Author Archives: bhartsock

Productivity Apps

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It’s been a while since I have updated my Tools list, or more appropriately for 2011, my Apps list. Since the initial writing of that list, one thing has changed pretty drammatically, I switched from BlackBerry to an iPhone. With that, how I get work done and the tools I use have changed. This post focuses on my top productivity apps.

Evernote

All day long, I find myself creating little notes. Notepad was the tool of choice, but now it is Evernote. In fact, this blog post was first written in Evernote on my Mac, proof read on my iPhone, and published from my work PC. That’s the power of Evernote. It’s features are simple yet powerful.

  • Note sync between devices
  • Plain text, rich text, image, and audio notes are all supported
  • Searching through piles of notes

There are a bunch more features I don’t use, but if you want to clear the *.txt clutter off your desktop, this is a great app.

Remember the Milk

RTM is a task manager. What separates it from all other task managers is the simplicity and speed. By simply typing a sentence, you can create a new task that has a due date, tags, etc.

“Schedule next sprint planning tomorrow #cp”

RTM also has a lot of keyboard shortcuts. In general, it is the fastest task manager I have ever used. For a fee, you can get it on the iPhone with all the features unlocked.

Word of warning, if you don’t sit down and learn how it works, you won’t like it. The keyboard shortcuts and semantics are super important.

LastPass

LastPass saves me more time and headaches than any other app I use. It is a secure password management app. It has a browser extension for IE, Firefox, and Chrome and works on Mac and Windows. Simple and easy if you are looking for a cross platform password management app.

Reeder for iPhone/Google Reader

Part of my job is keeping up on technology (at least part of keeping my job). The next two apps focus on managing the crazy amount of content produced on the internet. Reeder for iPhone syncs with my Google Reader account. That way, on the go I can be reading a few blog posts here and there. When I am not mobile, I just use Google Reader.

Instapaper

I get emailed a lot of articles and also run across a lot of articles while searching the internets. Unfortunately, the best time for me to read those articles is at night or while flying. Instapaper to the rescue. It saves webpages or emails for offline viewing, while also doing a few things like stripping ads and such.

I recommend installing the Instachrome extension (not the actual Instapaper extension). Obviously, I have it installed on my iPhone as well.

Unified Branch Diff in Tortoise SVN

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In my ancient pre-windows days, I used to do a complete branch diff before reintegrating into trunk to make sure everything looked good. Well, you can still do it in TortoiseSVN in three easy steps:

  1. Open Repo Browser
  2. Navigate to the first branch, right click, and select Mark for comparison
  3. Navigate to the second branch, right click, and select Show differences as unified diff



Little tidbit I didn’t know existed in Tortoise until today. Enjoy!

Events for Software Developers in Blacksburg

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It is sometimes hard to find out what events/activities are occurring for software developers in Blacksburg. This is a super small, non-complete list of things to do.

For VT students, there are a few more.

Let me know if there are other groups I can add to my list.

NUnit projects and config files

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NUnit project files (*.nunit) are an easy way to specify test assemblies you want tested during the build or continuous integration. Unfortunately, if you use app.configs in your test assemblies, you will quickly realize that NUnit isn’t loading them. For a test project, a single AppDomain is used (by default).

Today, I figured out how to change the default behavior quite by accident.

In NUnit GUI, go to Tools -> Settings then Assembly Isolation. Changing the Default Domain Usage setting to Use a separate AppDomain per Assembly caused NUnit to load an assemblies app.config.

Or, if you are using the NUnit console, simply add the parameter /domain:multiple and it should work. For example:

nunit-console.exe tests.nunit /domain=multiple

Note this option is only available in NUnit 2.5 or later.

How to create the perfect home office – Part 3 – The wires and wires and wires

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Wires are quite possibly the most annoying and unattractive part of any home office. Picking the right hardware and software will help, but at the end of the day you are going to have some wires that need a home. In this post I will go over a few of the ways I have hid equipment and wires in my home office.

Getting Started

The first step is getting the right equipment for the job. After a quick trip to Radio Shack and Lowes, I had all the equipment I needed.



Also, don’t forget a nice head lamp (the lengths I go to in order to create an awesome office).

Rethink desk space

All to often, a desk is cluttered with equipment that doesn’t need to be there. Routers, cable modems, wires. All these pieces of equipment sit on a desk for months (or years) at a time without being touched. Waste.

This caused me to sit back and rethink my desk space. Underneath the desk is an open slate for equipment storage and running wires. I ran with this idea and the rest of this post is focused entirely under my desk, with a beautiful Linksys router acting as the centerpiece.

The router

My goal for my favorite router, the Linksys WRT54G, was to hang it upside down under the table. I didn’t want to permanently attach it or damage the table with screws, so I choose industrial strength velcro to attach the router to the table.

My first attempt had little pieces of velcro on the legs of the router. It failed pretty quickly, as their wasn’t enough surface area on the legs to hold the adhesive velcro strips. The velcro was strong but the adhesive just wasn’t cutting it.

To remedy the situation, I popped of the legs of the router. (A lot of my ideas were inspired by the mount videos for WRT54G’s)

Then I cut a small hole in some velcro and then put a tiny bolt (from old computer parts I had stored away) through the velcro and leg. I attached a nut from the inside of the leg and reattached the legs to the router. This allowed the bolt to keep the velcro attached to the leg.

After putting the legs back on the router, I placed it under the desk and it has held strong for about a month now.

The cable modem

The cable modem was way easier because of the large surface area. I just stuck a big piece of velcro on it and slapped it under the desk.

Running wires

Running wires under the desk is pretty self explanatory, but I have a few tricks up my sleeve that I used to hide most of my wires.

Let’s start with this picture, before I started reorganizing some speaker wires.

The first thing I did was mount wire clips under the desk and run the speaker wires on the underside of the desk.

Then I simply ran the wires own the table leg to the subwoofer. I attached the wires to the leg with zip ties, as well as zip tied excess wires new the subwoofer.

Much better (at least the right half of the picture).

Next, I attached a cable organizing to the back of my desk. It was from Ikea, but it could easily be modified to work on other desks. It helped to get my powerstrip off the floor and hold some excess wires.

To run lots of wires around the desk, I created poor-mans wire clips with zip ties. It worked remarkably well, and I ran my monitor, keyboard, and speaker cables from my computer to their respective places on my desk.

The last thing I did was cluster wires to the frame with zip ties. Doing this removed the slack from the wires so they didn’t dangle under the table.

And now my home office is complete. Hope you enjoyed this series on how I built my home office.