Under The Wire

Under The Wire

Friday, November 21, 2008

EtherPad. The only way to write shared documents

Forget about Google Docs and other online tools that promises to help you editing collectively your shared documents but doesn’t have a way to see the modification to the document in real time. Such applications are the past in collaboration tools: with EtherPad we have a really cool web-application to write plaintext with your friends seeing what others are doing live.

Here my 2 cents:

Why does EtherPad rocks?

You can see the modifications live. Do I have to add something more?

Try it and fall in love with its clean interface that provides nothing more than a shared Notepad. And does it well!

You can chat with your friends to talk about what are you writing and really collaborate on what you are doing.

What is still to be done?

Support for other document formats than plain-text should be great. Unfortunately the world is not only about simple text.

Also a way to store files on my disk would be appreciated. Or are you thinking in the Google-ish way that all my documents are belonging to you and only to you?

Please try to get a 100% availability :-D. This service is really cool but if I can’t talk with your servers is quite useless.

Thanks to Oscar for the link!


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Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Please Google, give me back the old Gmail theme!!!

Few minutes ago I logged into my Gmail account and I found a theme change.

I was not liking the switch form the capital G to the small g in the Google logo, and I am still not liking it.

I think that the new theme is ugly and even the “classic theme” is not as good as the new one. Thanks god they provided the Older version option to stay with  the Gmail we are used to.

Please Google, don’t change logos and themes with new uglier ones!


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Friday, November 14, 2008

And the worst IDE ever is … Eiffel Studio!

I hope that you are a reader of Under The Wire and that you didn’t find this page looking for a solution to a problem with Eiffel Studio. Don’t waste more time on it, if it doesn’t work it won’t work whatever you search and whatever you are going to do. I’m sorry but the only advice I can give you is to not start a lost battle.

The only solution is to get a real language, with a real library and of course a real IDE.

If you like the Eiffel Studio icon (that actually is the only good thing of the whole project) save it somewhere and then trash everything else. Trust me, this is the only good idea!

Maybe you are thinking that all this hate (Yes, I hate it!) is quite excessive. I have my reason and after you read a couple of that you should only agree with me and join the Eiffel-Haters.

Here is a tragic list of the problem I had. The order is random, but it is impossible to tell what came first and what came then since once you solve a problem it will come back.

  • It auto-completes only what it wants and after you compile it. Not exactly what I was expecting. Sorry, I am a CTRL+SPACE addict.
  • It can’t understand that two files are actually the same file. What a stupid compiler (I don’t know it the stupidity is actually in the compiler on in another piece of software, however there is something that fails).
  • The library of Eiffel are so limited that they choose to introduce .Net support. It should have been a good idea. If only the debugger worked with .Net code. Please Ballmer delete the page written by Bertrand Mayer on the holy MSDN. It doesn’t worth the bytes on the server.
  • The user community is … hey there is anyone using it? It seems there aren’t and I’m not going to blame them. I just wonder why someone that is not completely crazy should decide to use this crapware. (Before you ask me, I am forced to use it. What a sad destiny).
  • Documentation? If you call the man pages documentation you may also consider good the Eiffel documentation. I am used to JavaDoc and MSDN and I can’t go back without being brainwashed!
  • Pre-compilation is a mystery. Why does it sometimes mess so up that the only thing to do is to take an axe and eradicate the all pre-compile folder. (Be sure to delete only what is in the EIFGENs, or you are going to break everything).
  • It is consuming my .Net. I know that this is only a word, but this is a horrible word. I don’t want you to touch my .Net. Is it clear?
  • It is open source and the community is not doing anything to pick the project to a decent working status. There must be a reason.
  • The native compiler generates C code. That means the need for another compiler and tons of new problem, just to make impossible working with this IDE.

What should I do? No, Vi is not an option. Nor killing everyone at ISE.

The only people that should be happy about this total failure are guys working at Xilinx ISE and EDK the two crapware for hardware design in VHDL. At least they work, poorly but sometimes works. This makes hardware's guys big losers, and they lost also the worst IDE award!

Eiffel: What programming should NOT be.

p.s.

Please stop the monkey that are randomly hitting the keyboard and choose to stop this terrible project. An Eclipse plug-in will be enough. And maybe it will also work!

p.p.s.

If I will need a contract on my programs I will rather call a lawyer. Surely I’m not going to use Eiffel!


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Make your Firefox address bar better

The best thing of Google Chrome is its address bar that has both the classic address bar role and the search bar role.

Firefox To have the same behavior on Firefox you have to remove the search bar. After that you can type your searches in the address bar. Unfortunately the default behavior is to show the useless “I’m feeling lucky” Google response, to get a full response you have to do the following steps:

  • type about:config on the address bar and tell Firefox that you aren’t going to make a mess.
  • search for the keyword.URL entry. Once you found replace the default string with this one http://www.google.com/search?btnG=Google+Search&q=


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Monday, November 10, 2008

Android threatened by huge security hole

If you're worry about your iPhone's security you should relax at the idea of a much more flawed operating system: Android.

This is what happens on a Android device: "basically anything you type into your keyboard is also being run in a hidden console with root permissions."


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