February 2005 Blog Posts
Microsoft has opened registrations for its latest Technical Roadshow which will get repeated in four cities between April and June. The developer track is purely on VS 2005 and SQL 2005 so could be pretty useful. Maybe I'll see you at the Birmingham Motorcycle Museum on May 24/5?
[Listening to: The Kill by Fugazi]
I've just put my Peavey EVH Wolfgang guitar up for sale on ebay. It's not so much that I don't play it as I don't need two guitars any more and it needs a nice new owner to care for it. If you feel like bidding, you've got until Sunday night next week.
Great. I guess Ipona will flip over to this as soon as Dave gets the time. Where did my test skins go?
I'm thrilled to announce the immediate availability of Community Server version 1.0:
Download Now!
[Via Rob Howard's Blog] And if, like me, you've been running dasBlog on a personal site and see no reason why this is of interest, on of CS's developers Ken Roberson has written an article on how to adapt it to work exactly as a single person site rather than a community. Then of course you have the added gallery and forum features, tempered neatly with...
Anyone watch The Apprentice? I really like this programme. Maybe reality shows like Big Brother ran out of steam a while ago but this take on it is much more watchable. Getting fourteen wannabe millionaire business people battle it out for a _really_ high-paid salary in either Donald Trump or Sir Alan Sugar's empire is fascinating. And you even pick up a few things about business as well. The UK (Sugar) edition of this began last week. It already feels different too. The difference in tone is the same between CSI amd CSI:New York. The colour of it is bleached...
Went and met the Iraqi businessmen and women attending Jane's conference on Monday. A valentine's date with thirty people. Nice. Very nice people though - all of them. There was the group who wanted to try clubbing, there was the group who couldn't get out of their deep blue funk. Then there was the conversation about languages. This group had all learnt English as a second language throughout most of school and all spoke it very well. Then I learnt they like French, Italian, German, and even Latin. "Latin?" I asked. "Yes, we love Jennifer Lopez, Ricky Martin. Latin Music...
Finally, a copy of Beg VB.NET Databases has arrived through the door. It looks good and is now available from Amazon. If you'd like to reserve and buy a copy online, there's a list of vendors here.
New build of MS AntiSpyware to install. Seems to work nicely except with RSSBandit and BitTorrent which it always re-identifies as a potential threat each time I restart my box. I guess this is because it can only identify RSSBandit as 'r' and BitTorrent as the app with no program name whatsoever. I'm not sure who to ask - MS or Bram and Dare.
Microsofts antispyware team made version 1.0.509 available for download a couple of hours ago. You can use Help > About to see what youre currently running, but unless youre another Microsoftie with the latest internal bits,...
You know it's a bad idea from the first few frames of the movie. You can see a million ways ti could go wrong. And then it does go wrong. And you don't care - you just gotta watch. Mick Foley wrote in his autobiography how he would practice highfalls by jumping from his roof onto mattresses in the garden to break his fall. The clip ably demonstrates why you should never use a trampoline to do the same.
My first day proper on the dotCoop project and while I'm waiting for tech services to ghost my new box, I've started looking at the RFCs which define the protocols I need to know. It's been a while since I logged onto rfc-editor.org but the first thing I saw was the in memoriam page for Jon Postel, the original RFC editor. Looking at it and Vint Cerf's eulogy, which is itself an rfc (2468), it felt good to find a true endpoint to the interconnected information highway. A area of zen, tranquil and calm, full of respect and love for...
Goldmund - Corduroy Road. Just achingly beautiful music - a treated piano and a bit of echo. Recommended to all lovers of non-chart music.
[Listening to: Yamase by Goldmund]
It's my final day at 3Form before I make the switch over to Pandanet. I've had a remarkably good and educational time here and what I've learnt should see me in good stead for a while. I've been a part of the Dojo, BSA, and CSC projects to name but three and the quality of the stuff they produce just gets better. Thanks everyone. Who knows, maybe I'll be back someday.
Interesting bug this afternoon. The click handler for a button on a page redirected to another page at the end of the code that was due to run after postback but actually ran twice with the redirect seemingly doing nothing what so ever.
private void btnSave_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
...
Context.Response.Redirect(redirectUrl, true);
}
Eventually it emerged that the redirect wasn't working because it was being called during a postback. Essentially, two calls to Redirect were being made - one implicitly by the postback and one explicitly by the handler code. The internal call took priority and a ThreadAbortException was being raised...
Dare and Torsten have announced their latest beta of RSS Bandit v1.3. Seems stable so far. The delicious plug-in is now installed by default even though the wBloggar plug-in is still the original one rather than Phil Haack's more useful one. We are now feature complete for the next release of RSS Bandit. Interested users can download it at http://rssbandit.sourceforge.net/RssBandit.1.3.0.18.Wolverine.Beta.zip. All bugs specific to the previous alpha release have been fixed. The next steps for us are finish working on documentation, translations and fixing any bugs that are reported during the beta with the intention of shipping a final release...
More good news from friendly film projects. Squier and James have won through to the regional part of the UK Film Council's Script Passage to develop Flamingo Swing further. This is a really positive thing. It's already pretty good and part of the Passage is an opportunity to pitch it to studios for actual production. Who knows, Summer 2006 could be very exciting indeed.
We started filming Bernadette's Crucible again yesterday. Unexpectedly, I was roped in to perform my first speaking role in front of the cameras. Quite what I was expected to do there I'm not sure, but all went well and I might even survive the cut. That counts towards my equity membership. I just need two more speaking parts and a nom de plume. Given my current rate of picking them up, I might get that membership in 2012.
New England beat Philadelphia 24-21 to win their third Super Bowl in four years.[Via BBC News | News Front Page | World Edition]
Well, I started work with him today as I mentioned earlier, and now James is giving tips on surviving his interviews. Wonder if I would qualify?
The trouble is, most programmers have nothing to differentiate themselves.
Check. Am writer \ publisher in programmer's clothing.
I also don't get much of a feeling of enthusiasm for technology from these people. I guess if you've spent ten years fighting with Visual SourceSafe and COM, you lose your joy at discovering a funky new development toy in the end. I want people who have a demonstrable history of hacking about with technology. I...
With Windows XP 64bit now in RC1, and Windows 2003 Server 64bit also looking like a healthy bet for the summer, what else is around? Andrew Duthie points out that MS is now running Route 64, a 64bit 3day training lab. For those of us who can't afford it or don't live in the country meanwhile, planetamd64.com contains the basic info you need on the hardware driver front, Avast Antivirus and Agnitum Outpost Firewall both have 64bit versions and both SQL Server 2000/2005 and VS.NET 2005 both have 64bit beta versions. WHat more could you need? Oh wait. There's no...
It's always a little odd, you first day at a new job. For me, odder than usual. As I was leaving, the job offer was just arriving in the post. As I commuted in my car for the first time ever, I hit my first rush hour traffic jam, even though it was 9.30 rather than 8.30. When I got in, the boss made me a cup of tea, which was nice. And then I sat in a meeting room for the rest of the day in my capacity as information sink for the new dotcoop team at Pandanet. It's...
I'm running Windows 2003 Server inside Virtual PC on my WinXP box which has a USB Broadband modem attached to it. But I cannot figure out how to get the virtual server to access the modem. It doesn't see the modem as it has no virtual USB ports. Ben Armstrong has a great post on enabling Shared Networking (NAT) which sounds useful but isn't. So the question remains. I want to get this OS activated and patched. How do I get it to see the internet. There is no other network. Just this box. Any ideas anyone?