web engineer - chillfire

Silverlight 4– MVVM – binding & dependency property injection

2011-10-28T16:18:00.001Z

I am not going to try and explain MVVM in depth, there are loads of post about what it is and how it works In essence its splitting the code and UI into separate (and testable) layers within your application while trying to keep the business logic out of the UI.

What I thought I should do is a simple example of one way you could bind your data.

One of this problems I hit very early on, was how do I use MVVM and allow data to be passed through from parent to child UserControls (these have to be generic - one for the address, one for a single phone number, etc) that are coded to validate themselves without having to understand the data context they are being used in. The big plan is to use them across multiple projects without having to rewrite/create each from scratch every time.

I started by dumping everything into one massive view model, this was the wrong way – it was nearly impossible to manage the code and with each control only needing the field(s) to do its single job it proved tough.

I looked at all the MVVM frameworks around, all are great, but none do all of the tasks I seemed to need. I also wanted to understand how MVVM worked in the background and using a framework would hide this from me.

No framework this time, I just coded my own simple modelBase to manage the standard bits and bobs.

What I ended up doing with the databinding is an MVVM application that uses dependency properties in the control code behind to manage data binding to some UI elements while still using MVVM to do the logic and control data storage.

I am building a Silverlight control to manage/create new customers so they can be vetted/contracts created etc for a telecoms company.

I have broken the form up into a number UserControls to try and make development easier and hopefully make each UserControl useable in other parts of the application.

The control forms a part of a larger control/view that manages an entire customer account, so being able to access the same customer data across (possibly) multiple Views is important.

How I did it (this time)

I am using web services to build the objects/classes/observable collections, these are all stored in a set of static classes that are all run before the application loads the UI, I had issues with loading everything asynchronously as if the customer loaded before the list of categories for example it would crash (there is probably a work around for that).

The main page holds all user UserControls , each UserControl is populated with static data before I load the customer view and ViewModel which will set the selectedvalue on any databound controls or text property for text etc.

Injection into user control code behind;

I am adding a binding my Customer ViewModel object to the LayoutRoot grid’s DataContextProperty, however you could add this to any property on any control. Or you could add a single field from the DataContext as well to any UI property.

My child UserControl code behind =

namespace Project.Controls.Customer
{
    public partial class ContractDetails : UserControl
    {
        public ContractDetails()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
            LayoutRoot.SetBinding(Grid.DataContextProperty,
                  new System.Windows.Data.Binding
                  {
                      Source = this,
                      Path = new PropertyPath("PropName"),
                      Mode = System.Windows.Data.BindingMode.TwoWay
                  });
        }

public static DependencyProperty DataProperty =
DependencyProperty.Register("PropName", typeof(GenericDataService.queueCustomer), typeof(ContractDetails), null);

        public GenericDataService.queueCustomer PropName
        {
            get { return (GenericDataService.queueCustomer)GetValue(DataProperty); }
            set
            {
                SetValue(DataProperty, value);
            }
        }
    }
}

I hva set the Mode to TwoWay, you could set this to OneWay, OneTime or change this at runtime depending who who is logged to force the binding to be readonly.

I then pass the data into the child UserControl above in the xaml of the parent control;

<my:ContractDetails PropName="{Binding TheData }" x:Name="contractDetails1" />

One last step is to set the text property of the textbox that is on the child UserControl , in this case it is the phone number, I use a text filter command to only allow numbers and there will be some UK phone number validation as well.

From the ComboBox sample above you can see the control is filled with data form my Static data class, however the selected item is set by the Customer ViewModel data passed in through the dependency property up in the first example,

(I have tried to show the linking between the three steps by colouring the keywords, sorry if this is confusing for anyone)

It is important to remember that even in Xaml the binding keys are case sensitive so in the above example PropName="{Binding TheData }" is okay, but PropName="{Binding Thedata }" will not work.

The above works well, but there are instances where you end up doing the validation on the control within the ChildUserControl in the code behind rather than the ViewModel, this is not perfect MVVM, but it works, so is good enough for me – at least until I work out how to do it all in the view model.

Summary

From what I have seen so far, its only been a few months of a steep learning curve (decided to move form VB to C# at the same time – glad I did), but there is no limit to what you can do in MVVM/Silverlight/Xaml, its really down to working around the eccentricities of the framework to make it do what you want it to.
Databinding is one of them, which I hope the above example explains - at least one way to do it.
Please note this may not be the best way, however in the rough and tumble of agile development, it works and it has shipped.

Silverlight 4 – error in FrameworkElementMetaData

2011-08-11T08:17:00.001Z

Booted up my PC and opened the latest project only to find when I try and view any of the silverlight VStudio just gives me this error: The type initializer for 'Microsoft.Expression.Platform.Silverlight.SilverlightCommonDesignTimeProperties' threw an exception. - Nice and helpful.

There was only 1 result on google that sent me to https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/669751/the-type-initializer-for-microsoft-expression-platform-silverlight-silverlightcommondesigntimeproperties-threw-an-exception#

Thanks to dgcaron for his workaround;

I had this very same issue when i installed the WP7.1 templates from the MVVM light toolkit. i was able to build and use my projects after i :
- removed the system.windows.interactivity.dll reference
- cleaned my sln
- readded the reference

Activity.log – visual studio 2010?

2011-08-09T10:14:00.001Z

Every now and then I have a pop up saying that something went wrong in visual studio and it is probably an add-on component that did it and I should run visual studio in /log mode to see what is happening in the activity.log

After a little playing in the command line trying to get this so work, I found this; http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2010/02/24/troubleshooting-with-the-activity-log.aspx by Bill Weinberger

A great post, explaining how to do it and what to look for!

Now to work out what is happening.

Identity theft how simple is it

2011-08-02T20:45:00.001Z

Armed with a few spare minutes and nothing but a mobile number for an eBay seller I was picking some kit up of I wondered how much I could find out about this person?

Step 1 – Asked Google

Google gave me a few spammy hits plus a link to a page on Facebook called "I have lost my phone, please tell me your mobile number again", I mean come on people. There were about 90 mobile phone numbers alongside this persons ‘friends’ names.

Step 2 – Facebook

Following through to the person profile for my ebay seller, a quick skim through their wall showed a load of birthday wishes a few months back, whilst their profile details mentioned they graduated from XXX university in 2002.
He also had a picture of his pride and joy, a beat up VW polo with its number plate visible in the photo.
So some simple maths gave me their date of birth +/- a year.

Step 3 – some more public sites

A quick scout of Linkedin gave me a few more clues on where they worked and adding this to the Facebook data a rough idea of where they lived too.

Twitter had no results, so they weren’t a geek (he works in a hotel btw)

Via BT, whitepages and 123people, using name and rough location I got a hit on an address, same surname but different initials (maybe lived with parents?)

So in half an hour I had;

1. Full name
2. Date of Birth
3. Postal Address
4. List of friends,mobile numbers (and all their names too, possibly DOBs)
5. Current employer and their address
6. Car number plate, although not sure what I could use it for?

This is probably enough to do bad stuff with, or at least cause some havoc.
I really don’t think people understand how easy it is now to piece together a full identity of just about anyone.

Yes there are bad people on the net that look for this stuff, but we really need to make it hard for them don’t we?

Prelude

I picked up my eBay purchase (from the address I found above it happens – strike 1), from the sellers father (strike 2), when I asked how his son was getting on at his new job (maybe pushing it a bit far with this), he said good but then looked at me a little bemused.

But I had already paid for the items so all is fair in identity theft and eBay purchases.

Keep it locked away

Its a dirt internet, keep it clean and hide the data you don’t want people to know about. You wouldn’t write your PC password on a post-it note and stick it to your screen would you?

Running a developer event – sponsors

2011-07-05T10:04:00.000Z

They may not come through when you think they will and even if they say they will, others though will come out of the wood work. But they will never find you first.

But don’t let that put you off!

There are a few or companies who support the UK MS development community that you could say will be guaranteed to help out in some way, make contact with these guys as early as possible as they always run their sponsorships on a first come (with the best idea) first served. And they take the longest to get money signed off and paid.

Now its the hard(er) bit, start sending emails out to every business contact you know, anyone could be a sponsor. I didn’t go for the give us cash or forget it, it was important for me to get ‘stuff’ that could keep the costs down and I never said no to a sponsorship offer.
The email that went out was heavily focused on what I was trying to do, not on how much cash I needed, actually for most first contact emails I never asked for cash. If there was a positive email, then I would send a gracious thanks and mentioning cash needed.

My initial thoughts were to ask for small amounts (trying to avoid a ‘no’), after speaking to someone who knows about running and organising a lot of successful events (Simon Sabin from SQLBits), I realised that I should be asking for the full amount from everyone and seeing what happens… First try on this was surprisingly effective.

Don’t stop looking for sponsors, you cannot be certain of anything until the cash arrives.

Be prepared to cover some(or all) of the costs for the event yourself, hopefully it wont come to that. But you do need to bear this in mind, this will also keep you focussed on finding both sponsorship and the right venue.

Phase1 – the people you know
Phase 2 – the people you know through people
Phase 3 – random companies that you have seen advertising in the magazines you read, who may or may not have any link to the event
Phase 4 – repeat 1,2,3

It takes balls (not literally) to run an event, if you approach people confidently and know what you want to achieve you will get a better response. If you know what the sponsors can get out of the event, you will get a better response.

My initial emails were basically crap, it took me awhile to get my story of what I was trying to achieve straight.

Once you have your sponsors, do keep them in the loop, now this is not something I did on the run up to dev4good, but I will be sending a thanks and summary to them all within a few days of the event finishing.
While the event is on, make sure every attendee knows who the sponsors are and what they paid for, I did a lot of this on day1, but forgot about this on day 2.

And most importantly don’t lie to sponsors, ie this is our 5th year, we have 200 people registered, your closest rival has given us £xxx etc It will only get you bad press when the truth comes out and you will find it very hard if not impossible to get these people to ever take you seriously.

