I think that it’s about time for this post so here goes.

Brief history
GUtil! was born sometime in 2006 and I released the first version (GUtil! 0.4.9.5) on November 3rd 2006, for Firefox 1.5.

At first it was something that I used to speed up access to the Google tools that I was using so I only had a couple of links. Then somebody asked for it and also asked me to add some more things that he used. So I did. And I published it. And more people wanted it. That is all.

Current status
I haven’t touched the code since July 30, 2009.I’m not using it anymore. I have restricted my Google usage to Google apps, Picasa and Reader.I don’t care about anything else, nor do I have the time to care about anything else.

Some statistics:
- GUtil! has been downloaded 240,651 times
- GUtil! is part of 198 collections on AMO
- GUtil! has 8680 active daily users down from more than 12000

Future
Well, here comes the bad news.
I’m not updating it anymore. I don’t have the time, the patience or the interest to update GUtil! anymore.

If you want to work on it, it’s always been open so go get the source and have a whack!
http://code.google.com/p/gutil-firefox-extension/

All the best to whoever wants to continue with GUtil!

Some time ago I worked on some projects using ASP.NET that were mostly ASPX with some specialized ASHX’s (c# behind the scenes).
The handlers just generated some graphs or exported Excel files, regular code monkey style, no architecture, no plan, just write it fast – quick dirty hack, quick buck – and I always thought that these guys that accept .NET inferior stuff deserve what they get.

As time flew by, I started to get a taste of what .NET is all about, luring me to the dark side.

Photo by B-tal

At the beginning I felt like “this is what evil must taste like”, but I quickly got accustomed to all the new things and now, I’m playing with .NET stuff again, mostly C#, trying to level my skills and having a lot of fun in the process. I built things like the quick and dirty multi font viewer, buggy and poor, mostly because nobody uses it.

Now, I wanted to start something bigger, and nicer (I won’t say what) and I felt that I needed to do it the right way, you know, MAINTAINABLE.
I started looking for a DI container and I started with Spring and Pico. I’m pretty accustomed to pico and I’ve been using Spring since version 1 so I though I’d give them a try. Wrong, strange, alien, weird, huge, EVIL.

For what I wanted to do it really seemed this way. How’s about something that is 10 megs big because spring and dependencies is 7 megs big. And I’m not even going to use most of it, I just want some plain dependency injection and maybe some tooling , like fast i18n.

Problem solved, evil destroyed
I found the solution! Why not have some fun AND learn the inner workings of C# and .Net? Why not build my own? So I did!

NanoDI is a small dependency injection container and tooling for .NET C# projects that are small or that do not need the complexity of bigger IoC solutions.

NanoDI‘s goal is to be small, fast and clean.

Links:
Nano Dependency Injection home
NanoDI Ohloh.net project page
NanoDI Google Code project

The code is junky by my standards but I’m slowly refactoring as my c# skills get better. Next week I’m going to finish scoping and start working on proxies and interceptors. You can help too!

Have a taste, have fun!

Being a software developer sometimes involves more than just coding.
This time it was a logo and a splash screen I did a while ago and I had a problem – I couldn’t remember what font I used.

Of course, having a lot of fonts installed made it a nightmare.

I googled a bit and found a lot of shareware that allowed me to view multiple fonts and compare. I didn’t use any of it. Instead I used a nice piece of software called Opcion.

It solved my problem, although it acted a little strange plus, it was Java. I can handle it because I’m a Java developer.. but can anybody else?

After finishing the work I decided I could do something about it. So I did.

It’s called Multi Font Viewer and it’s free.

You can download it from: the Multi Font Viewer page at xandertools.com.

If you want to take a look at the code or contribute visit the Multi Font Viewer Google Code project.

Best of luck and happy fonting!

“The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.” – Arnold Toynbee

I’m back!

I’ve missed work – just a little – but don’t let anybody know. The second day after my leave I had something really interesting to do, which kept me at work until midnight. Finishing successfully gave me the self esteem boost that I call “I love my job”. It’s one of those rare (rare now, once often) moments that remind me why I became a developer. Enough of that, back to business.

I’m married now, to a beautiful and fun woman that understands what makes me tick, and that’s wonderful. We are fixing our future house, which I hope we are going to finish by December which will include my hopefully spacious office (I say hopefully because we are going to share it, as she want gym stuff in it too). I’m going to use the new office for my fun work (that means work that I don’t perform at the office, which isn’t as fun anymore).

This fun work includes rewriting GUtil into something much better which will take full advantage of Firefox 3, working on the XUL data collection application that I’m going to hopefully finish this year (and which I’m going to use to catalog my stuff – 100+ SciFI and business books, currency collection, god knows how many DVD’s – so I am actully going to dogfood it) and testing Shredder/TB3.

Speaking about ThunderBird 3, it’s almost in Alpha 3 now, so we need all the help we can get. If you have a few hours, please join the testing effort and help us make the next version of Thunderbird a smash hit! After you read some testing instructions for Alpha 3 you can complete a smoketest in a little over an hour and give something back. It’s that simple.

For the grand finale, I’m leaving you with another great book. Odyssey by Jack McDevitt is a great space adventure, in the spirit of The Voyage of the Space Beagle. It’s not very big and it’s easy to digest.

I’m switching to George Martin for this week’s “on my way to work reading”. Cheers!

eLiberatica 2008 is over, long live eLiberatica.

It’s been a great conference, with wonderful speakers and just as wonderful participants, you really should take a look at the conference website.

The main topics of the conference have been open source adoption in the enterprise, open source business models and licensing. Conferences like eLiberatica raise awareness and promote open source in a fun and extremely interactive way.

Oh yeah, Microsoft came, and they were incredibly friendly and sincere and proved the community one more time that they are not evil, they just want to sell stuff in this new world.

For me, the most interesting parts were the presentations made by Mozilla’s David Ascher, ActiveState’s Shane Caraveo, Navarik’s Bill Dobie and surprisingly the talk given by Constantin Teodorescu, part of the Romanian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology.

I got some new ideas, confirmed some old ones, met some interesting people and generally had a lot of fun.

At the end of the conference, the O’Reilly rep did something that I extremely liked. They donated all the books that weren’t sold to the four universities present at the conference, quietly, the kind of thing that makes you respect them even more.