igorbrejc.net

photo credit: State Library of New South Wales collection

I’ve succumbed to the Twitter craze (well, not really, just experimenting . You can follow me on http://twitter.com/breki74

Topics? Development, OpenStreetMap, Kosmos and other projects I’m involved in, hiking, photography, who knows what else…

Take a look at these screenshots from my company HP EliteBook 8530p (which I strongly recommend against buying, for the reasons described below):

Needless to say I’m running the latest version of the graphics driver (the graphics card is ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3650). The driver crashes on average 2-3 times a day, sometimes without possible recovery – the screen becomes black and I have to hard-shutdown the computer. And I’m not playing 3D games or anything – just using plain old VisualStudio or a browser. The forums are full of people complaining about similar problems with ATI drivers – and the reports are up to 2 years old. 2 years and they still haven’t managed to produce a stable driver for Vista. To quote Borat: “Nice!”

photo credit: ~jjjohn~

Well, sooner or later it was bound to happen. I’ve decided to put the yellow “Donate” buttons on my blog.

Although I did consider it for quite a while, I never really got to doing it. I guess I was lazy or a little bit apprehensive about asking people to donate their money. But today I got a notification that my bandwidth monthly quota for the igorbrejc.net Web hosting has reached 80%, and it’s only 10th in the month. I guess all the software downloads lately have slowly eaten away my quota.

BTW I’m not paying anything for the hosting (except for the domain registration), since it was generously awarded to me by my friend Boris and he was even kind enough to extend my bandwidth quota several times. But I guess it’s time to give him something back for his help (a six pack at least).

So anyway, if you find the stuff I’m developing (Kosmos, GroundTruth, etc) useful, please consider making a small donation to my effort. The money will be put to a good use, buying:

• Books that will extend my knowledge
• Tools that will help me develop new (and hopefully better) stuff
• Extra bandwidth, if it is needed  
• An occasional beer or two

And here’s the button (I will post it occasionally in blog posts):

All donations will be kept anonymous (unless you want it known). Thanks!

Status Update

As a side note: I’m currently in final stages of developing a new tool for generating relief contours based on a new Isohypse Binary File (IBF) format I’ve conceived. The main benefit of IBF (as opposed to holding the contours in OSM XML format) is the size – an experiment showed it used only 1% of the space compared to OSM XML. The data is split up into tiles, so a user can have a relatively large area covered with a single file and then pick and choose which tiles he/she needs. The IBF contours will be available both in Kosmos and GroundTruth in the short future.

Jeremy D. Miller (author of the StructureMap) has an interesting post about good and bad stuff when you go into blogging. It is an interesting read, especially for people like me who have just started blogging. Recommended.

Development In General

• Continuous Integration anti-patterns – Make your life with CI easier by learning what not to do

.NET Development

• A list of FxCop rules dropped in VS 2008 and new version FxCop

OpenStreetMap

• Historic OSM animation

General

• A List of Amazon S3 Backup Tools

• Source Control for Micro-ISVs
• Ultimate Boot CD for Windows
• Physics in Crysis – watch 3000 barrels fall

Two weeks ago Newsgator has made its RSS feeds reading products free. I saw the posts about it but I ignored them since I already used another RSS reader (GreatNews) and was more or less happy with it. The only thing I really missed was being able to synchronize reading of feeds between the home and my workplace. This is not a problem if you use online readers, but since I’m quite demanding regarding the RSS reader user interface, I stayed with desktop applications.

Yesterday while I was reading through the latest Gizmo Richards’ Support Alert Newsletter (which I highly recommend, by the way), the FeedDemon news appeared again and I realized that not only are Newsgator’s products free, but they also offer a free registration to their online RSS reader which also serves as a synchronization point for all desktop RSS readers. So this means for example that feeds you go through at work will be marked as read and then this information will be stored on Newsgator web server. When you go back home, you won’t have to manually mark these feeds as read.

And one additional “goodie”: if you have a J2EE-enabled mobile device, Newsgator offers a beta version of Newsgator Go For J2ME. You just submit a form with your email address and will immediately receive a mail with the link to the download page of this mobile reader. I tried it on my (2-3 years old) SonyEricsson mobile phone and it works quite nicely. And off course, the synchronization feature works with mobile reader, too.

Hats off to Newsgator.