kdmurray.blog

The crossroads of life and tech

Tag Archives: Development

Random Image Selector 1.2.0 Released

I’ve just put the finishing touches on the latest version of the Random Image Plugin that I originally released in the summer.  This plugin will allow you to produce an <IMG> tag containing a randomly selected image from a folder of your choice on any wordpress page (or post if you allow php).

The two biggest features in this version are:

  1. Automatic discovery of your WordPress Folder:  One of the biggest barriers to entry for the non-technical folks who tried to use this plugin was a lack of knowledge (or access) for finding the physical path to the WordPress installation.   The plugin will now automatically detect and use this path. CAVEAT: If you currently point your plugin at a folder which is outside of your wordpress installation, you will need to move that folder to use the v1.2.0+ versions of the plugin.
  2. Scaling/Sizing of the Displayed Images: One of the most requested features from the first iteration of the plugin was the ability to resize or scale images to fit in a particular location.  With older versions, if you wanted all the images to display at the same size or proportions then you needed to resize them all prior to uploading.  Well this is no more!  Now you can upload tons of randomly-sized images and the plugin will take care of the dirty work (including the calculation of just how much to scale-to-fit.  :)

I’d like to take the opportunity to thank everyone who has downloaded the plugin, and particularly those who have taken the extra time to send me feedback.  As of this release the plugin has been downloaded over 2,400 times which far exceeds anything I thought I would accomplish.

So give this plugin a shot, and let me know if it works out for you!

Microsoft Releases VS 2008 “Orcas”

VS 2008This news is a couple of weeks old now, the latest version of it’s development software, Visual Studio 2008 (formerly codenamed “Orcas”) has gone RTM.  The newest version of (imho) the best IDE on the market follows the “Whidbey” release and has also shipped in “Express” editions.

For those of you who haven’t read my previous posts on the subject, the Express editions are standalone IDE’s for VB, C# and Web Development, as well as an express edition of SQL server which can all be used and distributed royalty-free.

I’m looking forward to poking around in VS 2008 a bit more in the coming months.  So expect to see some more of this, and a bit less focus on the Mac platform for the next little while.

Microsoft to Release .NET Framework Source Code

Microsoft .NET FrameworkI’ve covered a few stories on this blog [1], [2], [3] where Microsoft is making some positive strides toward opening up to the concept of open source, particularly in relation to it’s software development arm.

On October 3rd Scott Guthrie, manager of the teams who build the development and platform tools at Microsoft, announced that the source code for the .NET Framework would be released with the next release of Visual Studio (VS 2008).  This announcement is the latest in a series of moves by Microsoft over the past couple of years.

Though the source code will be available for download and reference by software developers, it will be licensed under the Microsoft Reference License, meaning that the source will not be freely distributable.

Still, this is a major step forward for the software giant, and I’m looking forward to seeing what the next step will be on the journey toward peaceful coexistence with the open source community.

Random Image Plugin — 1000 Downloads!

Exactly 2 months ago, I released my Random Image Selector plugin for wordpress.  Every now and again I take a look and see how many people are downloading the random image plugin.

On average, in the exactly 2 months since it’s release about 15 people are downloading the plugin.  And on September 22nd, it hit the 1000 download mark!

Thank you to all who have provided feedback on the plugin, and suggestions for the next version.  I am working on it now and expect to have something released by mid-October once all the WordPress 2.3 testing is completed.

Thanks again, and happy downloading!

WordPress Plugin: Admin Links Widget

I’ve just launched the first version of a new WordPress widget, the Admin Links Widget.

This very simple widget does as the name suggests. It provides links to administrative functions from the sidebar of your WordPress installation. The catch is, only administrators will be able to see the links so the general public won’t have their view cluttered up with links they can’t use.

Give it a try!

  1. Download the Plugin
  2. Unzip into your WordPress plugins folder
  3. Activate the plugin
  4. Add the widget to your site!

If you have any suggestions or feedback, please feel free to post below.

Visual Studio ‘Rosario’ — CTP

I just read on Jeff Beehler’s blog that Microsoft has released a CTP (Community Technology Preview) of the next version of Visual studio… and I don’t mean VS 2008 “Orcas”.

Virtual PC images of the new VS install were made available from the Microsoft Downloads website on August 3rd.  I’ve included a direct link to the download page.

A bit of idle speculation…?  Microsoft may have features in store for Rosario that were originally been slated for Orcas, but were bumped due to the changes in the Windows Vista feature set… WinFS anyone?

I haven’t had a chance to read over the whitepaper yet, but It seems strange to me that they would be so far along with Rosario when Orcas is still several months away from RTM.

Have a look through Jeff’s post for more details on what precisely we can expect from VS ‘Rosario’.

MacPorts: Subversion setup

In trying to upload my first WordPress plugin to the subversion servers at wp-plugins.org, I found that I didn’t have Subversion installed on the Macbook yet. So I turned to my first source for all Mac tools which originated in the Linux/Unix realm and that’s MacPorts.

