Category: General

Everyone uses Java/C# and Oracle, why choose something else?

May 18, 2015 / Piet / 0 Comments

If the tech guy (or girl) advises going for a less common technology, and something goes wrong, he’ll get blamed. “Why didn’t you use Java/Oracle/IBM like everyone else does?”

And you can be sure that something WILL go wrong sooner or later… and this guy knows it.

He knows he has a mortgage, kids that have to go through college, a wife with a spending habit… why take any chances? What’s in it for him if it works out? And what if it doesn’t?

People avoid taking risks. Especially people who work a ‘safe’ job as an employee.

Is this the lizard brain at work?

For the record: There’s nothing wrong with Java/C# (or any other language for that matter). They all have their (dis)advantages on speed, memory usage, developer-friendliness, license/price…

Yet NONE of them fit all tasks and situations you can throw at them, while yes: you can use most of them to implement most tasks.

Do you have any idea how many programming languages exist?

Just look at this list. These languages weren’t developed because there’s hardly any difference between them, or because a ‘one size fits all’ language exists.

Now, if you are a developer/sysadmin, I probably needn’t explain. But as I’m hoping to enlighten the non-tech manager here, I think an analogy is in order.

Let’s say you’re building a house. Would you use nails or screws for all attaching situations?

No. Depending on the kind of materials you need to bond, the needed strength, the climate it’s in, the budget, how long it should last… you either use nails, screws, glue, cement, or god knows what else.

You use the right tool for the job. It’s the same with programming languages.

A project done in Java will cost 5 times as much, take twice as long, and be harder to maintain than a project done in a scripting language such as PHP or Perl. … But the programmers and managers using Java will feel good about themselves because they are using a tool that, in theory, has a lot of power for handling problems of tremendous complexity. Just like the suburbanite who drives his SUV to the 7-11 on a paved road but feels good because in theory he could climb a 45-degree dirt slope.

Philip Greenspun, Java is the SUV of programming tools

(I just used this quote to show that there can be some bias and strong opinions concerning certain languages. I also don’t like Java, but that’s beside the point.)

Yes, you can hammer a screw into wood (I tried this as a kid), but it will take a lot of effort and will provide less bonding than a nail. And you might hit your fingers in the process (I also did this as a kid).

Still not convinced? Do you know that some programming languages can be 100 times faster than others? And there are also other differences just as relevant as execution speed.

And though execution speed can be important, it shouldn’t be your guiding factor.

Often people, especially computer engineers, focus on the machines. They think, “By doing this, the machine will run fast. By doing this, the machine will run more effectively. By doing this, the machine will something something something.” They are focusing on machines. But in fact we need to focus on humans, on how humans care about doing programming or operating the application of the machines. We are the masters. They are the slaves.

Yukihiro Matsumoto, Ruby programming language on Wikipedia

People sometimes dismiss Ruby because Ruby is slow. Well it is, and I don’t care. The biggest performance bottlenecks that I have day to day is the database, the file system, the internet and bugs. These are not problems with Ruby, so speeding it up will have a negligible effect.

Additionally, hardware is cheap and developers are not. If you can use a programming language like Ruby to make your programmers more productive, then you can increase the performance of your code with better hardware. You can buy the better hardware with the money you saved by making your developers more productive.

Graham Jenson, What is Ruby? It is fun and makes you happy!

I once was part of a team that had to make an internal web application. We didn’t have any Java experience, but the company already had some customer-facing Java web apps developed by the ‘webdev’ team. So we agreed to use Java.

After evaluating several Java frameworks, one of us bumped into this new thing called ‘Ruby on Rails’ (V0.11 at that time iirc). ‘Rails’, as it’s often called, was like a breath of fresh air after being bombarded with Java that seemed more like configuration than programming at that time.

There was only 1 problem: Rails uses Ruby instead of Java as its programming language.

Even so, we decided to go for it. We finished the project in considerably less time than the original estimate. This also helped management accept that we had neglected to use Java.

Was this all because Rails somehow made us work faster?

Not really, but it was very suited for this job, it was a really fun language (it still is), it was new and exciting, and because we were supposed to use Java, our asses were on the line in a major way.

It was the right tool for the job AND the right tool for us. By the way, last time I heard, this application was still running (I no longer work there).