Well that’s a few bits on sponsors, don’t hesitate to contact me if you want to find out more, tweet me @chillfire

Running a developer event - venue

2011-07-05T10:03:00.000Z

My biggest piece of advice to anyone looking to run ANY event
Get your venue sorted FIRST

That’s about it really, except a few other things to consider;

suitable for the Event

Make sure you focus on venues that fit your event, there is no use chasing a venue that is not suitable, if you can go to the venue before you say yes or put cash down, expect to out a deposit down well in advance of the big day, to secure the booking.
Keep in contact with the venue, make sure you know what they need from you and that they know exactly what you are expecting them to do.
When you go to the venue, try and imagine how the event will run in your head, ask about everything you may need and make sure anything verbally agreed is also bounced around in emails too.

Location

This will set your cost per person straight off.
In London its going to be a lot more than in the sticks, saying that you wont get as many people travelling to somewhere that doesn’t have a train for example.

Infrastructure

Public transport is a must, if it’s out of range to walk, then is their parking?

Accommodation

If you plan to run the event over night or not, people may want to stay the night before to save an early trip. I used a hostel as an option for anyone who didn’t want to kip on the floor. Saying that a few said they would have crashed on the floor if they had to. Also I could have saved a lot of cash by booking beds rather than dorm rooms that were not full due to last minute drop outs.
I was very lucky when I found www.hammersmithriverside.co.uk, this was all down to an opportune email. They allowed me to use the venue overnight (this was the biggest hurdle for dev4good, I wanted people to be able to work through the night if they had to (or sleep for free). I spoke to a few businesses and insurance was the problem, so was security. I tried real estate agents as well, looking for empty buildings, but again insurance and security were the problem.
I also looked into YHA hostels, as the initial event idea was for it to be a code retreat, but there are very few that have an internet connection (even 3G) and even fewer that are close to civilisation – they are a very cheap option though.

Services

Can you get the internet, is their 3G, how many people are you planning to have on site?
We had 25 people using 2 wifi points on the same Adsl and we crashed this quite regularly. One team ended up in the pub next door using theirs for a few hours. If you are using a corporate venue this probably wont be an issue, but do go wandering around your venue and make note of any ‘public’ wifi spots, cafes etc

Food

After the venue itself this is the second biggest cost, at dev4good I covered all food costs + coffee/tea/biscuits through the venue’s kitchen. We ordered pizza in on day 2 as it is a pre-requisite for any coder event.

backup

I didn’t have one, but its always worth having a backup in mind, especially if you are booking a long way in advance, don’t stop looking for other venues, you never know hen you might need them.
If you have any questions, tweet @chillfire and I will see what I can help with

dev4good day 1

2011-07-02T23:21:00.001Z

Day one has been a great day for learning!

The 3 charities all came to us with completely different problems.

Hope and Play (www.hopeandplay.org) were looking for a way to locate and manage resources. And allow other charities or people to do the same.

The Ministry of Stories (www.ministryofstories.org) are looking for a way to get more young people writing stories and publishing these to the world. All while helping to generate a little more cash along the way.

The Design and Craft Council (www.craftanddesigncouncil.org.uk) want to be able to automate their awards processes

For me one of the big worries about the event was how to get the teams to work on all the projects.

Fortunately after much post it noting and milling about, the teams magically built themselves!

Then came much discussion and planning

Then the internet and wireless connections started to fail our multi user downloading of updates/platforms/frameworks. So much so that one of the teams retired to the pub next door to use their wireless (well that’s their story anyway)

More pics from day 1

http://www.flickr.com/photos/64749203@N03

Its been a great day and there will be more code and frivolity tomorrow.

These are not the mind waves you are looking for

2011-06-22T21:44:00.001Z

A few weeks ago I was watching the ‘Best if the Gadget Show’ and one of the task they showed was how they controlled a gantry crane with nothing but the power of their minds.

This was in my mind something straight out of the Sci-Fi shows I watched (and still do) as a kid.

This coincided with me trying to find some cool kit for the volunteers coming to dev4good (www.dev4good.net), we had the Kinect, we had the MS Surface, mind control was definitely on the cards.

Two days ago my Neruosky Mindwave arrived, queue the Star Trek theme tune.

Out of the box

Un Boxing the toy was easy, getting the sticker off their USB dongle was tricky. Unboxed there is not much to the system.
A weird headset similar to the one used in universal soldier (maybe there is a hint of irony here) and the aforementioned USB dongle.

That it I thought, this is all I need to control the world?

I did need a single AAA battery though.

There was also a CD, installing this gave me the option to install the latest software which was 400mb…

The headset is fairly lightweight and feels fairly solid, although not sure about letting the kids use (as the pictures on the box show).
When its on your head, it feels a little odd at first, its not something I would wear in public, at least until I can get my Jedi mind tricks working to make people forget they saw it.

I am guessing the positioning of the main contact and the forehead pad is important, but it does feel weird.

Install

Simple, just agree to the Licence and its off, took about a minute and half to extract.
Plug in the dongle when told, 30 secs later and MindWave manager opens and asks you to add put a fresh battery into the headset.
Once on it auto searches and pairs itself to the headset and tells you the serial number.

Up and running

Once installed the ‘App Central’ application kicks off

and the mindset becomes active.

Using mind control in the real world

Okay its all a little more grey than I thought, there is a great set of free apps/games installed by default. But while playing them you never really know if its you actually doing anything. This I think because you are not interacting with things in the same way.

When I type on a keyboard, I can feel what is happening, I am thinking a millions times faster than my fingers can type – but I know that its me that is doing it.

Sounds strange, but the mindset reads you brainwave and there are you you use for most of the games

- Alpha waves for relaxation
- Beta waves for focus.

But as I don't know how to control them, its a ll a bit hit and miss.
I guess the more you use the hardware and apps the more you understand how your own brain functions.

Now all I need to do is find an application I can use this for!

good place to start for developing against the mindset

- http://developer.neurosky.com/
- http://thinkgearnet.codeplex.com/

more to follow as I start to code my world domination platform up"!

dev4good - who what where why?

2011-05-28T17:35:00.002Z

I have been asked quite a few times why I am organising dev4good and every time I answer that questions it seems there is a different reason.

History

The initial idea came to me while watching a short film a friend Dave Hawes made, while taking part in the PayPal charity hack last year. I thought ‘hey I could do that, but just not with a single platform/API’.
I had no time so the idea was filed into my “great idea, no time folder”

R.I.P Build bunny

Time flew by and we had our first codefest evening at Devevening where we (Matt Lacey usually) writes a player app (noughts and crosses) that everyone attending had to compete against with there own self written player. Everyone had 2 hours to work on it, at the end we had a play off and the winner got - bugger all actually.

But the point was it was quite impressive what you can achieve in under 2 hours, some of the guys paired up and worked as a team to build their player and even though it was a competitive event, everyone was happy to help those needing a point in the right direction.
We have had a few of these events now and they are by far the most enjoyable code events I have taken part in.
Fast forward to early 2011 and I find myself brainstorming exactly what this hack day will be.
It had to be a simple format, otherwise I would never get it sorted in time. And it had to be based around solving problems, I wanted people from different backgrounds involved, there must be a competitive edge in there, a time constraint, sleep will be optional and we will need a tonne of coffee.

We also needed something to work on, something that we would not work on during the normal 9 to 5 slog.
Lets face it if you work in IT, normally your job is to make something that does stuff that makes money for someone. Or you end up developing something to remove the need for human interaction.

I though that charities always have problems they need solving and most don’t have the funds to realise their dreams or the technical staff to help them do it.

ideas + skills = results

Developer stereotypes

Personally I think developers (of the software variety) tend to have the reputation for working late, in the dark, illuminated by their multi screen setups hunched over their wireless keyboards, sipping on a cup of coffee mere mortals would have tipped out hours ago – or is this just me?
Joking aside, for a lot of us isn’t too far from the truth, at least a few night a week anyway.
Saying that I really like working with other people, however as a freelance developer up until very recently anyway, its usually just me, myself and I writing code and solving problems and trust me, never listen to I and myself can be a little flaky at 2 in the morning.
So having an event that forces developers to work with people they would never normally work with on projects that they would probably never work on – it’s got to be a good thing right?
So the question was “What would happen if we took our codefest idea, but this time threw in 30 developers. The problems would be real world ones form people who really need the help.
Most importantly if we solved any of these problems we would be directly helping a person somewhere.
It seemed like a win win situation to me.

Enter dev4good

In march I was lucky enough to meet a man who had a building in London that basically cried out ‘hack day’, it had a bar!
He was happy for us to use the place for an entire weekend (including overnight, which for most corporate venues as this is not allowed due to something called insurance).

That pretty much set the ball rolling, dates were set, websites were knocked up (literally), then the social network wheels started turning.
3 months later we have 30 registered developers, over £5000 worth of prizes (thanks to them all), people coming from all over the UK (plus one form Holland) and a tonne of free coffee (hmmmmmm).
Also we have (so far) 2 fantastic charities that really need our help;
- www.hopeandplay.org
- www.ministryofstories.org
Dev4good is a social experiment of sorts, lock 30 developers in building with some serious problems and see how they work their computer sorcery to solve them.

Revelation

During the last few months while organising dev4good, I have met some amazing people along the way and we haven’t even had the event yet!
It is so refreshing to work on a project that a) isn’t IT based for a change and b) allows you to meet and talk to really cool people.

So come on, why?

To make a difference (cheesy I know), but I really do believe that we (that’s all 30 of us) can make a difference over the course of a single weekend and if we can help 1 person then all the hard work will be well worth it.
I am also fairly sure that everyone attending will gain a lot from just working with the other people there. It’s an awesome team of people who are coming.

Right I want to join in the fun

You can register over at dev4good.wemoot.com
There is a load of info on out wemoot portal, feel free to look around

If you cant come, but would like to be involved?

