Category Archives: Tips - Page 2

DNS – Tweaks

Posted by on December 14, 2010 Comments Off

DNS speed can really affect your home router either for the better or worse..

I use a open source bit of software called namebench to periodically verify that I am using the most performant/reliable DNS server.

Take a peek, it really does help… http://code.google.com/p/namebench/

MacBook upgrade

Posted by on November 28, 2010 Comments Off

My home laptop is my beloved black macbook which has a reasonable Core Duo 2.2 ghz but unfortunately the hard drive is getting a bit full due using as my digital photo album…

After a bit of research I decided to replace the 250gb drive with a new shinny 500gb from Seagate.

Preparation

After receiving the drive I needed to clone the drive to new drive, which is pretty straight forward if you have a “SATA/IDE Adapter Kit with Power Adapter for a 2.5 drive” and “Carbon Copy Cloner”.

After cloning the drive you can checkout the drive by booting off the external drive to see if everything is as you expected (press right alt on bootup)… Note: cloning the drive too hours… so perhaps leave it overnight..

Installing the drive

Then you can follow apple’s own instructions, which are kindly documented below, though my drive housing required the use of my trusty torx security drivers bits because it had one of those security screws….. thanks apple.. :-) Ohh.. you might want to leave your macbook turned off for a while to ensure it is cool as the drive is a snug fit.

Anyway, the outcome is I have a larger, faster drive and zipper little macbook… it feels quite nice… why didn’t I do it earlier…

References

  • Apple’s drive replacement instructions
  • Seagate ST9500420AS, 500GB Mobile SATA Momentus, 7200RPM 16MB Cache

    • Visual COBOL 2010 R3

    Posted by on September 22, 2010 Comments Off

    For the last couple of months I have been working on next release which is cunningly name:

    Visual COBOL 2010 R3

    Which is surprising since the previous was called Visual COBOL 2010 R2.

    If you are using any of products in the PC and want to get a sneaky look at the future of COBOL then please apply for our beta program..

    http://www.microfocus.com/promotions/wwtevcbp0110/default.aspx?page=form

    Posted by on August 22, 2010 Comments Off

    Last week I replied to a post about exceptions, it made me think those programming .Net daily take for granted the etiquette of using Exceptions. So I thought I would share some of my thoughts… well it is a sort of a rules’ish list.

    • Exceptions can be expensive, so avoid using them for normal conditions
    • Only catch the exceptions you can handle
    • Don’t hide/swallow exceptions
    • Don’t catch System.Exception as will also catch unmanaged exceptions such as System.Runtime.InteropServices.SEHException
    • Consider using your own custom exceptions or derive them from similar ones
    • Remember inner exceptions when processing an exception
    • Use the Exception suffix on your custom exception
    • Consider using Microsoft’s StyleCop to point out common issues
    • Avoid using System.ApplicationException if you want to use the code in the Silverlight CLR
    • Remember to serialize your own exception types
    • Use xml comment docs for the exceptions a method raises… it helps intellisense..

    I suspect I might have missed something.. so feel free to comment..

    Extending Visual COBOL 2010

    Posted by on July 1, 2010 1 comment

    One of the many great reasons for choosing Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 as our development platform for Visual COBOL 2010 is it ability to be extended… which we have done but you equally use third party extensions too.

    One of my favourite extensions is the spell checker for the editor, which is great for pointing out spelling mistakes, which for me can only be a good thing :-)

    To install the extension, it is as simple as downloading it, clicking on the downloaded file, restarting Visual Studio and using it.

    The spell checker I use with Visual COBOL 2010 is:

    http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/7c8341f1-ebac-40c8-92c2-476db8d523ce

    For those interested, here it is in action…