And when we showed the hardcore Java aficionados, one comment really struck: “it’s easy that way.” And this wasn’t the last time I heard this (often concerning Ruby). And shouldn’t that exactly be the whole point? Making things easier?

Unfortunately, when technology is concerned, the decisions aren’t always that clear and we rely a lot on other (less?) relevant factors to guide us.

Why your devs might not like a language that makes their lives easier

When I started out as a pro programmer, the company I worked for made client software in a not-so-easy language/framework. Why? Primary reason: they wanted the software to be as fast as possible, which is very valid.

Unfortunately, the database technology we were using was so damn slow that any advantage the faster language offered was totally obliterated. This was a huge bottleneck. The language was like a Ferrari, but it was waiting 98% of the time for the database’s traffic light. And that light won’t switch to green faster just because there’s a Ferrari waiting.

(For the tech guys: we were using C++/MFC and an Access database through ODBC… ok, stop laughing, we eventually switched to faster database tech.)

It also took several minutes to compile the project, meaning that we couldn’t just make changes and test them right away. No, we had to wait several minutes to test things, or get an error (and in the old days, that could have been several hours, but only graybeards remember this).

When I suggested that another language/technology (Delphi) was really more suited for the job, colleagues argued: “there’s no demand for Delphi programmers, this isn’t good for us.”

They were right. For me, this was my first job and I wanted to make a good impression. However, they had already proven themselves, knew this wasn’t going to be their last job and didn’t want to lock themselves into a framework/language that wasn’t in demand.

And I have no idea if they would have been able to find Delphi programmers.

Besides that, we could be pretty sure that Microsoft (the manufacturer of the tool we used) would still be around in a couple of years… while Borland (the original developer of Delphi) always seemed to be hovering on the edge of bankruptcy.

Would we have been more productive using Delphi? I’m pretty sure we would have. It was just much more suited for what we were doing and more forgiving for the rather average developers we were.

Would it have been good for the company? Not if the devs ran away and couldn’t be replaced by others.

Would it have been good for me? In hindsight, no. Now I can put 8 years of ‘pro’ C++ development on my CV, which is a lot more impressive compared to Delphi/Pascal. A lot of people used Pascal in high school, so it’s often not taken seriously.

So how do you pick a suitable language/framework?

You should use what startups use!

That’s what I used to tell the CxO’s. And I was wrong, as most of them didn’t work for startups.

Tech startups are the hotbed of technology. They use cutting-edge tools and make amazing software that scales to millions of users. And you will have to look hard to find startups using Java/C#.

Why?

Technology is at the core of their business, and their goal is to grow fast or fail fast – which probably isn’t yours. You are probably looking for stability, and aren’t interested in failing, no matter how slow or fast it goes.

You’re part of a startup? You should have brighter guys on board than me who will tell you what language/framework to use. And pssst: don’t waste your time reading this, you’ve got a startup to grow!

So, should you just stick with classic, proven tech then?

Hell no!

The language and framework you use can make a real difference. I think that except for certain edge cases, the human impact far outweighs the technological impact.

Have your programmers experiment with alternatives. Even if they don’t get all excited and suggest ditching your current tools, they might just find them useful somewhere. Also, it will help to fight boreout and keep things interesting.

Depending on the kind of software you make, it might be worth investigating domain specific languages (DSL).

This is something that could motivate the seniors and benefit everyone.

I have worked in EDI in the past, and DSL’s would be perfect there. Of course, I’d do it in Ruby, but I’m biased.

But isn’t it hard to learn a new language?

The basic logical building blocks of all languages are more or less the same. To compare programmers to writers again: a good programmer can tell a solid, logical story, no matter what language or framework (s)he uses.

Regular learning will also make it easier to learn new things in the future. I like to think of this as keeping your ‘learning muscle’ in shape.

And it will certainly not hinder career opportunities to experiment with other tools.
Au contraire mon frère.

Finally, it will also help you attract new talent. A business that uses Java, but with some Ruby, PHP and Node.js where it makes sense, sounds a lot sexier to the kind of people you want (well, it does to me).

Some have even suggested using technology as a hiring filter.

“The programmers you’ll be able to hire to work on a Java project won’t be as smart as the ones you could get to work on a project written in Python. And the quality of your hackers probably matters more than the language you choose. Though, frankly, the fact that good hackers prefer Python to Java should tell you something about the relative merits of those languages.”