We are still on the lookout for sponsors contact dev4good (or ask@dev4good.net) if you can help financially or have a product you think could help our team out.
Spread the word, we will be running these events every year in London, or if you would like to run one in your region/area/town/country get in touch.
You can also follow the event on twitter @devfourgood and the hash tag is #dev4good

dev4good – developing for a better world

2011-03-30T15:17:00.001Z

One of the cool things about doing what I do, is the simple fact I can build something from nothing with nothing but an idea and notepad (okay I haven’t hand coded a website form scratch in a few years, but I could if I had to).

Another cool part of my job is the people I work with, the other IT professionals, designers and developers (other people are cool too).

I help run @Devevening (Surrey based developer user group) and a few weeks ago we had another hack night, where developers are given a problem and 2 hours to solve it. Every time we hold these events I am amazed at how much can be done in a very short amount of time (this time was a battleship client that you had to pit against a fellow developers client to see who would win)

I am getting to the point honest…

So I wondered what would happen if you got a group of developers together for say a weekend, throw in some real world problems (donated by a few charities) and see what amazing stuff could be done.

This idea has grown slightly and I am in the process of setting up the UK’s first ever Developer/Charity hack event, called dev4good, check out the site www.dev4good.net for more details.

We have a venue in London, on the river Thames no less (www.hammersmithriverside.co.uk) which is awesome!

If you think you would enjoy a weekend of coding with developers from all over the UK in possibly the craziest working environment, register for updates and provisional places, follow @devfourgood on twitter for updates.
Anyone from any IT background, any platform can help, designers, IT professionals, hobbyists, get in touch, we need your skills.

If you are a UK charity and think you have a problem that only the “A-team” could help with, let us know.

Obviously all of this is going to cost money, so I am looking for sponsors to help out with food/drink costs. There are no costs for charities, there may be a small registration fee to stop the ‘no-show’ effect for developers, but that’s it.

So what do you think, do you have what it takes to help building something cool, that could change someone’s life?

Home media platform project

2011-03-25T14:37:00.001Z

I was asked to setup a home music centre for a friend, nothing too hard I thought. The requirements seemed standard, so I said yes let me at it.

3 weeks later, I found myself still trying to piece together the components, none of which I had ever used before – fun!
(This was 3 weeks fulltime)

The requirements were;

Must use optical out (its connecting to high end amp)
Needs to look like it fits in and around high end audio gear
Headphone out
Low power
CD drive play/burn
Internet access
Auto rip function
Remote control for playlists etc
External touch screen
Silent
Small footprint
Easy to use for a non technical user

Server/Base unit

I went off looking first of all for a base unit, the mini-itx platform looked like the best of what is available. And the boards are cheap enough these days to make home cinema/media PCs available to everyone.

But what I found was although the boards are cheap, its the extra bits that add up. By the time I added an external power supply, remote control, ram, hard drive it was still looking at +/- £400 with a decent case.
Add to this the problem of adding a slim line CD drive to some ITX cases, it seemed that if you did this the case got big quick.

I did find that the Acer Revo PCs were a pretty good fit, add an external CD drive and bingo, but I really wanted an all in one unit.

I found it in the form of the Asus EeeBox EB1501P Net Top PC.
It had optical out, internal CD (one of those funky soft eject ones too), Windows 7 Home Premium, WiFi, HDMI, eSata and although ebuyer didn’t mention anything, it came with USB keyboard/mouse, Media Centre remote control and a vesa bracket.

All powered by an Atom D525, Dual Core 1.8Ghz with 2Gb Ram for £270 +vat (its dropped by £30 now….)

Base unit was sorted, the screen was a little more fun, I wanted something small enough to be usable and not too big that you would notice it in the room. There are a number of 10” USB driven touch screens on the market (be careful some don’t work on 64Bit OS) and after a chat to the guys at New IT I went for the iMo Mini Monster a 10” wide screen, single touch monitor. It has a built in stylus that is hidden in the bezel too.

So that was the PC side of things completed sorted.

Remote controls at the ready

I wanted a tablet for the remote, but not an iPad, they were just too expensive for this project. I opted for a 10” Android ePad (10.2" Android 2.1 ZT-180a Apad/ePad 1GHZ CPU 256RAM) and threw in a 4Gb micro SD card for good measures.
I headed off the the android market place for a remote control to control the music…. I installed and uninstalled every single ‘free’ remote control literally in the market. Both iTunes and Windows variants… All were basically crap they worked most of the time or did everything except display the media library.
I did find one app that was fantastic when you had under 100 or so tracks, however as soon as we broke this level on while ripping we saw a massive drop in speed. It doesn’t cache anything on the tablet, so EVERY time you go to load an artist, genre etc it goes off and asks the server for the list, then waits until everything has been sent. We were waiting for 5 mins for a screen update… uninstalled that pretty quick.

This was when I put my IT hat on and realised that there must be a remote desktop app, there were lods of them, all were paid for and because I am tight I didn’t buy them.

What I did, which I think when looking back was a genius move and I should have done it in the first place, was to install TightVNC on the PC with the android TightVNC app on the tablet.
Instant connectivity, full screen, lag-less (pretty much) experience.

To make this better we put a wireless AP in the room that the kit lives on and only the devices in that room use that network, for an extra £40 it was worth it, the tablet and PC chatter to their hearts content without losing out to any other traffic.
The other reason for the added AP was the house we were installing in was built in the 1700’s so had walls about 1m thick of stone, which have the ability to block WiFi.

I used 3 home plugs one at the router in the 3rd floor office to run the network down to the ground floor conservatory and to the kitchen to a second AP just for the kitchen/liveing area as the BT router upstairs was dropping to under 1 bar most of the time.
The home plugs where sitting around 20Mb throughput, but this was expected as the wiring itself is a little flaky from time to time.

Conclusion

This was a great little project, the client is over the moon, a few minutes on how to connect the tablet to the PC and he is instantly in an environment he knows.

We ripped just over 3500 tracks in 2 days (used the Asus + 2 laptops running in parallel, ripping to the shared media folder – the whole D drive). The rip speed of the Asus is about 70% of my old HP laptop, not sure why this is, I am guessing the speed of the soft eject CD drive may be the problem.

If I was to do it again and I will for myself at least, I would throw another 2Gb of Ram in the Asus. It streamed DivX films okay over my network using Home plugs (70-80Mb) while playing on my TV via the HDMI, but for video I think the more ram you have the better.
When SSDs come down in price these boxes will be perfect for them, they use net to no power anyway, heat is minimal, but with an SSD it will just be that little bit better.

I would probably fork out for an eSata drive as well, or at least a NAS box/home server setup to work alongside this, the storage is great for MP3s, but would get eaten quickly with video storage.

Pics

So we have the 10” screen next to the tablet running TightVNC!

The 10” screen on its own

The Asus EeeBox

Nice to do something that doesn’t involve writing code for a change!

The end of the IT department

2011-02-24T12:01:00.000Z

My response to http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2785-the-end-of-the-it-department

That was a very interesting read, not what I would call a balanced view though and made me write;

My company is the IT department for a number of companies in the UK and I have been the IT manager in charge of departments in the past.
In part I agree there are parts of the corporate IT world that need to be relaxed, but most are based around very old fashioned thinking and cost of upgrading

The IT world is an ever changing industry, people with the right skills today need to upgrade these skills next week.

Also normally the people who work in the IT departments are not the same people that make the decisions to what can and cant be changed in the company.
If I had my way every PC, server would be replaced every year and always be patched to the latest versions of their software, this is however impractical to most companies as the cost of this is inhibitive.

Yes the 'cloud' is amazing and will lower the number of IT support staff in the building, however it just moves these people and their skills outside of the business, wont this just create a hole in the companies shared knowledge?

I have moved a number of companies to the cloud (not really the cloud, but they call it that, I call it dedicated outsourced server hosting) and they are all happy, but in doing this I had to upskill to understand the implications of these technologies for each company to make sure it will do what they need it to.
Now the big problem we are facing is the local adsl circuits are topping out and we are reliant on 100% uptime from not only an adsl line, but also the infrastructure at the other end.

So when a server goes down, exchange plays up, the problem is passed to an outsourced support company, who place the problem in their 'queue', then we wait.... we have no control or input... 9/10 I could fix the problem if I had access to the servers myself (10 years of IT support do count for something) but I cam not allowed access so we wait.....

The cloud idea is good, but I can see companies jumping on the 'save money' band wagon and then realising that moving their infrastructure outside of their control could cost them more in the long run.
one thing that no one ever asks is "So if it goes wrong (the cloud) and doesn't work for us, how much will it cost to move everything back?" - the answer - LOTS, probably more than the move out as you will need new hardware, licensing, staff, skills...

The cloud is not for everyone, be very careful about what goes where and who controls what.

utilising the power of 'remote'

2011-02-16T15:31:00.001Z

Among other jobs I manage the IT for a number of small businesses and in a bid to not be on site very often (save costs,fuel,carbon etc), I have been testing a few remote support platforms.

The 2 that remained after testing were Microsoft Remote Desktop and Teamviewer.

All of my clients are Microsoft based, so when working on their servers Remote Desktop just made sense.
The down side is that there needs to be a public IP address linked to the server you are trying to connect to if you don't use a VPN that is.
On hat note VPN's are great, however they don't always give you the best user experience, like trying to connect across a 3G dongle to fix a problem can be clunky, remote desktop does hog a lot of resources. It can be done though, don't get me wrong. While on holiday in Kefalonia I did connect into a server over a very ropey 3G connection using Remote Desktop.

Teamvier has a citrix(y)/go to my PC feel about it and for connecting adhoc to client PC's it is fantastic.

You dont need a VPN (although it has one built in anyway), your client connects to their server which managed the authentication and initial connection. As far as I can tell it then drops the 2 connections together like a VOIP call, dotn quote me on that I have not done mush research into this side of things.

What teamviewer does do is alleviate the need for public IP address and firewall routing, it uses port 80 from both ends of the connection and encrypts the data as well.

I have been saved on a number of occasions by teamviewer, as you can install it to run when windows starts up, I can remote into a PC and fix VPN's etc without too much hassle.

