Tonight we released Windmill 0.4, easy_install -U windmill .

Since the OSAF shake-up we have been very distracted with all kinds of things, and if it hadn't been for the community asking for features and actively using Windmill it wouldn't have seen a fraction of the attention that it has. Over the last four months we have worked with lots of you out there in the community stepping up our browser compatibility, python compatibility, IDE usability, Performance basically every piece of the project has become better because people have made themselves heard and there is nothing quite so motivating as an active community.

We have maintained our accessibility in #windmill on freenode and are glad to see more and more users there every day. Right now we are in the process of slating the bugs/features that will go into Windmill 0.5. Please feel free to make your voice heard in this process as well.

This release contains a revamp of the IDE, fixes for usability in IE, major performance tweaks, tweaks in the server for continuous integration and a whole slue of bug fixes that you can go view at http://windmill.osafoundation.org.

Thanks for your continuing interest, involvement and support!

As a web developer you are probably aware of that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach that you suffer when posed with the idea of testing your freshly written JavaScript that works perfectly in FireFox.

For years now, we have had to 'suck it up', and pour a glass of scotch to get through an afternoon of testing in IE. As I am now a Web Developer at Rearden Commerce who currently caters to an audience of enterprise users instead of your standard bay area geek population -- I have to make sure everything I commit works nicely in IE.

Last week after a few hours of IE testing, and dirtying my code I worked so hard to organize with alerts, I decided that there HAD to be a better way to do this. I went ahead and spent many hours searching the web, installing everything I could find that promised to make IE development easier and happily I can say -- it was a success.

First and foremost however, there are a few tips I can give you right off the top that will make your life easier. Before you take the plunge into line by line alerting, go through your code and do the following;

1. Remove unnecessary commas in your data structures:
( FF ignores this one, but IE will give you an error that isn't helpful )
ex.

var superNinjaObject = {
me: 'adam',
home: 'oakland',
};


2. Don't try to access characters in a string as if it was an array:
( Works in FF, but IE will simply give you undefined and not tell you a thing )
ex.

var myString = 'Welcome to the Jungle';
$('mynode').innerHTML += myString[14]; //Broken in IE
$('mynode').innerHTML += myString.charAt(14); //Compatible alternative


Now we can get to what you are really interested in, the new tools:

1. Internet Explorer Development Toolbar
URL: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/deta ... laylang=en

This is Microsoft's best stab at a firebug equivalent. This gives you all the flexibility you need to inspect the DOM tree, look at CSS, Scripts, Images, Network etc. To put it simply, it makes IE development something you can swallow. I can't image going back to IE development without this. Unfortunately it is missing two things, the first is the absolutely necessary JavaScript shell. This can be solved by using the IE JS Bookmarklet that you can find at http://blog.monstuff.com/archives/000287.html. Add this to your favorites and then whenever you need a JS shell, pop this up and hack away ( I agree it would be nicer if it was built in ). The second is the ability to set breakpoints and step through your code debugging and introspecting objects and variables. I do have a solution for this, see new tool number 2.

2. Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition
URL: http://www.microsoft.com/express/vwd/

This is the solution to your break pointing, stepping, introspecting needs. The way you use it is a bit awkward, but it does complete the development experience. To use this you need to create an empty web project and then start debugging. This will launch IE and bring you to a blank server page off the local MS web server instance. At this point you can go ahead and plug in the URL of the app you are wanting to test. Additionally if you have set any 'debugger;' statements in your source it will pick that up and automatically ask you if you want to start debugging there, or continue on. When you stop the debugging session in VWD it will kill your browser, so beware if you have to navigate to some deep point in your app you are probably going to get frustrated if you write buggy code. :) At it's 1.4 Gb space requirement it's hardly a comparison with firebug -- but it's certainly a step up from alerts all day long.

Update:
If you don't already have it installed, a good midpoint between nothing and Visual Studio Express is the Microsoft Script Editor which comes with office 2003, heres a video on how to use it, http://www.jonathanboutelle.com/mt/arch ... _jav.html. Thanks for the feedback blogosphere.

