Quicksoft Development Blog

Would it not be nice to automatically start synchronizing files with a NAS or other device capable of storing files somewhere on your home network whenever you connect to that specific network?

Microsoft makes a free tool available which can do most of what is needed. SyncToy can be downloaded and configured quite easy.

Making it sync automatically when you connect to a specific network is more complicated, but it can be done with no additional software except for the Windows 7 Task Scheduler.

Start the Task Scheduler

• Goto: Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Task Scheduler

Add a new Task

• Click Create Task (not Create Basic Task)
• Give the task a name

Add a Trigger

• Go to the next tab "Triggers"
• Click New...
• Select begin the task "On an Event"
• Select Log: Microsoft-Windows-NetworkProfile/Operational
• Type EventID: "10000"

Add an Action

• Go to the next tab: "Actions"
• Click "New..."
• Click "Browse..." and select: C:\Program Files\SyncToy 2.1\SyncToyCmd.exe
• Type "-R" in the arguments field

Add a Condition

• Go to the next tab: "Conditions"
• Click: Start only if the following network connection is available
• Select the appropriate network from the dropdown
• Check the other settings on this tab, if you want to sync while on battery power deselect the Start only if the computer is on AC power checkbox

Taking a risk here: I don't like Git and I have reverted back to Subversion. Counting the number of tools helping to convert from Git to Subversion (0) I have to say that I am apparantly one of the few, however where I work mostly on projects by myself, and being very familiar with Subversion I have not been able to get used to Git during the past months. It does not offer me anything extra over my subversion install, however it does make my live more complicated.

By the way, I started following github's twitter's these guys are trying to beat twitters server and performance problems during their start it seems, the number of "oops we are down" messages are hilarious.

The EngineYard solution seems briljant, it saves a heck of a lot of time for anyone wanting to run a rails app, however after having an account for a few months I decided to cancel it.

Main reason is that there is no way to "pause" the Amazon host, therefor it must be deleted if you dont want to pay for it full time, next to that the app needs to bootstrap real nice for this to be easy, something which is often not the case in the development phase of an application.

So basically in my opinion it is not very useful during the development phase of a project, but it still sounds promising for production applications, lets hope I get to find out in the future.

After a lot of looking around for good rails plugins I found Formtastic on a rails cast by Ryan Bates. This plugin makes views with forms very readable and easy to edit.

http://github.com/justinfrench/formtastic