The other big seller for me is the client PC's do not need to have teamviewer installed, they can download and install a 'no install' client for windows/mac and just tell me the ID and secure password, presto I am in.

There is no downside for me anyway with using teamviewer, its free for non commercial or you can buy a lifetime licence.

When you add in its ability to allow you to do remote presentation, VPN, VOIP calls, chat, file transfer etc, the cost of a single licence is quite resonable +/-£440

Just checked and there are clients for PC, Mac, Android and IPhone and iPad....

The most complicated thing I have had to try and do is move some files to a secure web server and my access is IP based, so I only have access from my office.

This happened while on a train;
I used teamviewer to get onto my desktop in the office (had to call to have it turned on though

Then remote desktop'd onto my clients PC that is on their office network, copy the files from the designer's PC to the server in the DMZ through the PC I was logged into.

Long winded and slow, but I did it without having to break any security by telling someone how to do it and it meant the client didn't have to wait for the job to be done the next time I was 'passing by'

If you do IT support and need a remote support platform to use (did I mention you can white label it as your own?).

Teamviewer gets a thumbs up from me.

Nokia + Microsoft ?

2011-02-11T08:55:00.000Z

This morning BBC breakfast announced that Nokia was going to make a big announcement, possibly that they are going to work with Google on their next range of phones....

1 hr later I get to work and in that time Uncle Steve (Boom baby thats what we are talking about) Ballmer announces that Microsoft and Nokia are forming a strategic alliance.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ukmsdn/archive/2011/02/11/windows-phone-and-nokia-enter-strategic-partnership.aspx?wa=wsignin1.0

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2011/feb11/02-11partnership.mspx

I like the nokia handsets, the OS has been getting increasingly out of date, so I moved to windows phone 7, as a developer the plan was to build some apps and get rich and famous.
I haven't done any of that, but I have realised that MS is onto a winner with their mobile OS, I thinks it really good and possible even better than the competition.

But what does this alliance really mean for the day to day phone user?
Probably not much unless you are a symbian OS developer, maybe more flexibility and choice as Nokia do make cool handsets.

WIll be interesting what Nokia say later on today.

Company acquires new business - Q: Do we run two website targeting the same people?

2011-02-09T13:04:00.000Z

I was asked over a bottle of wine what I thought the best thing to do when 'Company A' buys 'Company B' and they now have 2 websites targeting the same consumers on the net.

This is a great question and although I can remember my exact answer (blame the wine), the question keeps popping up in conversations with other clients.

Some history on search engines (mainly google)
It used to be that if you had a site and somebody copied the content (think CTRL+C then CTRL_P) the SE would think its you trying to do bad stuff. Somtimes the new site would actually beat the older site in the ranking as it was new and fresh etc. Other time both sites would be penalised and would see their result standings drop, or disappear.
Index updates would be 'rolled out' every few months, and we would all sit and wait to see where we ended up in the results, and then have 3 months to fix it and wait, then fix, wait....

Duplicate content across multiple site's was bad and I would have said back then to drop one of the sites Company A owns and permanently redirect the traffic to the other, keep it neat and clean.

Fast forward to now
SE's are super smart, they update their index faster than the sites can be created.
The idea of sites of the same content is normal, sites are sharing XML feeds, mashing up data and content onto their own pages etc.

SE's can also check domain ownership, location of hosting server, location of company who owns the site, location of the people who visit the site.
Even if the sites have identical content, an SE can see they are different sites (okay there will be instances where they are the same but that's covered later *)

With 2 sites that are relatively the same (the 2 sites are travel/trip based), Company A has a great opportunity to maximise their traffic, across two competing sites.
Both sites are already ranking okay in SE results and have their own brand that consumers are aware of, so is there really a benefit of combining them straight away - I don't think so.

There are a lot of caveats and maybes from here on in, so have that pinch of salt ready.

If it was me I would;

set up SiteA and SiteB to interlink where appropriate
link to/from other 'intra company sites'
each should (if possible) target slightly different customers

set them to target different demographics (one high value trips other low?)
find out if either of the sites is being hit from any particular geo location, if so use this site to target this area. (this is very easy to do)
if targeting geo location, use local phone numbers

use meta data and page control the content on both sites so it is NOT exactly the same

use different staff is possible to write the content for each site, sounds a bit extreme, but web content writers always have 'accents' in the copy they write

don't be afraid to send customers from A to B, add pages on each site that are specifically set up to send the customer to the other. If they buy, who cares which site they do it th
leave the sites hosted where they are for the time being
run regular benchmark reports to see if

sites are working in harmony (traffic/ vs sales vs enquiry)
SE results are being helped by having 2 sites
customers are getting lost between 2 site

Once you know how the sites are working together you can decide where to go with the sites.

Obviously if one of the sites is new or has no SE value and no one ever uses it, then I would say kill it and focus on the other, but if the sites are both strong then its a waste of SE value to just get rid of it.

Its very hard to put a price on SE value, but it can cost a lot in time/£££ to get a site up to the level of a site that has 'some' value.

These are just my opinions, they could be wrong or they could help you, either way comment and ask questions.

* I see my site twice in the results
This can happen if you have sub domains that are displaying the same content ie public.site.com and www.site.com have the same content and are hsoted onthe same server, same owner etc.
In this instance I would shut down the duplicate sub domain and redirec the traffic to the main site.

There is no use setting your own site and sub domain as competitors

SQL Server does not handle comparison of NText, Text, Xml, or Image data types.

2011-02-08T12:56:00.002Z

When adding XML to an XML field in SQL server via Linq to SQL it all works fine, however when you try and update this XML field, you get this error;

SQL Server does not handle comparison of NText, Text, Xml, or Image data types.

Fix to my solution was to edit the dbml and set the updatecheck to false

<column canbenull="true" dbtype="Xml" name="OrderXML" type="System.Xml.Linq.XElement" updatecheck="Never"></column>

Works like a dream now.

LinqSQL tip #2– linqDatasource binding funkyness

2011-01-28T16:42:00.001Z

Binding controls via a datasource is nice and easy, however when you try and change the way the data is displayed in a dropdown for example, Linq can be a pain.

Example 1 – Add text variable flag to show what entry is a primary category and which are secondary categories

<asp:LinqDataSource ID="LDSRentalDefinition"
runat="server" ContextTypeName="DB"
Select="new (ID, (iif(isPrimary==true,' ','+') + Name) as TextValue)"
TableName="Categories" OrderBy="iif(isPrimary==true,' ','+'),Name" >

Weird thing is in the SELECT, IF statements don’t work, but old fashioned IIF statements do.

Still gets me that some C# code works inside the LinqDataSource on a VB page, but some VB works as well.
( || does work where | doesn’t )

Its a nice visual thing for the users as they can see straight away that any child category has a + in front of it in the dropdownlist

Annoyingly I was only allowed a single character inside the ‘’, page would crash otherwise.

Example 2 – add multiple data fields to a single item in the listbox

This is an easier one, but still very powerful to make your UI make more sense to the user

Select="new (ID, (Name + ' ' + Description) as TextValue”

List box items are displayed as “Bob boss”, “John cleaner” rather than just a first name.

LinqSQL tip #1– dynamic queries

2011-01-28T16:27:00.001Z

I had to build a reporting page for a client the other day that pulls a load support ticket data from the DB and makes it look nice on the screen.

Simple I thought, once the first version was done, I get the emails asking for date filters, easy.

Then the filters for member of staff, easy.

Then for the categories, easy

And then the sub categories, but sometimes we will want to filter by one and sometimes all of them, or maybe one or two….

This got me stuck there didn’t seem to be anyway to look at a list of checkboxes and add a ‘where’ statement to the Linq statement for each subcategory selected.

In SQL you would build the query up, using and/or statements to get the data back you need, in Linq this is farily tough to do on the fly in standard Linq code.

After a fair old time on the net I came across the LinqKit which has a Predicate builder!
This is an awesome piece of code, I could have tried to build something like this (I would never have got there in the time I had), but why try and reinvent the wheel when there is a handy .dll that does it already!

All I needed to do was create an array of the categories I need to filter by and throw them at the Predicate builder.

Function FilterSubCategories(ByVal iQuery As IQueryable(Of DB.Issue), ByVal _ searchTerms As ArrayList) As IQueryable(Of Issue)

    Dim predicate = PredicateBuilder.[False](Of Issue)()
    For Each keyword As String In searchTerms
        Dim temp As String = keyword
        predicate = predicate.[Or](Function(p As Issue) p.SubCategoryID.Equals(temp))
    Next
    Return iQuery.Where(predicate)
End Function

The function simply returns a queryable set of data that I can either bind to a control of continue to work with.

There are more extension sin the LinqKit, if you are looking for an easy way to deal with dynamic Linq clauses, this is definately worth a look.

Three UK create an unhappy customer (me)

2010-10-27T15:40:00.000Z

chillfire on October 26, 2010

Your comment is awaiting moderation.

Thanks for the response,

To be honest, for now I am happy with the phone, only 4Gb left after 5 days and that’s without any music on it..

As I mentioned I need a windows phone as part of my job, but I don’t have any other options on 3 for a different win 7 phone.

So there are no options for me at the moment to swap and even if I did pick another handset I would definitely end up with a phone I didn’t want for 2 years, a big fat catch 22 you might say.

What I am not at all happy with is the fact that the information I was given (and so have 3 retail staff I have spoken too) was incorrect when I purchased it leaving me with a phone that I am going to HAVE to upgrade in the next 12 months, leaving me out of pocket by +/- £400. This is really a trading standards issue I suppose?

I really do not understand how I cannot be allowed to get a free upgrade in 12 months time to a new win 7 phone, I suppose it really depends on if I am going to spend more than the trade price for the phone over the next 12 months, surely over the last 4 years or so I must have built up a fairly nice profit for 3?

On a side note (kind of) who does you ‘real’ testing for new handsets when they get released?

Is there any chance of testing the new 7 phones when they come out on behalf of 3, this wont cost you anything and would give me the chance to possibly get a phone that does what I need it to?

