SQLEditor Progress

Posted on 25 August 2008 by Angus Hardie

It’s been a little while since I wrote about the release of SQLEditor so it’s time to write about what’s been happening with SQLEditor since then.

SQLEditor 1.4.1.b2 (available now)

There is a new bug fix release of SQLEditor available in beta right now. If the “Check for beta versions” box in the preferences window is checked then you’ll get the offer of the upgrade to 1.4.1b2.

This is a minor bug fix release that fixes a few bugs that have been reported since the 1.4 release

SQLEditor 1.4.1b3 (available soon)

This release is going to fix a stupid bug that makes the file type selection in the export as image box not work correctly. The file types got mixed up in the code so the labels don’t match the output. It missed the b2 release, but it will be corrected in beta 3

SQLEditor 1.5

This is the next big release of SQLEditor. It’s going to have an entirely new SQL parser (written in ANTLR 3) and a major rewrite of the codebase (which moves almost all of the Java code to C or Objective C)

The new parser replaces to the old Java based parser (written in Javacc) with a new one that runs entirely in C and Objective C. Although I have found JavaCC to be an excellent tool, this replacement reduces the amount of Java code in the application substantially.

Plugins

The new code will also offer a much better api for plugins. The current api, which isn’t public, is used for the Rails import and export, but it’s annoying to work with, because the architecture wasn’t really built for it. The new codebase is much better for writing plugins.

JDBC / JNI Library for Cocoa

SQLEditor 1.5 also uses a new Java JNI and JDBC library for Cocoa which I’m hoping to be able to make Open Source soon. It allows you to access a database using JDBC rather than ODBC. This may not be as efficient, but it’s much easier to install drivers. If you would like to try these new libraries in your own application please send me an email and I’ll send you some code to try out. The final libraries are probably going to be BSD licensed, but it’s still being worked out exactly how it will work.

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SQLEditor 1.4 Final Released

Posted on 02 August 2008 by Angus Hardie

In case you missed it version 1.4 of SQLEditor was released back on July 8th.

If you’re using 1.3.9 you might like to consider upgrading.

The 1.3.9 upgrade system will be set soon to recommend this upgrade
(though 1.3.9 doesn’t use sparkle, so it can’t actually do the upgrade for you)

SQLEditor 1.4
(3.6 MB DMG File)

Lots of great new features and various bug fixes and improvements to the existing ones.

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Virtualized Mac OS X servers

Posted on 26 June 2008 by Angus Hardie

Media Temple are running a beta programme for virtualized Mac OS X server hosting (Using Parallels Server)

This sounds really interesting, it would be nice to be able to rent a Mac OS X box and run services on it.

It might even be useful for things like running a build system or even as a testing server.

The question is how much will it cost. That isn’t entirely clear yet, apparently because they’re not entirely sure how much each instance will need in the way of resources.

How it compares to SliceHost and Bytemark will remain to be seen.

(It must surely be more expensive, but how much more?)

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SQLEditor 1.4b26

Posted on 24 June 2008 by Angus Hardie

SQLEditor 1.4b26 is now available for download.

It fixes only one problem which is related to auto increment and SQLite.

This should hopefully be the final beta version for 1.4

🙂

The next version should be the 1.4 final release which will probably happen later this week or early next week (assuming no more problems are reported)

SQLEditor 1.4b26 Download [3.6MB DMG]

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SQLEditor 1.5

Posted on 20 June 2008 by Angus Hardie

SQLEditor 1.5 is making good progress. The latest thing that I’m currently working on is to extract SQL Views from a database. In theory this should be just like extracting tables, but it’s looking much harder to work out than I ever expected.

The new SQL parser is mostly finished. It’s been completely rewritten using ANTLR3. This offers a number of really good improvements, the most important one being that it’s not running in Java anymore. The parser is now completely native code.

Also pretty much finished is the new document model code, the new document export code and the new JDBC handling code. I’m hopeful that it will now be possible to run JDBC drivers that use AWT (which I’m informed the IBM DB2 driver may do).

SQLEditor 1.4 is just about finished too. There is one change that needs to get beta tested and then the 1.4 final release should be available.

Watch out for a new 1.5 download soon and of course the final candidate for 1.4

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Water found on Mars

Posted on 20 June 2008 by Angus Hardie

They spotted water on Mars!

Colonising now seems a step closer …

MarsPhoenix Twitter

(via Boing Boing)

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Reggy for regular expression testing

Posted on 07 June 2008 by Angus Hardie

Handy new tool I came across today which allows you to test regular expressions and see what they select.

Reggy

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280 Slides

Posted on 07 June 2008 by Angus Hardie

A cool new online presentation tool:

http://280slides.com/Editor/

The slide show application is really nice in that it feels very much like a desktop application when in use, even down the way buttons and key presses behave. The object rotation is particularly clever.

