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!

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!

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!

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!

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.

This year I decided to completely liberate my home computers. I always had Linux installed, dual booting, since RedHat 5. It’s taught me a lot of things over the years, especially my Slackware period.
I always like to think that GNU/Linux prepared me for the real IT life, for the long nights of enterprise deployments and roll-outs on Linux and Unix(mostly AIX) platforms and for the long days of Oracle troubleshooting. Most importantly I like to think that Linux taught me how to handle failure, how to resolve things gracefully and especially how to prevent “evil” things from happening.

When you first started using something like Linux, especially in the old days, it was all dark magic. It was something miraculous created by highly intelligent creatures that seemed to come from another universe. Imagine a 13 year old boy, getting a PC Magazine (or was it Chip?) CD that had something called Linux on it. I already knew what a BIOS was, I was already accustomed with 3 versions of MS-DOS and two versions of Windows (3.11 and 95) but I thought “Oh my God, this is so cool! I have to try this!”. That was the first time I really understood what disk partitioning is and what it really means to loose all your data. It took me a week to install everything back, and almost a month to get RedHat 5 and Windows 95 to dual boot. I especially loved the power I had. The power to bust everything up and the power to learn how to fix it.

Fast forward to five years later, Windows 2000 and Linux Slackware. I settled on Slackware because it was probably the only distribution that was “old school”. I couldn’t stand the “evolution” of RedHat and Mandrake (I think it’s Mandriva now) configuration and the fact that almost all distributions seemed to bloat. Entire gigabytes of “miscellaneous stuff” needed to be installed, spawning 3 to 5 discs. That was just insane. I loved the simplicity of Slackware. It’s tgz packages, it’s bare-bone nature, the possibility to install 50 megabytes of core packages and then each package I needed. I usually only needed Disk 1 for core and a few X and shell packages from Disk 2 and I was done. I did my homework on it, I spent hundreds of hours on Freenode’s IRC servers, talking to all kind of people that I still remember, people that are still there now ( like Zhivago, on ##c, one of the people I looked up to, I still do).

Fast forward to five years later. Not dual booting anymore. I’m writing this from my Ubuntu laptop, sharing an internet connection (through a ASUS WL-500G Deluxe wireless router running OpenWRT) with my Ubuntu desktop machine.
I think that this is the first time in my life when I can sincerely say that Linux fills all my needs as an operating system, and it’s not just about Ubuntu (although it is one of the best distributions I had the chance to work with), it’s about everything it contains that I use. Looking back over the years, I have to admit that Grub is definitely better than LILO, ext3 is definitely better than ext2, vim is better than vi, mc is better than nc (although nc was very good) and some modern GNU/Linux distributions are now better than Windows.

I am not a zealot, not am I a GNU or Linux fanatic, I am a technical guy working in a technical position, writing software that is usually hosted in application servers running on Linux platforms accessed by clients running all flavors of Windows. I must admit that although a lot of people think otherwise, Windows is a stable and pretty strong system, as I do all my development(and other spooky stuff) on a Windows machine, that I never shut down (it barely restarts once every month when some automatic updates really ask for it). Windows was installed sometime in the last months of 2005 and has worked flawless ever since (except for some strange Outlook issues that are out of the scope) so I admit that I trust Windows XP (with emphasis on XP), but not any other version.

In short, GNU/Linux shaped my life as a hacker, shaped my life as a professional and (I’m not afraid to admit it) shaped my life as an individual, so I want to send a warm greeting to all the people that made it what it is now.

Anyway, that was my Linux story for the new year, and I leave you with a screenshot of my new BluBuntu themed Ubuntu desktop.

I hope that all humanity (including the resource hungry corporations) will soon see the need for this kind of transportation.

Reading about it being treated so seriously got me a little curious. I mean, most people know about about:blank, you know, the empty document, or about the Book of Mozilla (only works on Mozilla/Gecko based browsers), or even the complex and very useful Mozilla’ish about:config settings window, but did you know about these SeaMonkey/Firefox ones:

• about:cache – Disk and Memory cache information
• about: – in page version of the about dialog
• about:plugins – lists all the installed plugins (very useful)
• about:buildconfig – details about the SeaMonkey/Firefox build
• about:neterror – this is my absolute favorite, it displays an error

Mostly i use about:config and about:cache but the random about:neterror coworker prank is always high-rated in my office .

Read more about about:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/About:_URI_scheme
http://kb.mozillazine.org/About_protocol_links

This is an ancient anchor clipart created using Inkscape 0.45, which i really recommend as it’s the best open-source vector graphics editor available on Windows.
Enough with the blabber, here is the clipart.

Gif version

PNG version

Download SVG

If this helped, have a look at some more free anchor clipart.