Paul Graham, Great Hackers

But don’t take my word (or Paul’s) for all this. Your mileage will vary. There are too many different situations to provide a ready-made answer. I hope I still gave you some food for thought and provided some insights though.

If there’s any meager advice I could give it would be this:

Talk to your developers
Are they using the right tools for the job?
Encourage experimentation. Without experimentation we’d still be using assembler (or gasp: Cobol!).
Have them investigate DSL’s.
Remember that this isn’t purely a tech/HR matter.

And know that something will always go wrong, and it often isn’t the technologies’ fault.

Had a good read? Sign up at here to get notified of future (dis)informative articles by email.

Agree? disagree? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

Header image by Duncan Hull, used under CC BY 2.0.

Your Developers Aren’t Bricklayers, They’re Writers

March 30, 2015 / Piet / 31 Comments

This article got voted Best “Everything Else” Article of May 2015 on CodeProject.
It trended on Reddit, where it generated an at times heated discussion.

If you have ten programmers, the best one is probably at least five times better compared to the worst one. No shit.

Define better: he works faster, produces less bugs and writes more readable, logical and maintainable code.

Programmers aren’t bricklayers or carpenters, but they are often treated as such. (not that there’s something wrong with these occupations)
“Why would I get a senior when I can get two juniors for the same price?”
“This feature takes three months for one programmer? Let’s just put two more on it so we can have it in a month.”

And why is that? Because there’s no decent, fool-proof way to measure the productivity of a programmer, I guess? Whatever can’t be measured, gets ignored. I’ve seen it too many times. [Tweet]

Also: would you rather have two juniors deliver your baby, fix your car, perform a lumbar puncture, or would you rather have one senior? Despite popular belief, the act of producing code is not a commodity. [Tweet]

The best programmers are up to 28 times better than the worst programmers, according to “individual differences” research. Given that their pay is never commensurate, they are the biggest bargains in the software field.

Robert Glass, Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering

If you really want to compare, then I’d say programmers are more like writers.

Some writers can produce a page turner that goes on to sell millions, while another might produce something that is so boring it extinguishes the fire it’s thrown in!
Yet, they both produced a book and thus they’re both writers, and you wouldn’t know the difference unless you’d really start reading the book.

Programming managers have long recognized wide productivity variations between good programmers and poor ones. But the actual measured magnitudes have astounded all of us. In one of their studies, Sackman, Erickson, and Grant were measuring performance of a group of experienced programmers. Within just this group the ratios between the best and worst performances averaged about 10:1 on productivity measurements and an amazing 5:1 on program speed and space measurements!

Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month

Let me give you an actual (yes, IRL) example

(Names have been changed to protect the innocent.)
The Company (no, not the CIA, just some software company) needs to implement a new module in their flag product. Mr. Lousy is free at the moment; great, let him start right away!

After four months of tinkering, Mr. Lousy is finally finished. The QA team finds loads of bugs and inconsistencies that need to be reproduced and reported back to Mr. Lousy. He then spends two weeks fixing those bugs and finally delivers a new version! Those are damn annoying bugs and Mr. Lousy often thinks about them while he stares into the distance.
This test/fix cycle is repeated two or three times.

The users have been promised this new module. Sales will be able to sign with some new customers that have been waiting for this module. There’s considerable pressure to just get it out there and it gets incorporated in the next release. Hurray! Champagne for everyone!

Unfortunately, the new module is still rather buggy. Customers are excellent at finding previously undetected bugs. So they contact support. The support team tries to find out what’s going wrong, whether the customer’s confused about the feature, whether they’re confused themselves, or whether it’s just a bug and can be reproduced. Yada, yada, yada. They decide to file a bug report. Unfortunately, Mr. Lousy is wreaking havoc—oh, I mean he is working on another project at this time, and he can’t just drop everything to fix them pestering bugs.

(And we haven’t even talked about whether the code is maintainable, logical and documented. Because sooner or later someone else will need to make enhancements, add features, etc.)

But, uh-oh…there are some bugs that Mr. Lousy can’t seem to fix. Also, new bugs turn up and no one is sure if they are indeed new, or just weren’t discovered before. Support gets pestered. Sales are getting annoyed, because those new customers find the module is too unreliable for day-to-day work and want to cancel their contract!