Another thing that makes this one clever though is the underlying framework, which is said to compile cocoa like code into dynamic web pages. It will apparently even be opensourced at some stage!

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Film Release Schedule

Posted on 30 May 2008 by Angus Hardie

Because I can never remember where this list is kept:

UK Film Distributors’ Association Film Release Schedule

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Scripts in XCode

Posted on 27 May 2008 by Angus Hardie

The build system for SQLEditor has lots of steps, from building each of the component frameworks, compiling the application, assembling the bundle, creating a disk image and then uploading everything to the server. (Plus things like version histories and read me files).To reduce errors I have several aggregate targets and a collection of scripts, but I was puzzled how to produce those little note entries that OCUnit generates when it’s running unit tests. There were several notes I wanted to make but I couldn’t figure it out.

However it occurred to me one day to inspect the souce of RunTargetTests and the answer was of course right there in the source.

<filename>:<line>: note: <message>

gives you a note.

<filename>:<line>: <message>

gives you a warning.

where

<filename>

is the name of the file you want the message to appear from

<line>

is the line number in that file

<message>

is the message you want to display

In the note form the word ‘note’ is a constant. Don’t replace it with anything.

As an alternative you put in use an empty filename and 0 for the line if you’re not interested in these details.

Example

@echo ":0: note: disk image creation complete"

Will display the message “disk image creation complete” as a note in the build window.

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The inspiration for star wars?

Posted on 10 May 2008 by Angus Hardie

George Lucas in Love

A parody on the origins of the star wars story…

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Engineers without borders

Posted on 19 March 2008 by Angus Hardie

Wired has an interesting article about Engineers without borders, a group that is trying to develop cheap technology solutions for developing parts of the world. The latest idea is a low cost wind turbine to generate electricity for lighting.
Best of all the design is intended to be produced by local manufacturers in the destination country, so it encourages local industry too.

Wired: Engineers Without Borders Bring Tech to Villages Without Power

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Flash CS3 – Trace not producing output?

Posted on 14 March 2008 by Angus Hardie

Found an odd problem with Flash CS3 today. I was working away and I realised that I wasn’t getting anything in the output window from calls to trace().

Just a completely empty output panel.

The answer is simple, make sure Filter Level is set to verbose in the menu on the output panel. If you have it set to None then you won’t get any output.

I’m not quite sure if this is something that I changed or if it is the default, but it isn’t exactly obvious.

Posted in Macintosh, Writing Software | 7 Comments

Chocolate Russian Roulette

Posted on 05 March 2008 by Angus Hardie

I happened to come across this:

Chocolate Russian Roulette [cybercandy uk]

You get a tray with 12 pieces of chocolate. 11 of them are praline filled milk chocolate bullets, the 12 contains a real chilli pepper.

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Handy database of recommended Mac Apps

Posted on 21 February 2008 by Angus Hardie

Johan Basberg (who designed the beautiful SQLEditor icon) has a handy list of recommended mac applications at

http://dittverk.no/mac/files/tag-editor.php

And SQLEditor is on this list 🙂

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ACID3 tests

Posted on 30 January 2008 by Angus Hardie

Work started on the new acid test almost as soon as the IE developer team posted notification that IE8 passes Acid2

🙂

Well, if you read the article and comments, it’s not perfectly correct. But it’s kind of funny as a quote.

CSSInfo

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ACM computer science key works

Posted on 19 January 2008 by Angus Hardie

The ACM is offering free downloads of selected classic works of computer science to anyone who signs up.

http://www.acm.org/classics 

(via  Lambda The Ultimate and Dusty Decks)

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Windows XP Services descriptions

Posted on 23 December 2007 by Angus Hardie

Since it wasn’t obvious to me where this document was, here is a link to a Microsoft page describing Windows XP services with descriptions.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/guidance/serversecurity/tcg/tcgch07n.mspx

There is also a similar document for Windows 2000

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb742605.aspx

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Brushy the Talking Airbrush

Posted on 09 November 2007 by Angus Hardie

Interesting blog post talking about how Adobe plans to improve Photoshop, which is obviously an application with a large number of very committed users.

John Nack is talking about task orientated user interfaces, which in theory is what Microsoft was trying to get to with clippy. Unfortunately since everyone seems to dispise clippy; Brushy the talking airbrush (signature quote: “Hey, pardner, looks you’re tryin’ to retouch a photo!”) is definitely NOT going to happen. (It’s just a joke in one of the comments).

John Nack on Adobe Photoshop: Photoshop, as seen through Johnny Cash

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Concept car with robot on dashboard!

Posted on 27 October 2007 by Angus Hardie

This looks really cool: IT World: Nissan adds a robot helper to its concept car

It’s a concept electric car which has a small robot on the dashboard that offers directions and tries to keep the driver cheerful.

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