I hope this made your life at least a small amount easier, happy IE developing.

Yesterday Kansas won the NCAA basketball national championship, congratulations. I give the Pac 10 teams a high five for doing as well as they did, WSU and Stanford made it to the sweet 16 and UCLA the final four.

This last weekend Meg and I spent in the Carmel Valley, the sun was shining the beaches were beautiful ( a bit windy ). We stayed in a B&B and enjoyed ourselves very much. Part of the day we wondered around Monteray, had dinner at a very tasty restaurant and generally enjoyed the tranquility. The Carmel Valley is a stunning place, green rolling hills all the way to the sandy beaches, if you squint your eyes and forget the temperature you might be able to convince yourself that you are in Hawaii :)

The political race forges on, I'm less excited about the whole thing every time I read the news. Hilary appears to be evading the inevitable and I constantly get emails making McCain look more like a tyrant. Obama seems to be the natural choice, I hope he finds a way to maintain integrity while being surrounded by the mass amounts of political sleaze.

Work has been going well, sinking deeper and deeper into projects everyday. Pleasantly surprised by the open minds that surround me, as I push for my pro client side agenda.

For the last few days I haven't been feeling that great, mainly queazy when I get to work and a bit anxious etc. So I did some research.. when I started getting a cold last week I started up on some Zinc supplements. It turns out that the dosage I have been taking is like 300% of what I should have every day, and I'm not the first to get sick from taking too much Zinc. Be careful of your ZINC dosage or you may get a ZONC

Lots of interesting things have been happening in the tech world, Google, Facebook, Mozilla etc.. but thats another post.

Have a great day.

I would like to note that the Washington State University - Cougar Basketball Team won their first game in the NCAA Tournament yesterday and are now slated to play Notre Dame on Saturday. It's exciting to see them competing with the big boys, when I was in Pullman the record was a little bit less exciting. However, it was always a good time to watch them beat the UW.

Last year we lost in the second game, I hope to see them making it to game three. Go Cougs!

The other competition is a little less fun, but very important. All of my favorite news sites have switched from technology news, to Politics and honestly at this point I would just like it to be over. The news gets nastier by the day, and if the democratic race isn't decided soon it will clearly do permanent damage to the party. Give me back my technology news!

My last blurb about competition is the Nintendo Wii, I would have to say that 'Crossbow Trainer' with the Wii Gun is probably the most fun I have had with a video game since Duck hunt on the original Nintendo.

Working with an application that has a Java back-end these days I have been experimenting with all kinds of new tools to make my life easier. The biggest problem is quickly navigating the immense directory structure to find where to put my code. Thus far the best at doing that particular task for the amount of resources it takes is Eclipse, easily.

The application to trigger this seriously annoying bug doesn't have to be Eclipse, it simply has to be any application that spits out way to much information to the system log. Eclipse apparently spits out mb's worth of data to the log per millisecond, which still blows my mind. I searched all over the place for a way to tell Eclipse that I just don't care, stop logging! I never found the solution, however I did find a way to turn of the syslogd.. making it so that if anything happens on your system you have no idea - not a great plan.

What happens is that in MacOSX 10.5 you will be happily sitting there coding away and the next thing you know you try to switch to another application and it takes MINUTES. Running the activity monitor or running 'top' you will see that the syslogd process is using the entirety of both your processor cores. The only way to make this stop, is by removing /var/log/system.log and /var/log/asl.db which have now become probably 100's of mb's. Then manually killing the syslogd process. Sometimes the problem comes back within minutes and sometimes it's days.

The word on the street is that the problem is in some re-factored syslogd code that has no bounds on the amount of CPU that it can use when processing the log files, when the log files get huge syslogd goes into overdrive and takes over your system. Since the last security update I haven't seen this bug, but I'm also now using Eclipse. Once I discovered that 90% of the code I would be working on is in a smaller piece of the directory structure it became reasonable to navigate with Textmate and the project drawer or VIM and :Ex. I know a day will come when I need an application that logs way too much data, and by then I hope Apple took care of this rogue binary.