And, finally, the boss asks Mr. Rockstar Developer to take a look at the code.

Mr. Rockstar isn’t really able to make heads or tails of it and sees lots of senseless constructions. He advises to rewrite the code, thinking it’ll take about a month. He gets to work and hands over the finished module in just a few days longer than his original estimate (he’s Mr. Rockstar, not Mr. Perfect). Besides some minor bugs that are quickly detected by the QA team, everything works as expected. The QA team starts to worry: if they’d all be like him, they’d be out of a job. Mr. Lousy thinks that Mr. Rockstar is an arrogant twit, but this isn’t really relevant.

The revised module gets released. Everybody is happy because it finally works. Hurray!
Congrats! Rejoice! Champagne again!

By this time, it’s usually forgotten that Mr. Rockstar managed to do in about one month what Mr. Lousy couldn’t in 7-8 months.

The huge difference between these two developers only surfaced here because they performed the exact same task.

By writing less code that does more, and by writing maintainable code that has fewer bugs, a good developer takes pressure off of the QA staff, coworkers, and management, increasing productivity for everyone around. This is why numbers such as 28 times productivity are possible and might even seem low when you look at the big picture.

Phil Haack, 10 Developers For The Price Of One

Now, what is the worst that could happen here?

Mr. Rockstar eventually notices that he’s considerably more productive than Mr. Lousy. And, don’t be fooled, he doesn’t need to get the same task to find out. This is his job; he’s damn good at it and he easily recognizes bad code written by a bad programmer. Still, he’s pretty sure (or absolutely sure) that Mr. Lousy is earning more or less the same amount of pay. He gets disgruntled and/or he quits. And you’ve just lost a considerable amount of production power for your development team.

Even if he doesn’t quit, how do you think he’ll feel when a release/project is running late and the whole team is ‘punished’ with overtime? This is the inevitable waiting to happen.

If you’re really out of luck, he’ll be replaced by another Mr. Lousy.

So, why does this go unnoticed so often?

Because it’s easier to ignore this issue than to fix it—at least up to a certain point, and also because no one likes to rat on colleagues and be the cause of someone losing his job; because Mr. Lousy has three kids and just bought a new house; and, most importantly, because it’s very hard to measure a developer’s productivity, unless you’re really able to compare them both doing the same task as in the above story.

Are you a developer? Do you agree? Please let me know in the comments. Almost all non-tech people think ‘one developer day’ is an exact measurement. [Tweet]

Now, I’ve been thinking a lot about this: measuring a developer’s productivity. I’ve often been jealous of salesmen because their remuneration is based on their accomplishments. I’ve got some ideas (still ripening) on how to separate the wheat from the chaff. I’ve also been thinking about and will be posting about how to identify, attract and retain the Mr. Rockstar developers.

Who am I and why am I telling you this

I’ve worked as a professional developer (that is, getting paid for it during a daytime job) for over 10 years. I made my first commercial product (a game) in 1989. Although this didn’t make me rich, it still felt great (I was 16 at the time). A couple of years later, I sold the idea of one of my games, and it eventually got released on the Nintendo Gameboy (and other formats) by Bandai! I can tell you from experience that it’s very satisfying to see something you thought up (including the name) actually being sold in a shop.

In 2008, I took a non-tech job at a very technology-driven company. I wanted to learn about running a business in general, about the sales process,… everything non-tech that happens in business. Well, my tech chops probably got me hired and are still very useful, but they are no longer an essential part of the job.

I don’t program for a living anymore (or rather: at the moment), but often tinker with various new technologies in after-hours projects. To me, it’s the same as reading a good book—exciting and relaxing at the same time.

In my current role, I often encounter people who express certain misconceptions or who lack basic knowledge of the development process. In their role (often CxO), this basic knowledge could make a huge difference.

Enlightening them isn’t on our agendas during these encounters and I usually just leave it at that. When appropriate, with the CxOs who I know on a more personal level, I’ve tried to convince them of their incorrect or incomplete view of the software development process (usually to no avail).

Now, because I like to think via writing, and I really think I can provide value here, I’m making a series of blog posts about the various clichés and misconceptions I’ve encountered in this industry.