MacPorts (formerly DarwinPorts) is a package manager for Mac OS X which can handle the installation, removal and updating of many tools. The vast majority of these are command-line programs. They run the spectrum from development tool like Subversion or Ruby on Rails, to network tools like bind or arpwatch.

Typical syntax for installing a MacPort is:

sudo port install some-application

A quick note about the Subversion install: you may need to ensure that your MacPorts install is up-to-date. I needed to run a “self update” of MacPorts before my subversion install would complete. See the transcript below to see what I mean…

titanium:~/Projects/WP-Plugins kdmurray$ su root

titanium:/Users/kdmurray/Projects/WP-Plugins root# port install subversion +tools Error: Unable to execute port: wrong # args: should be "proc name args body"

titanium:/Users/kdmurray/Projects/WP-Plugins root# port selfupdate DarwinPorts base version 1.400 installed Downloaded MacPorts base version 1.5 Configuring, Building and Installing new MacPorts base selfupdate done!

titanium:/Users/kdmurray/Projects/WP-Plugins root# port install subversion +tools

If you’re working with command-line tools on your Mac, and trying to compile linux tools from scratch, give MacPorts a shot. It will quite literally save you hours of time and frustration.

PowerTray 0.9 Beta Released

Well after several weeks of trying to work on things (and 10 days of waiting for SourceForge) I’ve managed to get the first Beta-build of PowerTray published and available for download.

The initial version has a few interesting features:

  • Plugin-based architecture to allow for future feature development
  • XML configuration file to allow for assignment of Hotkeys
  • Plugin for Google Search
  • Plugin for Wikipedia Search (english only)

This project can be downloaded from the SourceForge project site. Please leave your comments and thoughts on future enhancements.

Visual Studio 2005 on Vista Requires Admin Rights

I finally got the chance today to get back to working on PowerTray, this time with my Visual Studio 2005 installation on my Virtualized Windows Vista setup.  The first thing I ran into was this warning dialog:

VS2005 requires admin permissions

To me, this is the kind of issue that shows immaturity in the OS.  Though it is possible to run the environment without full-blown admin permissions, some of the functionality of the environment is limited as a result.  There is an MSDN article on the subject which outlines the difficulties that are faced without admin rights.

Most of the problems are only resolvable by running VS2005 using administrative permissions.  Ross Dagan has a post on his blog on just how to set this up using the VS2005 shortcut.

Admittedly this is just another front in the battle between security and usability.  I understand why most of the security features which cause these issues exist in Vista, and admittedly the option to run only Visual Studio in administrative mode does keep the computer quite secure.  It’s just disappointing that there isn’t a more elegant solution.

Getting WGET for OS X 10.4.x

!!! Geek Alert !!!

Sometime ago Apple removed the tool wget from the OS X toolset and replaced it with the arguably more powerful curl tool. This new tool is great, and it has many new advanced features that the older wget tool lacks. However curl has one thing against it: it’s somewhat more complicated to use (and its man page is much longer). As a result, I find I use wget far more frequently.

So the question is, where to get wget?

The answer? Right here!

You can download a package of the binaries and an install script/readme file from here. (Thanks to Quentin Stafford-Fraser for doing the initial version of the binary pack).

Alternately, you can follow these steps (shamelessly cannibalized from wincent.com) to acquire and build wget for yourself. Note: This does require that you have the Apple Developer Tools (XCode) installed.

# Make a working directory somewhere, anywhere in fact.
mkdir wget
cd wget# The original instructions called for you to get the source from the cvs repository
# but it looks like that copy of the code no longer exists.  I believe they switched to
# a subversion repository, but since OS X doesn't come with SVN by default, we'll
# just have to do things the old fashioned way
# Download a copy of the source code for wget.  I found mine at
# http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/wget/
# (pulling down a file like this is a perfect use for wget)
curl http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/wget/wget-1.10.2.tar.gz -o wget-1.10.2.tar.gz

# Uncompress the archive
tar -zxvf wget-1.10.2.tar.gz

# Move into the new wget source folder and perform the build actions
cd wget-1.10.2
./configure --with-ssl
make

# Run the installation command.  This will require the root password to complete
sudo make install

# Exit the sudo
exit

# The default installation folder is /usr/local/bin. In Mac OS X 10.4.x, this folder
# is not a part of the $PATH variable by default.  You can add it with the command below
export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH

Again, a big thank you to those whose articles I plagiarized referenced. These binaries above were compiled on the MacBook (Intel Core Duo, OS X 10.4.9). I would think that they will work on any Intel-based Mac for sure, not sure about PowerPC versions. Let me know if this works out for you!

EDIT (2007-06-02): Judging by some of the comments, it appears that this build does not work on PowerPC-based Macs.  I’m looking into the steps required for creating a universal binary now…  Stay Tuned!