By the way I was told by the upgrades team I could not return the phone if I have turned it on/used it…

Can someone please tell me what the email address is to send my complaint to?

The one 333 gave me was incorrect and the email has bounced.

thanks

Moderator on October 26, 2010

@Chillfire – If you’re not happy with your Omnia 7 you can return it, as you’re still within your 14 days. If you want to discuss other phones then yes that’s a call to 333 and they’ll run through all your options. I don’t believe we can let you keep the phone until an upgraded model is released because we will need you to fulfil your contract with us. Thanks for the feedback you sent across to me, this has been sent to the retail team and they are making sure all the team are up-to-date.

chillfire on October 26, 2010

morning, can someone drop me an email if anything is being actioned for me or if I need to try to talk to 333 again?

chillfire on October 25, 2010

Your comment is awaiting moderation.

Again not for public info;

Just thought I should let you know I think this “Does it have SD expansion” problem may be bigger than I thought.

I went into the maidenhead 3 store to ask about protective skins for the omnia and the guy there asked about my thoughts on the phone, when I mentioned the 8Gb limit he said that cant be right as all the training he has been given said it came with an SD slot.

I gave him the phone and he was amazed it didn’t have it, even took the battery cover off to prove it ha ha.

cheers

chillfire on October 24, 2010

Your comment is awaiting moderation.

Hi,

I hope you can help, you dont need to post this publicly, but I am running out of places to get help from.

The email address I was given by the 333 upgrade team guy, proofs@3mail.co.uk has just bounced, what is the correct email address for the complaints team?

cheers

chillfire on October 23, 2010

Yes I know Arne refused the delivery because I told him my phone didn’t have the SD slot…
The problem I have is the phone is part of my job, ie I build mobile apps, so I need a phone on the 3 network that is windowsphone 7 series that has more than 8Gb of storage, this leaves me stuck with the phone who’s spec changed from when I bought it to when it got delivered.
I tried to explain this to the 333 guys – all I want to be able to do is use the phone as it is now but have the opportunity upgrade it if/when the new phones get released to 3 that have more memory. I explained that if I return the phone I have to leave 3 to get a different one on a new network, they weren’t very passionate about wanting me to stay.
I have emailed proofs@ to see what they can do, but the 333 guys were trying to tell me that this blog wasn’t owned by three so I shouldn’t believe what is posted here (until I gave them the URL for it) and that the 3 site never said the phone was expandable..(I got screenshots as oone as the confusion started).. so I wasn’t too impressed with them to be honest.

Is it possible to meet up to discuss the problems I have had/am having around this phone?

On a plus side I was at a developer event today and the phone was enjoyed by many a greasy finger, also a lot of impressed faces when I told them the deal they can get on 3.

cheers

Moderator on October 22, 2010

@Arne Helseth – It’s not a problem if you want to return your phone within the first 14 days of delivery. If you do have any problems getting through to customer services then I can arrange for them to call you.

Moderator on October 22, 2010

@Chillfire – You should be able to return it, no probs, within the first 14 days. Sorry you’re disappointed

Arne Helseth on October 22, 2010

chillfire: You should have done what I did, refuse delivery. By now all their internal systems will be updated to show no SD slot so any attempt to speak to their customer support will be like having a root canal.

Good luck in returning it.

chillfire on October 22, 2010

I can now confirm the Samsung omnia 7 doe NOT have a microSD slot, very disappointed to say the least.

chillfire on October 21, 2010

I see the omnia 7 specs have been updated on the site to say it does not have any microSD slot anymore.

Does this mean we can return the phone if we don’t want it now due to the lack of expansion and wrong info on the site?

cheers

chillfire on October 21, 2010

may have found the problem US and UK version of the phone may be different

http://www.techwatch.co.uk/2010/10/13/samsung-focus-will-have-microsd-support-omnia-7-wont/

cheers

chillfire on October 21, 2010

Same question as arnehelseth, can anyone confirm if the omnia really does have an SD slot?

The review here http://windowsphonesecrets.com/2010/10/12/windows-phone-7-and-removable-storage/

says that the SD slot is under the battery it is NOT a standard expansion slot for cards to be taken out and used elsewhere, it is storage extension only. Once the card goes in there it gets used by the phone as part of the total storage available.

I will more then likely send it back if I cant extend the storage space, shame really.

cheers

Arne Helseth on October 21, 2010

That’s what I figured. You should be getting quite a lot of devices sent back then as everyone I’ve spoke to needs more than the 8GB onboard storage.

What’s especially worrying is that I had a long chat with your support rep and he went away twice to confirm it did indeed have a slot.

Tanks for your answer though.

Moderator on October 21, 2010

@Arne Helseth – I’m sorry but you’ve definitely been misinformed. No Windows Phone 7 has an HD slot. Thanks for flagging, we’re getting all our copy amended and our teams rebriefed

Arne Helseth on October 21, 2010

So, does the Omnia 7 really have a SD card slot? All information online (as well as info from Microsoft and Samsung reps) points to it being 8GB with no SD slot, yet Three has it listed on their website with upgradeable memory (upto 32GB) – this was also confirmed to me by your customer support, but he was most likely quoting the Three website or intranet knowledgebase…

My handset is going back to Three and contract cancelled if in fact it turns up with no expandable memory

It sucks there are no stores (at least up in the NE) with stock though, had there been I could have verified with my own eyes rather than taking some random persons word for it.

Question: Is the launch shambles down to you, the operators (including all others like Orange, O2, T-Mobile etc), Microsoft or the device manufacturers? According to sources elsewhere shipments have contained a lot less handsets than ordered by networks/stores – this kinda makes me worried there is an inherent fault with either the hardware [or more likely] the software.

Moderator on October 21, 2010

@Chillfire – Phew!! Hopefully the hunt is over. Let us know how you get on with your new Windows Phone

chillfire on October 21, 2010

Just had a call from 333, new omnia 7 arrives tomorrow – very happy

thanks

chillfire on October 21, 2010

I found the buy now button unfortunately I was hoping to upgrade in store.

Called 333 and they have no stock, possibly this afternoon.

Is there anyway to find out if there is physical stock in stores

cheers

Moderator on October 21, 2010

@Chillfire – Launched the same phone as Orange today too You can buy it online here

chillfire on October 21, 2010

Morning, any updates on omnia 7 availability?

It looks like orange had a good morning in London with the microsoft hardware launch – http://bit.ly/8ZROE7

cheers,

Moderator on October 19, 2010 @Chillfire – No probs, I’m just checking this out for you and a few others asking on twitter. As soon as I know, I’ll let you know

chillfire on October 18, 2010

Thanks moderator, is there anyway to find out where there will be stock?

Or will the people at 333 have a better idea on from the 21st?

cheers.

Moderator on October 18, 2010

@Chillfire – Thanks for your feedback, really useful to know. We’re launching the Samsung Omnia 7 on Oct 21 as planned. As an existing customer, calling 333 is your best option for getting hold of the handset quickly. We’ll have limited stock, so it’s possible the Maidenhead store won’t have a batch from day one. So there is no hold-up as far as we’re aware

chillfire on October 18, 2010

I just came out of the Maidenhead 3 store.

I asked about the Omnia 7 and was told they were only launching the HTC and the nokia this month….

Called 333 (and after wrestling with the myriad of number selections…)

I asked about the Samsung omnia…. long pause, no updates about when it will be launched and no specific dates either…

Then was told I could get any phone I wanted on that operating system, but there was only one windows phone available.

This is really disappointing, can anyone at 3 comment on whether this lack of information is a manufacturing problem or an administration issue. I really thought the phone was to be launched on the 21st of October?

And with no information form the 3 team it makes me wonder what the hold up is or who is causing it?

My live with a Samsung Omnia 7 - WIndowsphone series 7

2010-10-23T21:06:00.001Z

Mit liv tillsammans med en Samsung Omnia 7 - WIndowsphone series 7

First things first, this phone does NOT have a microSD slot, even if your phone provider says it does!

I have never owned a touch screen phone, my last smartphone which has server me well for the last 2 and bit years is a Nokia N95 8Gb, a simple and robust phone.
So in a way I am a noob with all this fancy touchy feely slidy, greasy finger stuff.

Things I have noticed about the phone itself;

It gets warm when charging from the mains but not from USB
The off/lock button is in a stupid place
The battery life is not great, it will need charging daily if you have everything turned on
This is a consumer only phone* (more on this below)
The phone has no expansion slot
It is lightning fast and very usable
Integration with windows live/skydrive/office is fantastic
It will not connect to an exchange server with a self-certified SSL certificate
Browsing the internet has its limitations ** (more below)
It does have a habit of rebooting *** (more below)
You must have a windows live account to use the phone to its full potential
The designers have listed to the user and done a great, the UI has been very well thought and gives just enough spice to make it interesting without being cumbersome.
There are some bugs, but it is 1st generation # (see below)
There is no cut/copy/paste, but the 1st gen iPhone didn't have that either I am told
It runs a lite version of silverlight
Internet browser is IE7 (ish)
Its awesome!!!!
Apps and installing them from marketplace is very simple

* What do you mean a consumer only phone?

I work in IT and generally have access (code or screwdriver) to all the devices I use, sometimes I even know how to fix or configure them.
The problem I have with the WP7 OS is I cant do anything outside of 'using' the phone, I cant edit things that are wrong.

So basically the phone is aimed at the social end of the market, I just find it limiting because I want to get into the menus and change stuff. For the average person on the street the phone will slip into their connected world unnoticed, it will complete the magic 3 screens and a cloud strategy Microsoft talk about.

From auto uploads of photos/video to skydrive, to building MS Office docs on the road knowing they will be stored safely on the cloud to playing your mates on xBox live while on a train to work, it all just works out of the box.

One of the coolest bits in the messaging system is the way it keeps track of conversations for SMS messages on a single scrollable screen with each one in its own little speech bubble, corny I know, but quite practical and what we expect now from what is basically a chat interface.

** The internet

Although the internet browser is an IE7 variant the phone itsel runs its UI through silverlight and weirdly enough wont work on silverlight based websites, or flash, or anything that relies on javascript.