Header photo by Moresheth, used under CC BY 2.0 / Cropped from original

Twitter traffic might not be what it seems

August 12, 2009 / Piet / 1 Comment

Are you using bit.ly stats to measure interest in the links you post on twitter?

I’ve been hearing for a while about people claiming to get the majority of their traffic originating from twitter these days.

Now, I’ve been playing with the twitter ruby gem recently, doing various experiments which I’ll not go into detail here because they could be regarded as spamming… if I’d conduct them on a large scale, that is.
It’s scary to see people actually engaging with @replies crafted with some regular expressions and eliza-like trickery on status updates found using the twitter api. I’m wondering how Twitter is going to contain the coming spam-flood.

When posting links I used bit.ly as url shortener, since this one seems to be the de-facto standard on twitter. A nice thing about bit.ly is that it shows some basic stats about the redirects it performs for your shortened links.

To my surprise, most links posted almost immediately resulted in several visitors. Now, seeing that I was posting the links together with some information concerning what the link is about, I concluded that the people who were actually clicking the links should be very targeted visitors.
This felt a bit like free adwords, and I suddenly started to understand why everyone was raving about getting traffic from twitter.

How wrong I was! (and I think several 1000 online marketers with me)

On the destination site I used a traffic logging solution that works by including a little javascript snippet in your pages. It seemed that somehow all visitors disappeared after the bit.ly redirect and before getting to the site, because I was hardly seeing any visitors there. So I started investigating what was happening: by looking at the logfiles of the destination site, and by making my own ‘shortened’ urls by doing redirects using a very short domain name I own. This way, I could check the apache access_log before the redirects.

Most user agents turned out to be bots without a doubt. Here’s an excerpt of user-agents awk’ed from apache’s access_log for a time period of about one hour, right after posting some links:

AideRSS 2.0 (postrank.com) Java/1.6.0_13 Java/1.6.0_14 libwww-perl/5.816 MLBot (www.metadatalabs.com/mlbot) Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;MSIE 5.01; Windows -NT 5.0 - real-url.org) Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Twitturls; +http://twitturls.com) Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Viralheat Bot/1.0; +http://www.viralheat.com/) Mozilla/5.0 (Danger hiptop 4.6; U; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050920 Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-us; rv:1.9.0.2) Gecko/2008092313 Ubuntu/9.04 (jaunty) Firefox/3.5 OpenCalaisSemanticProxy PycURL/7.18.2 PycURL/7.19.3 Python-urllib/1.17 Twingly Recon twitmatic Twitturly / v0.6 Wget/1.10.2 (Red Hat modified) Wget/1.11.1 (Red Hat modified)

Of the few user-agents that seem ‘real’ at first, half are originating from an ip-address used by Amazon EC2. And I doubt people are setting op proxies on there.

Oh yeah, Googlebot (the real deal, from a legit google owned address) is sucking up posted links like fresh oysters.
I guess google is trying to make sure in advance to never be beaten by twitter in the ‘realtime search’ department. Actually, I think it’d be almost stupid NOT to post any new pages/posts/websites on Twitter, it must be one of the fastest ways to get a Googlebot visit.

Same experiment with a real, established twitter account

Now, because I was posting the url’s either as ‘status’ messages or directed @people, on a test-account with hardly any (human) followers, I checked again using the twitter accounts from a commercial site I’m involved with. These accounts all have between 500 and 1000 targeted (I think) followers. I checked the destination access_logs and also added ‘my’ redirect after the bit.ly redirect: same results, although seemingly a bit higher real visitor/bot ratio.

Btw: one of these account was ‘punished’ with a 1 week lock recently because the same (1 one!) status update was sent that was sent right before using another account. They got an email explaining the lock because the account didn’t act according to their TOS. I can’t find anything in their TOS about it, can you?
I don’t think Twitter is on the right track punishing a legit account, knowing the trickery I had been doing with it’s api went totally unpunished. I might be wrong though, I often am.

On the other hand: this commercial site reported targeted traffic and actual signups from visitors coming from Twitter. The ones that are really real visitors are also very targeted. I’m just not sure if the amount of work involved could hold up against an adwords campaign.

Reposting the same link over and over again helps

On thing I noticed: It helps to keep on reposting the same links with regular intervals.
I guess most people only look at their first page when checking out recent posts of the ones they’re following, or don’t look too far back when performing a search.

