I started looking when I saw Clocky, the rolling alarm clock. This clock, after you hit snooze, starts running and hiding from you so you have to get out of bed to find it and turn it off.

I started thinking about the alarm clock that I saw in college. It was a baseball alarm clock that you could throw against the wall to hit snooze. That was a fun alarm clock.

Being the gadget junkie that I am, I realized at that point that I really shouldn’t just settle for the classic-boring-bargain travel alarm clock. It just wouldn’t fit with my persona and image. Having a clock that I have to find, however, in strange hotel room is not a fantastic idea. Not knowing what to do, I hit Gizmodo and started looking at the options. Wow! There are a ton of different types of alarm clocks out there.

I really like the size and features of the LifeMax Under Pillow Vibration Alarm Clock. It’s small, battery operated, robust and it has a vibration wake feature. That’s cool for those mornings that I need catch an early plane and need to get up in the morning without waking up my wonderful wife. The issue there is that I haven’t been able to find a distributor this side of the ocean. I can order it from MenKind in the UK but I don’t think that they ship international – at least their checkout form didn’t let me pick another country.

So the seach didn’t end there. There are alarm clocks that fly and more alarm clocks that can fly, sensory alarm clocks that wake you up with smells (see the Bacon Alarm Clock and Hakugen Odor Alarm) and cool audio clocks (see the Space Invaders Clock, Police Scanner Alarm Clock or any of the many MP3 alarm clocks), clocks that make you think to turn them off (see the Pattern Clock that plays Simon says with you before you can turn it off or the Puzzle Alarm Clock that makes you put together the puzzle before it turns off). I’m also interested in the Progressive Wake Alarm Clock and others like it because they don’t jolt you awake. Among the many other issues with all of the clocks in the this paragraph – very few of them will fit in the suitcase well.

So, I started looking for clocks that will travel better. Obviously the best for that would be the Online Clock but I’m not on the internet all the time. I know that Martin Shoemaker has written an alarm clock that works well when his machine is not in the shop or gets rebooted because of auto-updates. I could write/buy a software clock, but I really want a hardware solution to this because I never know how my laptop will be in use so I’m leary of that.

I’m now looking at the Credit Card Case Clock and others like it. They are small, light and ultra portable.

So, what travel clock works for you?

Jim with the Book

Windows Developer Power Tools on Amazon

Want your copy signed??? Come to CodeMash!

One of the questions that came up was how GUI testing works with NUnit. I happened to attend a talk at SD West (http://www.SDExpo.com) by Elisabeth Hendrickson from Quality Tree (http://www.qualitytree.com) on that exact topic. She has been working on a test harness for GUI testing that’s built on NUnit. You can learn more about it here – http://www.qualitytree.com/autotest/dotnetgui.htm.

Event: Obfuscation, IT Governance and Enterprise Risk Management  

Date and Time: Monday, April 24, 2006 1:00 pm Eastern time zone

Duration: 30 minutes

Description: Attendees will leave with a clear understanding of the role of obfuscation as an effective control for application security, access control, IP protection in the context of broader IT governance and enterprise risk management frameworks.

Here’s the list of ten tools that I covered in my session:

1. CodeRush/Refactor
   1. http://www.devexpress.com/
   2. Mark Miller (http://doitwith.net/)
   3. Dustin Campbell (http://diditwith.net/)
2. GhostDoc
   1. http://www.roland-weigelt.de/ghostdoc/
3. cr Documentor
   1. http://www.paraesthesia.com/blog/comments.php?id=701 0 1 0 C
4. SandCastle
   1. http://www.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?ProjectName=SHFB
   2. GUI for SandCastle – http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/SandcastleBuilder.asp
5. Reflector and Add-Ins
   1. http://www.aisto.com/roeder/dotnet/download.aspx?File=Reflectorctor
6. CopySourceAsHTML
   1. http://www.jtleigh.com/people/colin/blog/archives/2004/10/visual studio a.html
7. ZoomIt
   1. http://www.sysinternals.com/utilities/zoomit.html
8. Camtasia/Snagit
   1. http://www.techsmith.com/
9. Process Explorer
   1. http://www.sysinternals.com/
10. Snippet Compiler
    1. http://www.sliver.com/dotnet/snippetcompiler/

There are a lot of tools that didn’t make the list that really easily could have.

1. Tablet UML
   1. http://www.tabletuml.com/ – the UML tool that you don’t need to learn. It was created by Martin Shoemaker out of Hopkins Michigan.
2. CodeKeep
   1. http://www.codekeep.com/ – online Snippet Library and collaboration. It’s was created by Dave Donaldson out of Columbus Ohio.
3. CodeSmith
   1. http://www.codesmith.com/ – template based code generation. One of the great uses of this is to generate business objects based on database tables
4. Too many others to name at the moment…

Download: GrokTalk-10DevToolsIn10Minutes.ppt

I’ve had one HUGE issue with my new tablet (new as in December) which is a Fujitsu Lifebook T4020. That issue was that the End and Home keys are function keys! In other words, I have to hold down the function key and then press PageDown to get End. I use End all the time and in combination with other keys whereas I rarely use PageDown and only use it by itself so it’s not a big deal to hit a function key for that. It took just a quick moment to reverse those so that End is where PageDown used to be and PageDown is the function key.

	Randy Rants’s site
	Home page for the guy that wrote SharpKeys
	http://www.randyrants.com
	Hansel Minutes
	Home page for Hansel Minutes

There are a couple of minor differences that you should be aware of if you are interested in using log4net on the Compact Framework. First of all, not all of the appenders make sense – like the RemotingAppender, the EventLogAppender and the OracleAppender. Secondly, there is no mechanism for retrieving assembly level attributes so you have to explicitly initialize and shut down the log4net engine.

static void Main()

{

      try

      {

            //This line configures the log4net engine.

log4net.Config.DOMConfigurator.Configure(

new FileInfo(@”\log4net.config”));

            frmLogin loginForm = new frmLogin ();

            loginForm.ShowDialog();

                  Application.Run(new frmMain());

            }

      }

      catch (System.Exception e)

      {

            _log.Error(“Main“, e);

      }

      finally

      {

            //This line shuts down the log4net engine

            log4net.LogManager.Shutdown();

      }

}

The other thing that was interesting is that the online help on http://logging.apache.org/log4net showed conversion patterns with %message%newline to print the message and then put a newline in the file. I had to use %m%n because the first one there printed as

My stringessage

ewline

which was not quite what was expected.

Have fun with log4net, it’s a great lightweight logging framework for the compact framework.