This is going to be a pain i the arse very quickly, but there are plugins for youtube and I hope an iPlayer app is released soon too.

So all the kerfuffle over iPad not supporting flash seems a little silly now.

Most sites I have been work well and the zoom in/out ala two finger shuffle is fantastic.

*** Rebooting/Locking up for no reason

Right this is a bit weird and may be down to the app I was trying to run, it only seems to do it when I try and open/resume the twitter client (from twitter). The phone also locked up a few times with this app as well (or the seesmic twitter client).

I may have the answer to the locking, I think it may be down to the 3G connection, it looks like when the phone is off network the app opens and tries to update, so it waits for a network response...... still waiting then does not know what to do.

The rebooting is a weird one, will keep an eye on it. or am I hitting the off button?

# Bugs

I have found a bug in the way it manages contacts (this could just be me, but would be interested in hearing what others have found). The first time you view your contacts the phone asks if you want to import your SIM contacts so I did this, all very easy (The phone will sync these SIM contacts with your Windows Live account). I also connected to my facebook account (yes I have one but its not actively used) and instantly had all of them in my contacts list as well.

Now I decided to take my facebook contacts out cos I have none of their mobile numbers etc. So I disconnected the phone form facebook.

However all of the facebook contacts were still in my contact list and these could not be selected or deleted even after a reboot.

So I had to do a factory reset and reimport my SIM contacts to get a clean list.

The good thing is you can link your facebook contacts with your SIM contacts on the phone to give 1 person multiple presences an interesting link but it means that you can still keep phone contacts separated out.

An extra bit to this is if you have any issues with your contacts on the phone and because it syncs them on you windows ID, you just login to your windows Live account and edit/delete them there, which is easier than on the phone until you get used to the keyboard.

Conclusion after 1 day of proper use

Okay the phone is fantastic and the platform in my opinion is going to make a it a great environment to develop apps for.

Everything about the phone screams, 'this is my phone REALLY' and the OS apart from a few niggles is pretty solid. In the next few months hopefully there will be a way for developers to deploy their apps to small corporate groups privately (the only way now is to load your app up to the marketplace for anyone to download so securing it is vital).

The COOLEST thing so far
I am sure this wont stop people trying to steal these phones, but if you have the phone enabled to sync its location with your Windows live account and you ever lose it....

Map it - view the location on a map
Ring it - ring the phone for a minute
Lock it - locks the screen and optionally add a screen note saying 'please return'
erase it - reset to factory settings

Oh did I mention all of this is avaible via the windos live site, ie you can do all of this remotely!!!!!

I really like the phone, can you tell, and everyone who had a play at todays DDD8a thought the same, well no one said this is shit, they all just spun/pivoted their way through the UI, just like the peoplein the WP7 ads do, its very engaging.

As I get more used to the phone and its quirks I will add more posts, follow me on twitter @chillfire for updates on my life with a Windows Phone Series 7.

