John Luif

I recently purchased an Apple TV to replace Netflix. So far I'm very pleased, not quite the selection of netflix but the convenience is awesome. I'm never sure when the urge to watch a movie or tv show will come up and now it does not matter.

The cost is a little pricey, $3.99 for a movie and $1.99 for tv shows. At those prices I could go broke pretty quick so I have to watch how much I use it. Everything should be a dollar cheaper; come on a $1.99 for an off air tv show...

All in all I do enjoy it, and they add more movies every day. If you are looking for a convenient way to watch/listen to movies, tv, pictures and music then this may be the ticket.

In Windows 2008 the backup and restore comes with an option for a full backup which basically means it will take an image. This has come in very handy because I do not need any third party software now get an image and restore it on new hardware, like when my raptor hard drive unexpectedly crapped out.

I have been using many different database modeling tools for SQL Server to figure out which one would work best for me. Some of the features I'm looking for are:

• Quick table creation and editing
• Easy and quick to add or edit relationships
• Can create different schemas
• Can generate a database script for specific schemas
• Can compare model to an existing database and generate alter script
• Can compare model to older version of model and generate alter script

In the past I have used Sybase's Power Designer Data Architect but now that I'm paying for it out of my own pocket it seems a bit too pricey. Power Designer is a complex tool to use that does a lot but is in need of some user experience expertise.

So I started cheap, not recommended. I first looked at Database Spy by Altova, not truely a database modeling tool in my mind because I can not generate the ddl needed to create the database out of the tool. There are some nice features of Database Spy like intellicrack sql editor and quick editing and exporting of data.

Next I tried Happy Fish. I really like this tool; the most user friendly interface of any tool I have used though it does lack on looks, no fancy color gradients here. Creating, changing and generating ddl for the model was breeze. There is only one feature missing in the product which made me not choose it, there is no support for generating alter scripts from and existing database or an older version of the model. I was really disappointed when I found this for two reasons, one the tools is just so easy to use it is almost fun (I said almost) and two, it has a compare with database feature which had my hopes up but it falls short.

In the lineup next was DDS-Pro by Chilli Source. Did not expect too much from this product and did not get much, I think I had it installed all of 15 minutes before I was already convinced it did not meet my needs. It did however leave behind a nice present in my system32 directory, an old version of sqlcmd which then broke my database build because the "-S" did not exist long ago.

And now I can stop looking as I have found the affordable database modeling tool, ModelRight. This tool is not as easy to use as Happy Fish but works fine none the less. The big feature for me is being able to compare the current model with a database or an older version of the model and generate an alter script. This is a fairly common task when maintaining or extending existing software, which in my mind makes any database modeling tool that does not do it worthless.

I have chosen to use Axosoft's OnTime software to help manage projects. This is a very powerful and adaptable piece of project management software with many strong features. My biggest reason for choosing OnTime over FogBugz was the user interface was more intuitive to the business user. I like to get the business involved as much as possible on projects and if they can not figure out how to use the software then it is the wrong tool for the job. Personally I think FogBugz does some things very well and in a lot of ways allows a knowledagble user to be very efficient using it but the fact remains that the learning curve is too steep for business users to use it, they just do not have time to sit down and learn it.

Honestly there is almost to much out of the box with OnTime so I simplified it. Out of the box it comes with separate areas for features, defect, tasks, incidents and a wiki. I chose to turn off the defects and tasks and rename features to backlog items. I also added a custom field for backlog item type which can be scenario, feature, defect, or task. The reason I did this is I like working from one prioritized list and it just simplifies the whole process. I have also modified the workflow process each backlog item goes through (another great feature of OnTime).

There are many more customization that I may do in the future but this is my first pass through OnTime and it is working pretty good so far. There is also developer sdk which I'm actually using on one project to call the OnTIime web service to submit incidents from a web site. Incident is something else I preferred to change and call them tickets instead.

While I am happy with OnTime there is a downside, it is slow. Not slow enough that I will not use it but noticeably slower than FogBugz.

It has been a while since I blogged and there is a reason for that. A lot has changed in a very short time for me. Our family grew with the addition of Chloe and starting my own company Clydesdale Software.

It has been a great time with Chloe, she started sleeping through the night at three weeks which frankly concerned us at first but now is a blessing in disguise. Chloe is full of smiles and very talkative, it seems like she really wants to be part of any conversation. All I gotta say is I'm not paying the cell phone bill when she is older:)

Business is going well, sometimes too well. While I welcome all the business I'm sure my wife would be happy with less since I'm working all the time. There are some very exciting things I have been working on which I will be sharing some information on shortly.

Thats all for now.

After purchasing two consumer grade gigabit switches, the NetGear GS108 and the Linksys SD2008, and having them both fail I really started to think if gigabit was ready for the consumer. I would have to say from my experience with consumer grade gigabit switches that it is definitely not ready for prime time.

The good news is as a consumer you can still have gigabit, you just may pay a little bit more for it. I would recommend purchasing business class switches. The switches I'm using are the Dell PowerConnect 2708 which I'm very impressed with thus far; though it does not take much to impress me at this point, staying turned on is enough:)

In a previous post I talked about how I was dd-wrt to route multiple WAN IPs. Well, ever since that post I have been screwing with it because it has not been working quite right. I finally figured it out with the help of some forums out there. Use the below script in the Firewall section under Administration->Commands to route multiple WAN IP's to internal IPs:

ip addr add [extra wan_ip]/29 dev vlan1

iptables -I FORWARD -d [internal ip] -j ACCEPT

iptables -t nat -I PREROUTING 1 -p all -d [extra wan ip] -j DNAT --to [internal ip]

iptables -t nat -I POSTROUTING 1 -p all -s [internal ip] -j SNAT --to [extra wan ip]

The main piece I was missing was the first line which puts the extra wan ip on the same vlan as the wan ip the router is using.

Hopefully this will save someone from having to scroll through forum posts looking for an answer.

To my surprise MS Remote Desktop for Mac does exist!