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April 2005 Entries
I have Thrush
No wait, that headline isn't quite right. I mean I hear a Thrush. Down on th patio. It's a glorious day here and the windows are open wide, and the thrush is happily bashing snails on the flagstones. Whack, whack, whack. Noisy little fellow. Well, when I say little, I mean huge - the snails obviously aren't for his family, since he's a bit tubby. But then so am I, and less snails means more chance for the Hosta which they tend to decimate every year. The snails that is, not the thrush. Unless they've developed a hitherto unknown habit of eating leaves. Anyway, I digress. Back to drawing pictures of the ASP.NET page lifecylce.
[Listening to: Feelin' Love - Paula Cole - This Fire]
posted @ Friday, April 29, 2005 3:51 PM | Feedback (2)
Movies, don't talk to me about movies
Hmm. Wired have a review of H2G2. I think they miss the point, in that this is the vision of the movie DNA wanted, not what Hollywood wanted. That's why it never got made before. I know Wired is a US magazine, but they don't get the importance of the film actually being made and staying true to the quirky writing. Nor do they look outside their borders - there are other, more famous red rocks than those in the Southwest USA. Jeez, learn a little about the world please.
[Listening to: Prophesy - Nitin Sawhney - Prophesy]
posted @ Friday, April 29, 2005 11:23 AM | Feedback (2)
Life, don't talk to me about life
There is something inescabably good about life when you go to see a good movie and have a large plate of fish and chips with a beer afterwards. Yesterday was generally a bad day; didn't feel great and didn't get much writing done. Very DNA. So I decided to abandon work at 5:30 and head out to see The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Simply put, it's a triumph. Douglas would have loved it. Interestingly the audience contained quite a lot of youngsters, probably ranging from 10 to 16. The rest were in the middling years who, like me, probably remember it from the original radio series. Anyway, go and see it. It's marvelous.
[Listening to: Take It - Staind - Break The Cycle [UK]]
posted @ Friday, April 29, 2005 8:39 AM | Feedback (1)
Upcoming talks
I'll be at Developer Developer Developer on Saturday 14th May, which is a free day of sessions by community speakers, held at Microsoft in Reading, UK. After that will be the VBUG Spring Conference on 18th May in Sheffield.
[Listening to: Land of the Free - Thea Gilmore - The Lipstick Conspiracies]
posted @ Wednesday, April 27, 2005 10:34 AM | Feedback (5)
It's a hardware problem
Having spent last week with Alex (who is feeling much better now) and using his Media Center box I feel I need one. I can't afford one, nor can I really justify one since I have a perfectly good (nay excellent) TiVo, but you know, geeks and their toys. I want to buy one that is small, quiet and fits under the TV, so will start investigating. But, in the meantime I borrowed Alex's Black Gold Digital TV card (he's still on analogue as digital TV in the wilds of Derbyshire is, err, let's just say erratic) and intended to install MCE 2005 on an old machine to play with. I want to write some plug-ins. So I picked an old Pentium 3 box, knowing it would be slow, but it's only for testing. A dialog saying "you're graphics card is not supported" put paid to that, until I found details about hacks to get around it. Several hours later and MCE starts, but won't play videos on TV - just a black screen and a rather pained expression from the machine. So I order a new video card, a relatively cheap one since I don't need all that gaming nonsense. This is at 10am Monday morning and at 1pm Tuesday the card arrives - wow excellent service (from Scan in case you're interested). I wait until the evening before trying it, but it doesn't fit. Apparantly there are different types of AGP slot. Who knew? Lot's of people it seems, except me in my little dark dungeon. Investigation proves I have an AGP 1x slot (it's a P3 remember) and the card requires 2x upwards. Sigh. Maybe now is time to upgrade that box with a new motherboard. The next phase is to try an old NVidia card I have in another machine, but that proves insipid too. So I abandon the P3 machine and try my music box - this is the one I have the guitars and keyboard (of the musical kind) plugged into and is a P4 with a more modern motherboard. In goes the new card, on goes MCE and lo! Success. That was, of course, round about midnight and I'm too busy to spend more time playing, but it works. Lesson of the day. If you're a software guy, steer clear of the hardware.
[Listening to: Industrial Revolution, Overture - Jean Michel Jarre - Revolutions [UK]]
posted @ Wednesday, April 27, 2005 10:22 AM | Feedback (1)
Global warning? Pah!
I know you expect variable weather in spring, but today has officially been weird. I awoke to snow which had all disappeared once I'd showered. Since then it's been glorious sunshine, with black clouds menacing on the horizon. About 5 minutes ago what can only be described as a blizzard appeared. A sort of cross between snow and hail and now we have big fluffy snowflakes whiting out the view. It's almost unreal, like as though someone is standing just out of view tipping a bag of fake snow into a fan. Actually I haven't got up to check so that could well be the case, but it seems unlikely.
[Listening to: Cool for Cats - Squeeze - Singles 45's and Under]
posted @ Friday, April 08, 2005 6:10 PM | Feedback (2)
MVP Day
Yesterday was the UK MVP day down at Microsoft Reading, which as usual was a fantastic day. A wide variety of talks, including a short one by me on how to get into writing and publishing. One amazing session was from Microsoft Research where we were showed some of the projects they are working on - pretty darn cool, and the hope that some of it might appear in Longhorn. What's interesting for me about these days is meeting people of different ages and skills, whose specialist areas are nothing to do with mine. When you're wrapped up in your own little area you tend to forget all of the other products that Microsoft provide and the amount of effort the MVPs put in to support the community. The evening event was great too, with the entertainment being The Roving Artist, who just completely amazed me. He'd stand beside you and within a minute or so you'd have a lifelike silhouette. Very accurate and so much detail. Fabulous. He even got my pint into mine, so it represents me well. The evening did, of course, continue until the early hours, and I retired at 3am. The last made it until 5:30 apparantly and they didn't look too bad at 9am for breakfast. I'm way to old for this and spent most of the next day recovering. Today was office re-arrangement day, so I finally have masses of cupboard space and shelving. Much better since I can hide a lot of junk away now.
[Listening to: Pale Movie - Saint Etienne - Too Young To Die]
posted @ Friday, April 08, 2005 5:21 PM | Feedback (1)
Keyboard shortcuts
Dave's top tip for keyboard shortcuts - make sure they don't clash with other applications. I'm recording a demo for a presentation using Camtesia, which uses F9 to start and stop recording. I'm 5 or 6 minutes into the presentation and start the debugging bit, manually placing a breakpoint in VS 2005. I continue with the demo, hit the breakpoint, press F9 to disable the breakpoint for next time around and continue with the demo. Completely forgetting of course, that since I'm recording F9 is now handled by Camtesia so I've stopped the recording. Another few minutes of recording and I switch to the recording window to stop it when I see it's already stopped because of the F9. Bother (which wasn't the word I used, but I try and be polite on this blog). I could try and record the end section and splice them together, but I know it's going to look awful, so it's start again, remembering to use the mouse to enable/disable breakpoints this time. Sigh.
[Listening to: Bob Harris Country / Paul Jone - Richard Thompson - Action Packed: The Best of the Capitol Years]
posted @ Friday, April 01, 2005 10:22 AM | Feedback (1)
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