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.

AX 2012, the Wizard Wizard, and Origin GUIDs

I had a weird issue in AX recently, and, since I didn’t find much mention of it on the web, I thought I’d write it up for my blog.

A while back, I had used the “Wizard Wizard” to create a wizard form in AX. The name of this tool is kind of silly, but it’s basically correct — it’s a wizard that helps you create the form and class objects necessary to create a standard wizard control in AX. It worked fine, and the resulting wizard was deployed to production a few months ago.

I needed to make a change to it recently, though, and when I tried to import it to our testing environment, I got the following error: “Unable to save Form MyWizard. Origin value: {GUID value here} conflicts with element from model store.”

This led me down quite a path, as I haven’t really ever had a reason to dig into origin GUIDs before.
There’s a little bit of history on the origin GUID here and the best explanation I could find on origin GUIDs is here.

So, once I knew a bit about origin GUIDs, I did a little digging, and discovered that the origin GUID for my form was different in each of our environments (dev/TFS, staging, and prod). This should never happen; as the article above states, “this origin will be the same for this element in all installations, environments, versions and variations.” So… huh. How did that happen?

I looked into the TFS history, and discovered that the initial check-in for the form had no origin GUID at all. That line was simply missing from the XPO. So, if I understand things correctly, the lack of an origin GUID field in TFS is likely what caused it to be assigned new and different GUIDs in staging and production. (And, at some point, the field got filled in on my VM and made it into TFS with a completely different GUID.)

I looked into a number of other forms I’d created in the past, and couldn’t find a single instance of this ever happening before. I quickly realized that the one thing that was different about this particular form was that it had been created with the Wizard Wizard. I couldn’t initially find any evidence of an issue with this wizard, but eventually I found this question on Stack Overflow, from someone else who seems to have had the same issue.

So the end result is that I now know that, if I’m going to use the Wizard Wizard, I need to make sure I do something to force the generation of an origin GUID before I check anything in to TFS. (And that Stack Overflow question indicates that the “best practices” checker would likely have flagged this, so I should probably use that more often.)

I couldn’t come up with a particularly good solution to clean up this issue, other than duplicating the form to a new object, and deleting the old form. I briefly considered taking the GUID from prod, and trying to shoehorn it into the other environments, but that seemed like a bad idea, since I’d need to mess with TFS and with the ModelElement table in the database in each environment.

Text Editors

Possibly the most time-honored and effective way for a programmer to procrastinate on his or her work is to spend time messing around with text editors and/or IDEs. There’s a good case to be made that spending time selecting the right editor/IDE, and tweaking it appropriately, pays off in spades, due to increased productivity over time. But honestly, I can’t say that I haven’t sometimes spent time messing around with my text editor or IDE just as a procrastination tactic.

Yesterday, a new beta of Sublime Text 3 was released, along with the new version of Komodo Edit/IDE, so it makes sense to think about editors a bit.

I bought a personal copy of Komodo IDE about a year ago, and I’ve been using it on the Mac and on Windows, mostly for PHP programming. And now I’m using it for Ruby too. It’s a little heavy to use it as a general text editor. For quick text file editing, I’m using Notepad++ on Windows and TextMate on the Mac. But Komodo is pretty good for PHP and Ruby.

I messed around with Sublime Text a few years ago, but didn’t really like it enough to stick with it. (And, at the time, I didn’t really have a good use case for it anyway, given the kind of work I was doing then.) Occasionally, I think about giving it another try.

At work, I don’t really need to worry about text editors much, since nearly all of the work I do is being done in either MorphX (the Dynamics AX IDE) or Visual Studio. Both of those environments work fine, for their intended use, and (in both cases) it wouldn’t be realistic to consider using a different tool for text editing.

But, for my recreational programming, whether that be PHP, Ruby, or whatever else, it’s nice to have a good programmer’s editor handy. I’ve already shelled out the $59 to upgrade my personal license for Komodo IDE to version 9. (If I thought I was going to need to do any serious Ruby development, I’d probably give Sublime Text another shot and see if it was significantly better than Komodo.)

I keep thinking I should be a real programmer, and learn more about VIM and/or Emacs, but I never quite get around to it. VIM Adventures looks like it might be a fun way to learn VIM. (Of course, I’ve been saying that I should learn more about VIM and Emacs for years; I just found blog posts from 2008 and 2005 saying basically the same thing I just wrote here.)