Now, this probably isn’t according to the twitter TOS. Actually, it might be spamming but no-one is obligated to follow anyone else of course.

This way, I was getting more real visitors and less bots. To my surprise (when my programmer’s hat is on) there were still repeated visits from the same bots coming from the same ip-addresses. Did they expect to find something else when visiting for a 2nd or 3rd time? (actually,this gave me an idea: you can’t change a link once it’s posted, but you can change where it redirects to)
Most bots were smart enough not to follow the same link again though.

Are you successful in getting real visitors from Twitter?
Are you only relying on bit.ly to provide traffic stats?

Google Chrome OS

July 8, 2009 / Piet / 1 Comment

It’s about time someone took this initiative: Google Chrome OS

I especially like the following:

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

I recently had the ‘pleasure’ witnessing several 60+ yr old friends and family (all respect for everyone in their 2nd or 3rd youth) buying their first pc, taking their first steps using a pc and the net.

Have you ever seen the gazillions of little ‘useful’ tools that are installed on a new standard Vista pc or laptop ? This is like learning to drive a new car and being placed in an airplane cockpit. And all the messages one gets about virus/security checks, fingerprint nog being enrolled, trial period expiring (because half those really useful tools come with a trial period), … If I was in their shoes, being confronted with this as a total newbie, I guess I’d just give up pretty soon. As a matter of fact, I actually gave up on Vista on my work-laptop, it was driving me crazy. Thank god I was allowed to install XP. I’m a Linux user at home, and Vista was such a frustrating experience that Windows XP actually felt like breath of fresh air.

And what are those people using? Email, browsing…. and maybe writing a little letter now and then or storing their photo’s if they have a digital camera. Actually (side note), I get the impression that hearing about facebook is a major motivator for the digital newbies to finally take the plunge, buy a pc and get on-line.

And OK, we’ve seen initiatives like this before, but Google is a brand everyone knows… unlike Ubuntu, Debain or Mandriva. Google = God. If I was Microsoft I’d be wetting my pants knowing Google was about to release their own OS, without a doubt fully optimized to use their own on-line office suit. On the other hand, the old adage ‘no one ever got fired for choosing Microsoft’ still holds a lot of truth.

I hope I’ll be able to give it a big thumbs up if a would-be pc-user asks me what kind of pc/OS they should go for in the near future.
On the other hand, if I’d do that, I’m pretty sure a couple of weeks later I’d get a call asking how to install this game or photo editing tool they got from one of their Windows using friends… or that nifty photo-printer they just bought. But then, I also get those questions now from newbie Windows users. It takes a couple of years before Newbie pc users understand that some things just don’t work and aren’t worth the time trying to fix them. I’d just wish they’d go back to the shop when something doesn’t work. You also don’t let you mechanic friend try to fix a problem with your brand new car. But that’s another story…

Wait and see…

Quiet 2007

March 10, 2008 / Piet

Ok, 2007 was a bit quiet on the blogging side. Been squeezing the max out of every minute of spare time and been working/learning as hell. Maybe more about what I’ve been upto later.

The layout started looking a bit stale so I modded a layout I like (credits: see bottom of page) to something I like even more (gustibus and stuff) and gave WP the much needed update. So there, giving a reason to unsubscribe to the 3 people that had forgotten that they were following my feed!

CSSVista: Internet Explorer Live CSS Editing

March 10, 2008 / Piet

This tool has been around for quite some time, but it often surprises me how few people (also ‘professional’ ones) seem to have heard about it. Since it’s the only FREE live CSS IE editing tool I know, and since (added bonus!) it actually offers split-view Firefox/Internet Explorer editing, there’s no harm in spreading the word a bit.

Get it at: http://litmusapp.com/labs. DL link is sent to email address provided. However, I’m pretty sure they honour their no-spam policy.

Oh yes… it only runs on windows. But since there’s no escape having to consider IE users browsing your site, it’s almost worth keeping a windows installation for (that, and homebanking).

Tip: If your site requires a login and you have problems logging in using CSSVista: save the page you want to edit using Firefox and open it in CSSVista for editing.

And just in case you’ve been hiding under a rock, for day-to-day live CSS editing use (running fine under Linux!) there’s the webdev swiss army knife: Chris Pederick Web Developer Extension.

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