I’ve been tinkering around with Quix, a ’super’ bookmarklet that can easily replace several Firefox addins and overall reduce your dependency on your mouse.

Installing Quix is a simple matter of visiting the Quix site and dragging the bookmarklet to your toolbar. Since I didn’t want to click on the bookmarklet to activate I used Firefox’s keyword to it:

Firefox Keyword Shortcut

So now I can do a ALT+D to take me to the address bar and type qq+Enter to pull up the Quix dialog.

Quix Dialog

There are quite a few commands and shortcuts available on the Quix site (enter ‘Help’ in the Quix dialog to get a complete list).

While I have a few shortcuts like this setup in Find and Run Robot (my launcher) having this bookmarklet running inside the browser adds a lot more power to what can be done.

I’ll probably only use a small percentage of these but even then I can already see it being a timesaver.

So I’ve been working with a bunch of REALLY old code lately and one thing I run into over and over again is queries with no queryparam.

While I do have a snippet setup in CFEclipse to insert a queryparam:

<cfqueryparam value="##" cfsqltype="cf_sql_$${CF SQL Type:varchar|bit|date|integer|numeric|timestamp}">
</cfqueryparam>

But I still have to cut-n-paste the variable, etc. Kind of a pain when doing it over and over again. So I started tinkering with AutoHotKey (my favorite lazy tool) and came up with this:

;-- Wrap selected text in QueryParam (will first strip ' or ") ---
!q::
clipboard =
send ^c
clipwait, 1
If ErrorLevel = 0
StringReplace, clipboard, clipboard, ', , All
{
clipboard = <cfqueryparam value="%clipboard%" cfsqltype="cf_sql_varchar">
send ^v
}
return
</cfqueryparam>

So now I simply highlight my variable – hit my key combo (in this case [ALT]+[Q] and my text is copied to the clipboard – stripped of quote marks, wrapped in the queryparam and sent back to the editor!

I have been working on some really old code lately and to say it is a mess would be an understatement. Evaluate statements all over, font tags and queries with no queryparams.

I’ve been using the first version of QueryParam Scanner for awhile now and discovered that it’s been recently updated – nice new interface:

QueryParam Scanner

Also a nice new options screen:

QueryParam Scanner Options

And I also noticed a blurb about an Eclipse plugin.  Installation instructions are on the link above via the traditional Update Site method or you can download the .jar file directly.

When I first installed it I was a bit confused on how to run it from within Eclipse but after a bit of digging I found it!  Simply right click on your directory and there will be a new option “Scan With QueryParam Scanner”

QueryParam Scanner Eclipse Plugin

This will then open up your browser, start QueryParam Scanner and load the selected directory.   Very slick!  Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a way to pass in options (recurse directory) so it will only zip through the files in the root of the directory you select.  The author Peter Boughton does mention these are early releases. Hopefully he can tweak this a bit in future versions to give you more control.

In my opinion every project should be run through QueryParam Scanner and the VarScoper, just in case. :)

Update:
Peter left a comment and after checking there is indeed a QueryParam Scanner option under the Preferences menu (which I somehow completely missed!)

QueryParam Plugin Preferences

Today I was on Twitter and someone mentioned installing Xen and I mentioned VirtualBox.  I still don’t think a lot of people know about it yet but they tried it and Twitted (?) me back that they had installed it.

Checking out VirtualBox now. Looks like it might be a little easier to configure.

I used to run VMWare but found the install was a bit of a pain (especially on Linux) and while it was nice I was never really blown away.  When I got my GPS and needed to run Windows on my Ubuntu machine I went looking around to see what else was available. I tried QEMU and a few others and finally stumbled upon VirtualBox (which has since been bought by Sun).

While I haven’t tried VMWare in quite awhile VirtualBox has lots of great features which I love:

• Simple install.  I’ve installed on both Windows (with a Linux guest) and on Linux (with a Windows guest) and never had any issues.
• There are a host of easily downloable images at the VirtualBox VDI Index. Want to try Ubuntu, Solaris or gOS? Grab and image and run it.
• Easily share folders between the guest and host – this makes moving files to and from my GPS a snap.
• Seamlessly run Windows inside your host OS.   You can even do this over RDP – a very cool video of that is available on YouTube.

If you haven’t yet checked out VirtualBox I’d certainly recommend giving it a try.

