Cool New Tool, For Devs and Those Who Aren't

A small company/startup which I have been following, Hello Code, since I signed up for their Exist service, have just put out a new tool. And this one is incredibly awesome for developers, but incredibly useful for everyone else as well.

This tool is, and it's a bookmarking service - on steroids! First of all, bookmarks, across platforms, and browsers. In the cloud. The most awesome bits so far, for me at least, are having descriptions and tags for an entry, all of which are searchable. The one thing that's incredibly useful, as a developer, is the importing of GitHub stars!

That's right, now when you star a repository, a reference to it will be imported to Larder, which you can then tag, comment, etc. It will actually, also tag the repositories appropriately with the language configured on the repository.

All of that, and if you go pro/paid, it's only 3$ a month, or 24$ a year if you pre-pay. It's really, simply put, a no brainer. It's pretty much replacing my Chrome bookmarks (which you can import, as I have), except for the immediately visible/clickable bookmarks bar. At least, until there is either a supported way to replace the Chrome bar with Larder entries. Yes, it really is that incredibly useful.

So really, go check out Larder. Afterwards, go check out It's like "Big Data" for your life. It can help you find correlations between your mood, meetings, walking distance, weight, weather, sleep, etc.

When what you're listening to matters...

About a week or two ago, I saw a discussion on Hacker News about How Surround Sound for Headphones Works. Linked within the article, as well as the source item's page, was a free tool for OSX called "Hajo's Headphone Enhancer". I downloaded and installed it, without giving it much more thought. However, I was working on my Macbook today, and thought I'd pop in some headphones and see just what kind of difference, if any, I would notice.

As tersely as I can put it - WOW! Alternating between different settings, on songs I've been listening to for ages was absolutely stunning. Rather than feeling like I was listening to a music album, it felts as if I were a fly in the studio during the recording sessions.

I used it for all of 45 seconds when I decided that this was absolutely worth the 10$ to register the software, and avoid any nagware screen after the free trial period. You can keep running it, as the author says on the page that it is free, however, as with all effective nagware, a prompt/reminder to register will appear every so often - every 30 minutes if I am remembering correctly.

As you can see by the options for audio/ambiance styles, it's not as elaborate a configuration as Boom 2, which did sound quite nice when I tested it with the built-in speakers (I did not try "Boom 2" with headphones before my trial period lapsed). However, the counter argument of "it's not as elaborate a configuration" makes it quite simple to pick a setting, give it the thumbs up, and rock out! But maybe that's just the knob fiddler in me trying to set different things within Boom 2 in a "let's see what happens now" attitude!

tl;dr: If you run OSX and use headphones, get "Hajo's Headphone Enhancer" and pay the unquestionably cheap but totally worth it 10$ for registration!

Using the CodeRush Test Runner with Platform Specific Libraries

An issue appeared today for a co-worker, who was getting failing unit tests on one of our components, when the tests were being run from the CodeRush Test Runner. By the way, have I mentioned my love for CodeRush + Refactor? No? Well I do, to the point where I have a work license as well as a personal, paid for out of my own pocket, license! Unfortunately, he was getting an error whenever he ran the tests against the library, which we know has been working without issue for years. Not only that, but when he checked the build history on our build box, there was no report of failing tests. That reminds me, you ARE running your unit test suite in your Continuous Integration environment, right? Right?


He then mentioned the error he was getting, which is a BadImageFormatException getting thrown. That immediately connected two dots in my head, and I verified my suspicions. I was right, as it turns out, our image processing library is compiled against a .Net wrapper against a platform specific DLL targeting the x64 platform. It turns out, his CodeRush test runner was running in 32 bit mode. The fix was a simple one, where he simply had to tell CodeRush to run in x64 mode if the target platform was AnyCPU. The option is fairly obvious, if you know where to look.


Coderush Test RunnerIn order to enable it, bring up the CodeRush options (DevExpress menu –> Options or Ctrl+Alt+Shift+O for the keyboard inclined), expand the "Unit Testing" option folder on the left, and select the "Test Runner" sub-item. In the main window, about half way down, you will see a checkbox marked as "Execute in x64 mode if active configuration is AnyCPU". Check that, click Ok, and you’re set!


It is important to note that the only time this will cause an issue, if you have a library that is explicitly targeting a specific platform. If all of your libraries are targeting AnyCPU, you will not run into a problem, though you probably want to run your tests to where you are targeting both platforms, in case you notice any discrepancies, run into overflows, type incompatibilities, etc. In our case, we have an C++ image processing library that was compiled and linked to target the x64 platform, and as such, will only run in 64 bit mode.

Using OData from Objective-C - Fixing the odatagen NSRangeException bug

