Category: software

Text Editors

I spent some time looking at text editors tonight. I’m currently using an old version of Multi-Edit for most of the work that isn’t done directly in Visual Studio, PowerBuilder, or dbArtisan. (Which isn’t much really, but it’s still enough to worry about.) My only real beef with Multi-Edit is that it doesn’t have Unicode support. I was hoping that the newest version (9.10) of Multi-Edit would support Unicode, but it looks like that’s not going to happen until version 10.

Crimson Editor has Unicode support, and also supports a lot of languages (for syntax highlighting). It also has support for macros and column-mode editing, which are both essential.

UltraEdit looks interesting too. It’s got Unicode support, syntax highlighting, column mode, and macros. It doesn’t appear to support as many different languages as Crimson, though.

And of course, there’s always emacs. I’ve always wanted to learn emacs. Right now, I just know enough to get in, do some fundamental editing, and get out. A deep understanding of emacs is something I could actually put on my resume.

podcasting stuff

I’ve been listening to a number of podcasts lately on a fairly regular basis, and I decided to take the next step today, and actually start listening to them on my iPod. I’d been simply pressing them to audio CDs and listening to them in my car via the CD changer. This works fine, but I usually don’t want to listen to a given podcast more than once or twice, so it’s kind of a waste of a CD.

I decided to use my old first-gen 5GB iPod for this, rather than clutter up my newer iPod with podcasts. Getting this set up turned out to be quite a production. The old iPod was Mac-formatted, so, at first, I set it up to sync with my “received podcasts” directory via XPlay. That worked OK, but I thought I could do better by switching to iTunes. So I reformatted the iPod and set it up to sync with iTunes. I didn’t get very far. I started getting disk errors, so I reformatted again and set everything up again. I did a little better this time. I got one disk error at one point, but it’s been good since. I’ve been playing around a bit, trying to stress it and see if it’s going to keep working or not. So far, so good.

I also decided to upgrade to iTunes 4.8, just for yuks. That worked fine, except that it broke iPodder. I upgraded to iPodder 2.0.3, and everything seems fine now.

So, after all that work, I now have an iPod full of podcasts that I can plug into my car stereo via an old casette adapter. It sounds OK, but not great. I also ordered a car charger from XtremeMac, so I can keep the thing going, since the battery life ain’t what it used to be.

Version Control

If you want to set up a relatively simple yet powerful version control system on a Windows server, and you don’t want to spend any money on it, I recommend CVS. Start with CVSNT. Use Tortoise CVS as a front-end. Then, check this page for a quick and easy way to set up ViewCVS. Worked for me.

Beyond Compare

I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time lately looking at file synchronization software. I’ve been playing around with Vice Versa Pro for a week or so, and it works reasonably well. I stumbled across Beyond Compare today, though, and I think I’ll probably switch to that. It’s got a slightly nicer interface, and it’s got interesting scripting capabilities.

Podcasting

I’ve finally started playing around with podcasts.
Software:
– iPodder – Free, simple. Integrates with iTunes.
Sounds:
– Superburst Mixtape from Warren Ellis.
– Insomnia Radio
I’m sure there’s plenty of other good stuff out there. Just more good music to listen to in the car!