I was looking at Eclipse today and realized I never use the toolbar.  While you can hide it by right-clicking the toolbar and selecting “Hide Toolbar” it doesn’t stick. When you restart Eclipse – the toolbar is back.

Fullscreen Eclipse

I then went on a hunt to see if this was buried in the preferences somewhere  and turned up nothing. Next stop – Google!  That didn’t turn up anything either but I did run across and interesting plugin that at
least gives me similar functionality…

Eclipse Fullscreen

With this small plugin Eclipse and RCP Programs based on Eclipse can run in full screen mode, so that you can have more space to edit your programs.

So now I can open a file – hit CTRL+ALT+Z and get a nice maximized window – no toolbar, no statusbar.

Google Docs - Form

Recently we wanted to do a quick survey for our local ColdFusion user group. My first thought was to setup Ray Camden’s excellent Soundings survey application.  Dan Wilson pointed me to Google Docs instead.

Sure enough under the “New”menu you can find “Form”!   Google provides a very intuitive Ajaxy interface to quickly create a new form.  You can enter the normal question types – checkbox, multiple choice, text and text areas, etc. You can make certain questions required and also easily reorganize the questions using drag-n-drop.

Reporting is also available.  Google builds the form on top of a spreadsheet and then provides you with some default reporting options and of course you could move this data into Excel and do your own.

And of course the form wouldn’t be of much use if no one could see it so like all Google Docs you can make it public, as well as share the form itself so you can have multiple people editing it.

I usually don’t backup anything on my personal computer. I know. I know. But honestly I just don’t have anything that important on there – everything is in SVN or stores somewhere safe.  My wife on the other hand is a different story.  She’s doing a lot of illustration work these days for her company Your Door and More and her hard drive was filling up with Illustrator and Photoshop files.

Originally I tried Mozy’s free account. They give you 2GB of space and overall I was very impressed with how things worked.  But a few months after signing up we got a message indicated we were over our 2GB quota.  I knew we could upgrade and pay a small monthly fee but I wanted to explore other options as well.

After digging around and looking at several other services I decided to cancel our Mozy account and move to Jungle Disk.  Jungle Disk is simply a client you install on your local PC (they have clients for all THREE platforms – Win, Mac AND Linux!).  Your files are then actually stored on Amazon.com’s S3 Storage Service.

Setup could not have been easier. I signed up for Jungle Disk, purchased ($20) and downloaded the client and during installation it guided me through signing up at Amazon. Everything was tied to my existing Amazon account as well so I didn’t have to enter any new information – nice!

The Jungle Disk client (on Windows) is very well thought out. You can either setup a ‘backup’ plan allowing you to configure scheduled backups and selected data and/or you can choose to setup a ‘network drive’ which allows you to treat the Amazon Storage Service like a local drive allowing you to drag and drop files to it as well as share that drive among several computers.

Fees are dirt cheap. My wife probably won’t be moving much data other than uploading backups. Mozy was $4/mo. With Jungle Disk charging $.15/GB our costs should be under $1 month for some time.

Other pluses – you can choose to encrypt your data. You purchase one Jungle Disk account and can then use it on as many computers as you like. It’s possible to subscribe to backup reports via email or RSS.

Downsides? Not many so far. You are trusting your data to the ‘cloud’ so downtime could be an issue but for us that is not a huge deal. Web access isn’t included but can be purchased for $1 month. This allows you to access your data via the web instead of having to download the Jungle Disk client. Again not a big issue for us and they do have a ‘portable’ version of the client which you can store and run from a USB drive.

I haven’t installed the client yet on my Ubuntu workstation but I will report back once I have done that and used it for a few days.

I saw this post on David Harris’s blog and thought I’d mention a bit more about mind mapping.

What’s a mind map? Wikipedia says:

A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks or other items linked to and arranged radially around a central key word or idea. It is used to generate, visualize, structure and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, decision making, and writing.

I like to think of it as software to help you during those “throw it at the wall and see what sticks” sessions. Instead of a cumbersome Microsoft document I find mind mapping allows you to quickly collect and organize information especially during meetings.

Freemind is a free, open-source mind mapping software written in Java. As such it is cross platform so you can easily run it anywhere you can run Java. The Freemind wiki also has a nice list of alternatives.

If you have never tried mind mapping Freemind makes it easy to give it a shot.