Upside down round and round

2010-09-23T16:14:00.000Z

˙ɯəs nə sıləɟ oəl ɐʇɹod ləʌ 'ɹoʇɹoʇ ɐpıʌɐɹƃ lsıu ɐuɹn 'ənbıʇsıɹʇ səɔıɹʇln pı ɯəs 'ənbsıɹələɔs ɯɐu ˙uɐsɯnɔɔɐ ʇəƃə ənƃnɐ əɹɐuɹo ɯnʇuəɯɹəɟ ɹnʇıqɐɹnɔ ˙ʇılə ɯnʇɔıp ɔəu 'ısıu ɹolop ʇɐ ɔunu ˙ʇɐ ənbsıɹələɔs lsıu ʇəəɹoɐl ɔɐ 'sıɹnɐɯ sıʇʇıƃɐs əɹənsod ʇuəsəɐɹd ˙ʇılə ƃuıɔsıdıpɐ ɹnʇəʇɔəsuoɔ 'ʇəɯɐ ʇıs ɹolop ɯnsdı ɯəɹol ˙sılnɔɐı uɐsɯnɔɔɐ ınp nə ɯɐıp ʇɐɹəɔɐld sıɹnɐɯ ˙uəıdɐs ɐlnƃıl ʇn uɐəuəɐ ˙ɹoʇıʇʇɹod ıɔɹo ʇɐɹəɔɐld ʇəƃə ɐɹɹəʌıʌ sıɹnɐɯ ʇə ıɯ ɹoʇıʇʇɹod ıqɹoɯ ˙ɯəs sınb ɔɐ sıllɐʌuoɔ ɐɹʇəɹɐɥd ʇılə ʇə oəl nə ɯnlnqıʇsəʌ ˙ənbıʇsıɹʇ ɐ ınp ʇunpıɔuıʇ ʇɐıƃnəɟ ɔəuop ˙sıɹnɐɯ pəs ɐssɐɯ snʇɔəl ɹodɯəʇ ɔɐ 'sıdɹnʇ snqıdɐp ʇıləʌ ɯɐnb 'ʇıɹəɹpuəɥ ɯnʇuəɯɹəɟ əɐʇıʌ sıɹnɐɯ 'ʇəıpɹədɯı əssıpuədsns ˙ɐpɐnsəlɐɯ sɐʇsəƃə ɐssɐɯ ɐpıʌɐɹƃ ənbəu snsɹnɔ uɐəuəɐ ˙snqıdɐp sıdɹnʇ ʇıpuɐlq ʇə ʇɐɹəɔɐld sıɹnɐɯ ɔɐ ɐuƃɐɯ ɹodɯəʇ ɯɐnbılɐ ˙ƃuıɔsıdıpɐ ʇsə ɯnʇuəɯıpuoɔ pı ɐıuıɔɐl oəl ʇn sıdɹnʇ sıʇɐuəuəʌ snlləsɐɥd ˙snsıɹ snʇəɯ ʇɐ sɐuəɔəɐɯ ˙ləʌ ʇıpuɐlq snɹnd snsɹnɔ ʇə 'ɐllnu ʇıdıɔsns snʇɔnl ɯɐu ˙ɔunu ʇɐɹə sıʇɹoqol pəs ˙ıʇuəʇod əssıpuədsns ˙lsıu sıʇʇıƃɐs ɔəu ɔəuop ˙sısılıɔɐɟ sılloɯ ɯıssıuƃıp ɐllnu ˙ʇılə ƃuıɔsıdıpɐ ɹnʇəʇɔəsuoɔ 'ʇəɯɐ ʇıs ɹolop ɯnsdı ɯəɹol ˙snsɹnɔ ıɯ uɐsɯnɔɔɐ ʇə ʇıɹəɹpuəɥ ɯɐnb ʇəƃə ɹolop sılnɔɐı uıoɹd ˙ʇıləʌ ɐɹɹəʌıʌ ʇəƃə əssıpuədsns ˙ɹoʇɹoʇ sıləɟ ɔɐ ʇn ˙ɐuɹn uı ɐ ɯıssıuƃıp ɯnʇuəɯələ sıɹnɐɯ əɐʇıʌ oɹəqıl ɐ ɯɐllnu ˙sıdɹnʇ nɔɹɐ ʇɐ uıoɹd ˙ənbəu əʇuɐ sınb ɔəuop ˙ənƃuoɔ sndɯəʇ snsıɹ əɐʇıʌ ɯɐıp ɯıssıuƃıp snɯɐʌıʌ ˙ɔəu ʇɐıƃnəɟ snɹnd ɹoʇıʇʇɹod puəɟıələ 'nɔɹɐ əɹɐuɹo snʇɔnl ɯɐllnu ˙ɹədɯəs əʇuɐ snɔuoɥɹ nə ʇəəɹoɐl ʇsə pı snʇɔəl snsɹnɔ uı ˙ɹnʇəʇɔəsuoɔ ʇənbılɐ ʇəəɹoɐl uı ˙ɯəs uı əɐʇıʌ ɐllıƃuıɹɟ ʇəıpɹədɯı oɹəqıl ʇɐ soɹə pəs ɯɐllnu ˙sınb sıllɐʌuoɔ ɹolop ɯnpɹəʇuı ʇəƃə 'sıɹnɐɯ ɯnpɹəʇuı ɐʇɹod sıɹnɐɯ ˙oɹəqıl sınb snsıɹ ɔunu əʇɐʇndlnʌ ɹədɹoɔɯɐlln 'ənƃnɐ puəɟıələ lsıu ɔunu 'ʇunpıɔuıʇ opoɯɯoɔ ʇn ɹoʇɹoʇ 'əɹənsod ıqɹoɯ ˙sısılıɔɐɟ ʇəəɹoɐl ɐllnu səlɐpos əɹɐuɹo uı ˙ʇıləʌ ɐpıʌɐɹƃ ʇə əɔsnɟ ˙snqıdɐp ɯɐnbılɐ ɯnʇuəɯıpuoɔ snɯɐʌıʌ ˙ʇıləʌ oəl ʇɐ sɐuəɔəɐɯ ˙sɐʇsəƃə sıdɹnʇ ɔɐ səɯɐɟ ɐpɐnsəlɐɯ ʇə snʇəu ʇə snʇɔəuəs ənbıʇsıɹʇ ıqɹoɯ ʇuɐʇıqɐɥ ənbsəʇuəlləd ˙soɹə ənbəu ɔɐ ənbsınb ˙ɹoʇɔnɐ ɯnıʇəɹd sıɹnɐɯ ʇɐ ɐuɹn ʇə snlləsɐɥd ˙soəɐuəɯıɥ soʇdəɔuı ɹəd 'ɐɹʇsou ɐıqnuoɔ ɹəd ʇuənbɹoʇ ɐɹoʇıl pɐ nbsoıɔos ıʇıɔɐʇ ʇuəʇdɐ ssɐlɔ ˙ʇəƃə sıʇʇıƃɐs nɔɹɐ ɹnʇəʇɔəsuoɔ ʇəɯɐ ʇıs 'soɹə uıpnʇıɔıllos ɯnpuəqıq ɯɐnbılɐ ˙sıʇɐuəuəʌ əʇɐʇndlnʌ ɯnʇuəɯıpuoɔ ıqɹoɯ ˙snɹnd sndɯəʇ ʇə ʇn ˙ɹɐuıʌlnd puəɟıələ ɥqıu ɐlnɔıɥəʌ soɹə ɐ ənbsınb ˙snqıdɐp ʇɐɹəɔɐld snlləʇ ʇəəɹoɐl ʇɐdʇnloʌ ənbsəʇuəlləd ˙ʇɐɹə ɯıssıuƃıp ʇəƃə 'ısıu ɐssɐɯ ʇɐ ɔəuop ˙snlləʇ ʇıləʌ ʇɐ ɯɐllnu ˙snʇɔnl ənƃuoɔ ɹoʇɔnɐ ɯɐllnu ˙ıɔɹo ɯnʇuəɯələ ɔəu ʇn ˙uou sıʇɐuəuəʌ ɐllnu snsɹnɔ ɔɐ 'sıdɹnʇ ʇunpıɔuıʇ ənbsıɹələɔs ɹnʇıqɐɹnɔ ˙sıʇʇıƃɐs səɔıɹʇln ɯɐnb əʇɐʇndlnʌ ɐuƃɐɯ ʇəıpɹədɯı sınp ˙snʇɔəl ʇəƃə snqıdɐp 'ɔəu ʇənbılɐ ʇəɯɐ ʇıs sıʇʇıƃɐs 'ıɔɹo snɔɐl əɔsnɟ ˙ɐıuıɔɐl ʇıpuɐlq əıʇsəloɯ uıoɹd ˙ənƃnɐ pəs ʇn ʇıpuɐlq ʇɐdʇnloʌ ɐuɹn ʇn oɹəqıl ʇn ənbsəʇuəlləd ˙oəl ɹədɯəs sınb 'ənƃnɐ ʇılə ʇɐ sɐɹɔ ˙sɐʇsəƃə sıdɹnʇ ɔɐ səɯɐɟ ɐpɐnsəlɐɯ ʇə snʇəu ʇə snʇɔəuəs ənbıʇsıɹʇ ıqɹoɯ ʇuɐʇıqɐɥ ənbsəʇuəlləd ˙ɐɹɹəʌıʌ ɐɹɹəʌıʌ ɯɐıp ʇəɯɐ ʇıs ɐuƃɐɯ pı ʇn ˙ʇılə ƃuıɔsıdıpɐ ɹnʇəʇɔəsuoɔ 'ʇəɯɐ ʇıs ɹolop ɯnsdı ɯəɹol ˙əɐʇıʌ ənƃuoɔ ɯɐıp ʇıpuɐlq ʇə 'ɯɐnb opoɯɯoɔ ʇɐıƃnəɟ snlləsɐɥd ˙ɯıuə ʇıdıɔsns ʇəɯɐ ʇıs 'ʇılə nɔɹɐ ɐ ɯɐllnu ˙ɯnsdı əɐʇıʌ ɐpɐnsəlɐɯ 'uou əɹɐuɹo nə ɯnpuəqıq 'ənƃnɐ ʇılə ɹəƃəʇuı ˙oəl ʇn ʇɐıƃnəɟ 'ʇə ɯnʇuəɯıpuoɔ ləʌ sndɯəʇ 'ɯɐnb nɔɹɐ ɹəƃəʇuı ˙sıʇʇɐɯ snsɹnɔ ɐssɐɯ ɔəu ɯnsdı uɐsɯnɔɔɐ ɯɐu ˙sıʇʇıƃɐs pı ɹolop snsɹnɔ səlɐpos ıqɹoɯ ˙ɐuƃɐɯ ɐʇɹod sınb 'snlləʇ oıpo ʇəɯɐ ʇıs ɯɐllnu ˙sıləɟ ʇɐ sılloɯ 'ɔəu snɔuoɥɹ ʇn ɯnʇuəɯələ 'lsıu snsıɹ ʇuəsəɐɹd ˙uəıdɐs ɔəu səɔıɹʇln 'ɔəu əɹɐuɹo ʇɐ ɯnpɹəʇuı 'ʇıləʌ ɔunu ɯɐu ˙snsıɹ sınb ənbsıɹələɔs 'əɐʇıʌ ɐɹʇəɹɐɥd ʇɐ snɔuoɥɹ 'ʇıləʌ sıɹnɐɯ əssıpuədsns ˙uıpnʇıɔıllos ɐuƃɐɯ ɐpıʌɐɹƃ uı əɹənsod snʇɔəl ɔəu nɔɹɐ ɐllıƃuıɹɟ snɯɐʌıʌ ˙ɹədɯəs ɹnʇəʇɔəsuoɔ ɐllıƃuıɹɟ ənbsınb ˙ənbəu ɐ ɔəu snıɹɐʌ ɹədɯəs snlləʇ pı snsıɹ əɹɐuɹo ɯnlnqıʇsəʌ ˙ɐlnƃıl ʇəɯɐ ʇıs ɯnʇuəɯələ 'ɐʇɹod ʇıɹəɹpuəɥ ʇɐ əʇɐʇndlnʌ 'ɯıuə ısıu ɔunu ˙ənbıʇsıɹʇ ɐlnƃıl ʇəıpɹədɯı poɯsınə ɯnʇuəɯələ ɯɐıp ɔɐ ɐssɐɯ ɯnʇuəɯɹəɟ snɯɐʌıʌ ˙ɐlnƃıl pəs ɯnpuəqıq 'sınb ɯnʇuəɯıpuoɔ ʇɐ puəɟıələ 'ɯɐıp snlləʇ sɐuəɔəɐɯ ˙sıləɟ ɯnpuəqıq ləʌ ɯɐıʇə ˙ɐɹʇəɹɐɥd sıləɟ snsɹnɔ ɐ sısılıɔɐɟ lsıu uou ɯıuə əɹənsod uıoɹd ˙sıɹnɐɯ əɐʇıʌ ʇə ʇıdıɔsns ɯıssıuƃıp snlləʇ nə snʇɔəl pəs uɐəuəɐ ˙sɐʇsəƃə ʇunpıɔuıʇ oɹəqıl pı ənbəu ɐpɐnsəlɐɯ ʇuəsəɐɹd ˙ʇılə ənbıʇsıɹʇ ɐpıʌɐɹƃ 'əɐʇıʌ ɐʇɹod ʇə əʇɐʇndlnʌ 'snsıɹ snʇəɯ ɯɐıʇə ˙snıɹɐʌ ʇıɹəɹpuəɥ sıdɹnʇ ʇɐ oɹəqıl poɯsınə sınp ˙oəl ʇɐ sıɹnɐɯ sıɹnɐɯ poɯsınə ʇɐıƃnəɟ 'lsıu ɯnlnqıʇsəʌ oəl ɯəɹol 'sıʇʇıƃɐs puəɟıələ ʇn oəl 'əɹənsod ənbsınb ˙uəıdɐs ɯnsdı ɔəu ɹnʇıqɐɹnɔ ˙ʇılə ƃuıɔsıdıpɐ ɹnʇəʇɔəsuoɔ 'ʇəɯɐ ʇıs ɹolop ɯnsdı ɯəɹol

I am Not the STIG

2010-09-10T14:06:00.003Z

So here is my theory on STIG -gate.

Background:
Top Gear is a great show, loads of viewers and has a very strong brand, here in the UK and around the world.
It has however come under a lot of flack from people saying its just 3 grown men acting like teenagers in cars (I think this is the whole idea, but anyway) and a lot of people saying it's boring and past it.
In some ways I agree about it being same story different packaging each season, but like any good brand if it works, why would you change it (think Coke and Coke Classic from the 80's).

The STIG is a media icon, a silly name (its means 'path' I think in Swedish) but another globally recognised brand, possibly a longer lasting brand if the TG show was axed you could quite easily see this character popping up in different show formats?

Theory (Okay I might be a little cynical):
If I was the BBC or whoever produces the TG show and I needed to guarantee some ratings, how would I best do this?
- Fire a presenter? dangerous, they might write a book or start their own show (ah most of them have anyway) and finding a replacement would be tough.
- Change the format? not worth the risk and cost
- Kill the STIG? They have done this on a few occasions, and he magically appears again even more powerful then before -http://www.topgear.com/uk/videos/the-stig--hms-invincible
-Piss the man in the white suit off enough to force him to try and make some cash (or even tell him to reveal himself) a different way.

So the Stig has been unmasked, now they have a gap to fill, what will they do with all of this 'press' coverage?
My guess is the Stig will magically reappear and be as elusive and 'exotic' as ever before and we will still not know who is the Stig again, it could be anyone or it could be Ben Collins, who knows and to be honest anyone who watches the show probably wont care.
The fact there is a mystery person inside the suit is all that anyone really cares about, we know this person has changed before in the past, there are loads of YouTube footage of the different Stig's tall, short, tanned
The other 3 presenters have all made a bomb out of the show, the Stig was on £70k a year and I am pretty sure was not in on the merchandising payroll. So why not try and get a few quid (I heard £230k banded around for the book deal) out of what could''ve been the last year for the Stig anyway, if the show is cancelled then what really?

I was amazed that once the court injunction went through and he was seen without his white helmet, the 3 presenters were all doing the media rounds saying how disappointed they were, Clarkson said he had the stig around for dinner and felt betrayed (a little Clarkson humor me thinks).
Noramlly to get these guys involved in anything takes a lot of pressure from the BBC etc, but they were amazingly free to take questions....

So to the man/lady behind the unveiling should get a pat on the back, they have created a media frenzy over something that in the real world (outside of TV) is not very exciting.
But has guaranteed the viewing figures for the first TG next season will be through the roof and that Ben Collins book will be on the top of every TG viewers Christmas list.

I will be watching the first show and probably will get the book if I ask Santa nicely (wonder who he really is?)

