Log4Tailer 1.50

Log4Tailer 1.50 http://code.google.com/p/log4tailer provides interesting new features in order to monitor your logs. It’s a dedicated application to monitor the status of your logs regardless if your application provides its own monitoring platform or not. It is helping me a lot and this new release will help sys admins and testers alike.

In this new release, you will be able to specify regexes for every log, log4tailer will be able to update you by email every period of time you specify and lots more.

Log4Tailer 1.42 released

I released Log4Tailer 1.42 http://code.google.com/p/log4tailer/ on Monday. It is just a minor release affecting mostly on the final reports once you finish tailing a log. Log4Tailer allows you to tail logs in colors amongst other features. It is very useful for software testers and developers alike. I’ve found myself multiple times tailing logs in black and white using the “Tail” Linux command line, which was a pain for my eyes to try to discern information from thousands of lines. In my career I’ve seen some software testers missing “warnings” or even “error” log4j log traces, missing important information that can lead to a bug, and a long etcetera. Some of the features maybe are not going to be that important, but the core functionality, i.e. tailing with colors is really a killer app if used properly along with top notch terminal managers like Terminator hosted in launchpad https://launchpad.net/terminator. Make your live easier and enjoy .

Log4Tailer release 1.0

In the last weeks, I’ve been hacking quite a lot with log4tailer and today I released version 1.0. This version is a major improvement over  the last ones, and I hope it is going to be a great tool for those who, like me, spend many time tailing logs for debugging purposes, or just for those who need to monitor logs during many hours. I released the software along with a very nice PDF manual, that I hope it is going to be very useful.

Log4Tailer’s project is hosted in googlecode http://code.google.com/p/log4tailer/

Internet Explorer 7 vs Firefox 2.0

Again Firefox wins the battle against Internet Explorer. The main advantage of Internet explorer is that it is included as an update in the windows operating system and people who don’t care, will go on using this browser. Firefox wins, in my opinion, for being more customizable, and more advanced in terms of options and security. There are great add-ons for Firefox, and they make Firefox an unbeatable browser. People who didn’t know about Firefox are very happy that Internet Explorer has tabs, while we, Firefox users have been using them for ages. The battle will go on, for sure, but Firefox is and will be my preferred browser in both Linux and Windows.

Developing Applications in Microsoft and Linux

I am learning the c sharp programming language. It was invented by Microsoft and is included in the .net framework. Linux, by means of Miguel de Icaza, followed the trend and developed the Mono framework, a .net framework for Linux. Mono is available for all major platforms and in consequence is cross platform. You can develop mono apps in windows and they will run on Linux. That was the main reason why Ximian at the very beginning, and now Novell, developed the mono platform. I’m a big fan of Linux, but as time goes on and I learn the .net framework, I see that developing GUI apps for Linux is quite difficult, more than Windows. There are several reasons why a beginner like me think that way. There are plenty of books that talk about .Net and Windows Forms, and very few that talk about Mono and GTK# (the c sharp GUI Toolkit). Developing Windows Forms is very easy mainly because you have tons of documentation and GTK# is very, very hard, although very powerful, perhaps more than Windows Forms. Documentation is crucial when you are learning a new language, and Mono is behind .NET. Another crucial tool to learn a new language is having a debugger. There are no debuggers in Linux, and MonoDevelop does not provide one at the moment, so learning a new language without a debugger is horrible as you can’t see what’s going on behind the scenes. In Windows, on the other hand, we have SharpDevelop and Visual Studio, and they provide debuggers. Again, I’m a big fan of Linux, but if you are a .net developer, there’s nothing like developing apps for windows. GTK# should be easier to learn than Windows Forms.