I regret the decision, but this weekend wouldn’t be a bad time for a little vacation, and it looks like the weather in Anaheim will be quite nice for the next few days. (Meanwhile, it’s a bit bleak and rainy here in NJ.)

Bleeding Cool and The Beat have some photos up already, and a few articles from today’s programming. I’ll probably follow the news from the con over the weekend, while working on some homework for the course I’m currently taking on Coursera.