MRM Tech Blog

Synergy

There is a good little program called Synergy that lets you control multiple computers with one keyboard/mouse setup.

You need to install the program on all computers and choose one to be the server.

Here is a page with instructions and download links:

Synergy Instructions

These instructions are to have a Mac as the server but I set up my PC as the server easily enough.

You can cut and paste from one to the other and link up the screen savers.  I haven’t experimented past that.

IIS Admin setupWindows XP allows only one Web site in IIS.

This tool allows multiple Web sites, with a system tray utility that makes it so easy to switch.

http://www.jetstat.com/iisadmin/

 One warning - it may delete existing sites that you have meticulously set up, so be aware that they may have to be set up again.

Hey guys,

Saw this article and immediately thought of our team. Anybody seen this?

Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 were officially released last week. Some much anticipated features in VS 2008:

2008 supports application built of previous .Net Framework
Built in AJAX.NET
JavaScript Intellisense & Debugging
And much much more:
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/11/19/visual-studio-2008-and-net-3-5-released.aspx

Not as good as the firefox equivalent, but still useful.

Get it here

Installment 2, on my How to Trick out your Firefox series will touch on how to install FlashTracer, a super cool plug-in for FireFox that allows you to read trace statements in your browser. This is really helpful if you’re trying to debug a preloader, or anything else that requires external loading. The plugin is available for Mac, but I haven’t been able to get it to work on mine, so these instructions are for the PC.

1. Download and install firefox(duh).
2. Download and install the Mozilla Compatible Flash 9 DEBUG Player.*
3. Install the flash tracer firefox plugin.
4. Make sure that you have the following text file in the following location:C:\Documents and Settings\FirstName.LastName\mm.cfg. If it’s not there create a text file and name it as such.
5. Inside mm.cfg paste the following text: TraceOutPutFileName=C:\Documents and Settings\FirstName.LastName\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash Player\Logs\flashlog.txt ErrorReportingEnable=1 TraceOutputFileEnable=1 MaxWarnings=0
6. Restart FireFox
7. Go to Tools>Flash Tracer (or hit Alt+A)
8. The FlashTracer Panel should open on the left. Hit the options button at the bottom of the panel.
9. Flash Tracer needs to point at a text file to write the trace logs to. It should be: C:\Documents and Settings\FirstName.LastName\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash Player\Logs\flashlog.txt **

And that’s it. It should work. You can now read trace statements from Flash in your firefox browser. But, wait, what if you want to read them in IE, still unfortunately, the dominant browser?

There’s an IE emulator also available for Firefox. After installing this, you can click the Firefox/IE icon in the bottom right of your browser to toggle back and forth btw the two browsers.

If anyone needs help getting this to work please feel free to ask.

*NOTE: You might also need the Active-X Flash 9 Debug Plugin. I haven’t tried with just the mozilla one, I always install both.

** NOTE: The directory containing the flashlog.txt file may be hidden so you might have to browse to this by typing it out manually into the address bar.

This is so great!

If you like to trick out your Firefox, check this out. Perhaps the only bright side of having to reset my computer this week.

Hey, Craig, how about a FireFox category?

This is a great article from a post that I read on Slashdot today. I love the sections about Refactoring (thinking about our outsourcing) and Test Driven Development.

What’s better than a little lunch time blogging?? Was going through some feature tutorials on Adobe.com and found this video demo. TOO COOL! Will look for more and amend the post as I find interesting features - but this one alone is worth the upgrade.

http://www.adobe.com//designcenter/video_workshop/index.html?id=vid0201

Today the safari web browser was been released for windows XP and vista.

It’s quite neat to see the Macintosh style on a windows screen but it should help to check for compatibility since we all seem to develop in the windows environment.

http://www.apple.com/safari/download/ is the link and it’s currently in beta.