How Fear Can Keep You Writing
As I was searching for tools to help me with my general writing process, I found one that was particularly interesting, and worth sharing. Write or Die is an application that uses negative reinforcement to keep you typing. As long as you continue writing, you’ll be fine… but if you stop, Write or Die starts to get aggressive. As a first step, it will start changing the background color of the window to red. As time passes, the red gets more intense. If you don’t keep typing, and you let it get totally demonic, you will face one of three possible punishments, depending on your settings.
The mildest of these punishments involves a simple pop-up, reminding you to type. Not really significant, as you just click OK and you can continue. The mid-range punishment involves playing very annoying sounds, until you keep typing. This is the default setting, and while fairly effective, it isn’t my favorite. The harshest, and my favorite, is accurately called “Kamikaze mode”. It will cause your text to consume itself until you start typing again. By that, I mean it will start deleting words you’ve typed, starting from the end, working its way to the start. That’s just about as scary as you can get, without deleting the whole document.
I found this application intriguing enough that I paid 10$ for the desktop edition; however, you don’t have to do that. There is an online version of Write or Die, as seen in the screenshot above. To give it a try, visit the Write or Die homepage, and look for “Write or Die Online” on the right-hand side. Choose your settings, then click “Write!”. The 10$ desktop version runs on Adobe Air, and gives you much more flexibility when it comes to configuration.
It does have some bugs at the moment, but also introduces interesting ideas, like the ability to have a competitive “word war” against a friend. Essentially, this involves competing to meet a word count goal within a given time limit. Definitely the kind of creativity I want to support.
Comparing Files and Folders With WinMerge
Before I started working for my current employer, I hadn’t yet discovered how useful differencing tools could be. As I began working regularly with Visual SourceSafe 6 at work, I grew to value the fact that I could check for differences before every file check in. It was a standard for my employer, but to me, it was a process I was getting used to. Eventually, I realized that I needed a stand-alone comparison tool, in case Visual SourceSafe wasn’t around. This eventually lead me to a WinMerge, an open source differencing and merging tool.
There are numerous reasons why I like WinMerge. Most of all, I really appreciate the contextual options. With files, I can select any difference within a file, and choose to copy it from one file to the other, without leaving the application. With folders, similar functionality is available… I can copy, delete, compress, or move any given file difference from one side to the other. There are plenty additional features beyond that, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll make this simple: WinMerge is a tool I highly recommend for developers everywhere.
If you’re not yet convinced, I should probably mention that it can be used with Subversion. This works in Windows specifically, provided the TortoiseSVN shell is installed. TortoiseSVN allows the user to use an external comparison tool, rather than the built-in application, TortoiseMerge.
To register WinMerge instead of TortoiseMerge, follow the steps below:
- Right click anywhere in Windows Explorer, and select TortoiseSVN -> Settings.
- Expand the External Programs section.
- Select the Diff Viewer option.
- Select the External radio button in the Configure the program used for comparing different revisions of files section.
- Press the [...] button to browse to point to your WinMerge executable. In my case, this was the path: C:\Program Files\WinMerge\WinMergeU.exe
Testing Web Performance by Throttling Bandwidth
In the past, I often found myself wondering how some of my websites would perform when accessed from a low bandwidth connection. Unfortunately, I had no convenient way to test such a scenario, so I usually just forgot about the idea. I recently found myself in a similar scenario at work, and my searches returned a useful tool, Speed Simulator, by Vikas Patial:
Speed simulator is a simple throttling proxy which allows you to see how your site behaves under different connection speeds. It was written by me to test AJAX/Flash loaders and see how much my time took to load.You can simulate various speeds like that of a modem or a ADSL.A pre delay function is also there to help simulate delays due to DNS , connection establishment etc.
Here’s what it looks like:
It simply acts as a proxy, so all you need to do is point your browsers to access the web through Speed Simulator. You’ll then be transported back to the good ol’ days where most people had to wait for websites to load.
To do this:
- Click Start, and search for “Internet Options”. Launch it.
- Click on the “Connections” tab.
- Click the “LAN Settings” button, found within the “Local Area Network (LAN) Settings” section.
- Once the “Local Area Network (LAN) Settings” dialog appears, locate the “Proxy Server” section.
- Enable the “Use a proxy server for your LAN” checkbox, and enter the following:
- Address: localhost
- Port: 8080 (reflect the port listed in Speed Simulator)
Press OK to save your changes, and then simply click “Start” in the Speed Simulator window.
That’s it – all you need to do next is launch a browser, the bandwidth should be throttled. I’ve seen it work with Google Chrome and Internet Explorer. Configuring a proxy in Firefox requires different steps, but should work just as well, once configured.
I can see myself using this tool in the future, and not only for simple performance tests. For example, I can use it to test for possible timing-related flaws in JavaScript code. Definitely a welcome addition to my web development tool set.
Reviewed byBrian Ricard
File Locking: Access Is Denied? Not Anymore.
I’m sure most of you have encountered this type of error, at one time or another, while using Windows:
Cannot delete file: Access is denied.
It appears when you try to delete a file or folder that is currently in use by an application. To be completely accurate, the file needs to be in use and locked by the application to prevent external edits – the lock is likely the reason we see the error message. Sometimes it is really obvious which application has a locked handle on the file – for example, if it is complaining about a Word document – perhaps the document is still open in Word. Personally, I consider scenarios like that acceptable because they can be solved easily; unfortunately, all too often I get into trickier situations where I can’t figure out which application is holding onto my file. In those cases, I used to just reboot, and that would usually solve the problem. Yet, there were still cases where rebooting didn’t even do the trick.
Eventually, I was tired of struggling in those moments, and began searching for an application that could help – that’s when I found Unlocker. It allows you to remove locks from individual files via an “Unlocker” option within the Windows context menu. Definitely a nice feature… but listen to this – they took it a step further via a system tray program called Unlocker Assistant. If you encounter the “Access is denied” error while Assistant is loaded, Unlocker will automatically pop up a few seconds after you click “OK”, and it will show you the culprits:
From their interface, you have the option of either killing the process, or unlocking the files themselves – effectively breaking the hold the application has on the file without having to terminate it. Very handy. You can download Unlocker here.
If you’re more inclined to trust Microsoft-sanctioned applications, grab Process Explorer – a Sysinternals app. I didn’t try it for this purpose specifically, but from what I’ve read, it isn’t as simple as Unlocker when it comes to removing the “Access is Denied” error specifically. It serves multiple purposes, whereas Unlocker is specialized.