thread dump

There are quite a few network-drive products out there competing for our attention these days.  I’ve tried quite a few (including Box.net and SkyDrive), but narrowed the choice down to the two which seem the best: JungleDisk and DropBox.

JungleDisk attracts me mostly because I can use my existing Amazon S3 storage behind the JungleDisk tool and pay only for the space I actually use. (Note, JD now also uses RackSpace CloudFiles, which actually looks even better than S3).  DropBox is free for 2GB, then a hefty 99 USD annually, for 50GB.  Round one to JungleDisk, in my view.

Then we come to the user-interface. Both tools integrate with Windows and Linux, JD using drive mapping to expose the storage and DropBox using a special folder inside My Documents, with icon overlays to indicate file status.  Both support drag/drop access and run a small tray-resident UI application.

But DropBox is just so, so much nicer to use than JD in the everyday Windows context.  It feels better integrated and the UI seems cleaner.  Other folk have blogged about this difference and I must concur – DropBox has the edge.

Now to the subject which prompted this post in the first place. Neither of these products appears to handle proxy servers particularly well, especially when switching between proxy / no-proxy.  If I restart Windows and forget to switch off the proxy in JD, here’s the mess I’m greeted with when Windows starts:

Yuk. Can’t it simply notice that the proxy isn’t responding, log the fact / decorate the tray icon, and leave it for me to sort out?  It gets worse: if I click on the links (for more information) look what I get:

Is this really what they want the user to see?  This is awful.

DropBox is slightly better, but still doesn’t work properly if I leave the proxy on, and restart. No nasty dialogs, but the network connection isn’t resolved, even if I set it to ‘auto-detect proxy settings’ which according to the DropBox site should use the IE settings. Why can’t these tools auto-detect proxies properly?

DropBox files are cached on the local machine which means if the network is down I can still work on all my files locally, and re-sync when I next connect.  JungleDisk does cache your files, but in a pretty inaccessible way in your profile.  The path will be something like C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Application Data\JungleDisk\cache\e9998872111157539d8880eca4456345-default

Another good feature of DropBox which isn’t available in JungleDisk is sharing files and folders: in JD, everything is private.

DropBox gets so many things right. The one and only feature I want from JungleDisk is the S3 / CloudFiles backing store. Obviously, the DropBox business model is built around the 99 USD annual charge so I don’t know whether this can/will ever happen.

Although Project Locker has served me very well for a good many years, better alternatives have emerged recently. I didn’t set out to switch providers, only to see whether Project Locker would support Mercurial or git. At the time, neither were available – since then PL have added git support. It was while looking around at the many newer project hosting services that I came across Assembla.

The Assembla proposition is simple and very reasonable: public, open-source projects are hosted for free (up to 200MB). Private plan pricing is extremely keen:

• $2.00 per user per space, per month
• $3.00 per gigabyte of disk space per month
• $8 per user per month maximum. After you pay for a team member in four spaces, additional spaces are free.

Private plans get unlimited disc space.

But for me, the economics of Assembla are only half the story: the other half is a combination of things: the clean, functional web interface, the range of additional tools (Trac, wiki, files, chat, project dashboard etc.) and a strong feeling that the people behind Assembla know what they are doing.

Assembla does offer git hosting, but I’m sticking with Subversion for now.  SVN is good enough for my purposes and I can’t live without TortoiseSVN.

I’ve been using Assembla for a couple of months and my experience has been very good indeed. 

Bit disappointed with the latest VS Express 2008 installer – I’ve download the ‘kitchen sink’ ISO image (containing all the VS Express editions), but when I try to install VC#, I get these errors:

and this one:

Because this is a new laptop (therefore a fresh Vista install) I did wonder whether this was a Windows Installer service issue, but the service is there and appears to be the latest version.  I’m puzzled, and more than slightly irritated.  It must be something simple – I’ll no doubt kick myself when I discover what it is.  Meantime, I’ll try the network install.

I recently got a shiny new laptop, which is great, but usually this means installing and configuring a lot of stuff before it’s really a comfortable place to be.  I’m sure this is familiar to most folk.  I expected one of the biggest challenges to be Firefox, as I have a number of plugins, a lot of passwords and the usual bookmarks and preferences. 

Luckily, I found FEBE, a Firefox addin which effectively solves this problem.  The addon can be found on the Mozilla site here, but the author’s own site has the latest version – there seems to be quite a big version gap.

To take all of my settings to the new machine I used the ‘Full Profile’ option in FEBE which creates a single file containing absolutely everything: I did try experimenting with a subset but it wasn’t successful.  If you’re not familiar with Firefox profiles I strongly suggest reading this section of the FAQ on the author’s site and follow the instructions.

After my last post on NB and Eclipse, you might think that I’d never go anywhere near NetBeans again. Well, predictably enough some things (chiefly HL7, Ruby and RDF) have dragged me back to NetBeans and Java, so I grabbed NB 6.0 Beta 1 and gave it another try.

Much, much better. Somehow, the startup time has been reduced quite a bit, everything felt faster and the whole tool is shaping up rather well. A complete contrast to my previous (and quite recent) experience. I played with the startup settings to improve performance even further (details somewhere below) and now I’m quite happy with it.

You do need to spend a bit of time with NB to appreciate just how good it actually is: the code editor features outshine Visual Studio quite easily – better refactoring support, better code navigation being the two I immediately appreciate. Simple example: want to go to a definition? Hold down CTRL and statement elements become hyperlinks. Adding libraries and references is as simple as in VS, and you can create project groups which are similar to VS solutions.  I’ve barely scratched the surface.

The set of plugins in the default download of NB 6.0 provides a lot of functionality, not all of it really ready for daily use, in my opinion. The UML support appeared good until I tried to use it for a substantial reverse-engineering job: it took a long time and the resulting class diagrams were slow and awkward to render and navigate.  Not really a priority for me, though.

Subversion support is also provided and this is definitely a priority for me.  Sadly, this appears to be weak, too. First, NB appears unable to import new (unversioned) projects: the ‘Import into Repository…’ command seems to be permanently greyed-out. Oddly, the ‘Commit…’ command is available even though the project folder is completely unconnected to my SVN repository.  If I invoke that, I get a partial list of new files in the grid, and the option to commit them; clicking the commit button apears to work, but after a while I see a popup dialog saying “Action canceled by user”, even though I did nothing!

Ruby support is good, but I’m a novice Ruby developer and have yet to exercise all the Ruby features. The ever helpful Roman Trobl has provided some good Flash demos of Ruby support: I recommend watching the demo of NB’s RoR support, where Roman builds a bare-bones blog application in a couple of minutes. I haven’t found a better Ruby IDE yet.

I plan to put more information on using NetBeans on the Java section of my Wiki, especially for folk coming to Java and NetBeans from a Visual Studio background.  So far I’ve only added a note on the configuration settings I’ve adopted which improve performance considerably – more soon.

How long can this last?  Well, on the evidence of the last few days, I’m optimistic.