Exporting Excel 2010 to XML

2010-09-08T12:35:00.001Z

After many expletives and banging of keys, I finally found that it is really easy to export an excel sheet to XML – that is as long as you remember to;

1- Turn the developer tab on in the ribbon

2- Create a valid XML file to map to (the special word is valid, it might be valid to us mere mortals but Excel is an odd beast)

3- Map it up

4- Export – no really that’s it

1- Turn developer bar on

File -> Options -> Customize Ribbon -> From the Main tabs list on the right tick the developer tickbox -> OK

Once this is turned on go to the developer tab and click the Source button.

A new panel will appear (empty probably) this is where the XML file will be once it has been mapped.

2 – Create an XML file

</Service>

<Service>

<code></code>

<description></description>

<comment></comment>

</Service>

</services>

The important bit to note is the 2^nd instance of the service node, if you only have a single instance, excel only allows you to export the top row of your data….. hmm a bug maybe?

Save your XML mapping file somewhere easy to find (don’t delete this as you will need this if you ever need to export the data again, it’s not stored as part of your workbook)

3- Map it up

Back in Excel, Click the XML Maps button from the XML panel and select an XML file you just created, if asked click yes on the schema message box (saves time unless you want to make your one).

Once the mapping structure is in right click on any of the nodes and click Map Element, now select the range of data from the excel sheet you want to populate your XML file.

If your nodes and columns are ordered the same, you can right click on the top level mapping node and map the whole XML file to all of your columns in one go.

4- Export

Now click the Verify Map for Export, if all went well Excel will now be able to export your data using your XML mapping file via the Export button in the developer tab.

goodluck

2010-05-17T20:20:00.003Z

Just back form a great holiday in France (stayed in Manninghem, inland form Le Torquest and south of Calais).

Arriving on a bank holiday was meant there wasn't a lot open or people about, although at times it felt like we were living in a post apocalypse universe... where do the people go?

As holidays go it was just what I needed, the house we stayed at had NI (no internet), limited heating (so we had to get a roaring fire going each night -very manly) and even squeezed in a BBQ and some drunk golf in the back yard!

We didn't do much, bar sitting on the beach for 2 days (not too hot, but got a bit burnt) drinking a bit much each night and chilling, which was great.

back to real life and real projects!

Must admit I didn't really miss the internet or emails.... well not much

nice to hear good stuff about new zealand

2010-05-17T20:18:00.003Z

As a patriotic Kiwi living abroad it is always good to hear that NZ hasn't gone to the dogs just yet!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/8683377.stm

Outlook 2010 can connect up to 15 Exchange accounts

2010-02-23T22:34:00.000Z

This saved me loads of time, I realise not everyone has more than one Excahnge mail account, but every company I work with gives me an email address, and normally as I setup their servers its going to be on a Mocrosoft Excahneg box...

Thanks to the Microsoft Office team (they listed YAY), Outlook 2010 can host more than 1 exchange account now!!!

But I needed more than the default allowed 3 and here is how to do it -

Bink.nu | COOL: Outlook 2010 can connect up to 15 Exchange Organizations - Bink.nu

note: this involves a registry edit, please backup everything before doing it as we all know how bad a registry error can be!!!

Avatar - the movie

2009-12-21T13:34:00.002Z

Firstly WOW!

Avatar is an amazing movie, the attention to detail is immense. I mean they production team created not just a world, a language and a culture from scratch but they immerse you into this place called Pandora from the start. There is a short no intro to the story form the main character but the rest you learn as the movie unfolds.

I have tried to leave any big story line bits out of this, but if you haven't seen the film, trust me it is good and stop reading now until you have seen it.

==================================================

Some small things I think made the movie;
- Real pandorians have 3 fingers, human avatar clones have 4 (guessing its because of the genetic mix)
- Every breathing animals breathes through openings on their body, not through their mouths
The Hallelujah mountians.... cool (glad to see earth physics doesn't have to follow humans around the universe)
- The big tree - it is BIG, I mean BIG
- The scene where 'Jack' walks for the first time.
- Sigourney Weavers Avatar was 6 yrs younger than anyone elses as hers was the first to be created

A couple of things that got missed during the edit;
- One of the human avatars gets killed then appears in the closing sequence?
- Where humans can and cant breathe the 'air' on Pandora needed to be explained a little as sometimes they could other times they needed breathing masks.

My thoughts;
Okay I did think having an 'Aussie' with a blue face getting the crowds riled up to go to war was a little too braveheart, but who cares really at that point of the film you are so immersed in the story that it does not matter. But maybe as a kiwi I am biased.

The story behind Avatar is not a brilliant one, however if any more time was spent on explaining this and that it would never have got finished and would have ended up a bit like The Lord of the Rings films - a lot of film for a single story - keeping everything in one film was a big project on its own, I wonder how much footage we will get in the directors cut?

So many times during the film I found myself going 'cool' or 'wow' or 'awesome'. I realise it is being pencilled in as the most expensive film of all time and I dont care if it is because you get to see all of the money being spent. In every scene there is something hapening on the edge of the shot, moving, changing colour.
I am a geek but even the computer termail workstations in the human complex with their curved translucent touch/hologram screen were cool - and unlike other SciFi films you can see these being built soon with the current technology we have now.

Okay Avatar is set in 50-60 years in the future, but all of the cool military kit would fit in now to our world now, it was all 'petrol' powered, it looked real and sounded real, it fired bullets, not laser beams etc.

Avatar had some amazing scenes, but everything was so (and I say it again) immersive that you had no problems believing that what was happening on the screen wasn't impossible.
The film has something for everyone, even the girls get a hidden chick flick romance in the background. For the guys there is a bit of "murder, death, kill" and the kids get cool plants animals and ofcourse loads of blue people.

All in all an amazing film that I will happily see again, probably in 3D.

realisation - its all about knowledge

2009-12-07T12:22:00.003Z

Last week I attended the Devevening.co.uk - codefest event, Matt Lacey set us all a task to build a competitive Connect4 player to compete against each other and a 'Random' player he wrote, we had 2 hours.

Seemed like an easy task, use visual studio to build a .dll that can beat the pants off the other developers attending - simple, bring it on.

This is when I realised, that after 7 years of programming, that I had forgotten a lot of my windows forms days (desktop software).

Web vs Windows
Now if the code is the same, the data is the same and the architecture is similar (more so now than when I started), what was the problem? - one too many pints before we started (nope).

Using a stateless environment (the web) to run my systems has made me far too reliant on session variables, view state bits'n'bobs etc.
The fact I had no data source of any kind to store any data in threw me, how would I know where the connect 4 pieces were, let alone who owned which piece. How would I count to 4 in any direction ... aaarrgghhhh I need a session.item()!

After much playing and re-coding, all while running the clock down, I ended up fudging the code to play a set stratedgy of moves, all dependant on where the last piece was played. Not good code and well embarrassing. With everything hardcoded I was a sitting duck for an intelligent player.

I lost by the way, full credits went to someone who knows far more about desktop software than I do!

Conclusion
The blackhole of knowledge between web and desktop publishing is not a big one, however I think to hop from one to the other without thinking about the two is something I am gong to try and tackle over the next few months.

It is so easy to get into a comfort zone of code, I know all of my code and what is possible to do within a web environment, but throw me a windows app and I really have to think about what I have to do and what can and cant be done in that environment.
There is no easy step-by-step to make this transition easy, it is hands-on process, you make a mistake and fix it.

I found it really interesting to hack my way through Matts project, I do think that I have forgotten more about developing for windows than I would care to remember.
A humbling experience, it's the small things that make you sit back and think!

Thanks to Matt and everyone else who thrashed me at devevening, look forward to seeing everyone next year on Jan 28th!

wemoot.com has been nominated for 3 crunchie 2009 awards

2009-11-16T15:29:00.002Z

Wow, I just found out my big project for the year has been nominated for 3 crunchie awards, thanks to those who nominated wemoot for the awards!

To win this I need everybody to vote for wemoot by clicking on the links or buttons below and remember to use the 'share' button on the crunchies site to tell all of your friends, if you haven't registered with wemoot, now would a great time too.

Voting closes on 21st December - Only one vote per day per link per IP address, but dont let that stop you!

Vote for wemoot - Best Social Network App

Vote for wemoot - Best Bootstrapped StartUp

Vote for wemoot - Best International StartUp

PayPal Buy Now button on an asp.net page

2009-10-27T16:52:00.003Z

This problem has annoyed for a very long time, you can add a paypal buy now button to any website, you login to your paypal account and fill in a few boxes and presto out spits a few lines of html to get you going.

<form action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post">
<input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_s-xclick">
<input type="hidden" name="hosted_button_id" value="9225183">
<input type="image" src="https://www.paypal.com/en_US/GB/i/btn/btn_buynowCC_LG.gif" border="0" name="submit" alt="PayPal - The safer, easier way to pay online.">
<img alt="" border="0" src="https://www.paypal.com/en_GB/i/scr/pixel.gif" width="1" height="1">
</form>

Which when added to my page directly (or via my CMS) just doesn't work - I won't go into the reasons why right now.

After many hours of trying to find a simple solution so my clients are able to add these adhoc buttons via the CMS, I realised I was trying to over complicate things by writing loads of code and generally wasting precious development time.
Taking a few steps back and going throguh the whole process again made me realise that when you create these buttons on paypal there is a second tab above the html window that says 'Email' when you view this tab you get this;

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=123456789

which you can email out to people to pay for an item - can you see what it is yet?

SOLUTION:

Simply add an href using the 'Email' link with the paypal button inside...

<a href="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=9225183" target="_blank"> <img border="0" alt="" src="https://www.paypal.com/en_US/GB/i/btn/btn_buynowCC_LG.gif" /></a>

Sometime the answer is staring you right in the face.

Google indexing and how I think it works

2009-10-14T12:17:00.004Z

These ideas came about after a lot of research into data replication for a client and from listening to search experts from google and microsoft, obviously there is a lot of guesswork in there as well.

I could be wrong, hey I could be right, we will probably never know.

I started trying to answer this question at loving tech forums - http://www.lovingtech.net/forums/thread-duplicate-content-on-article-sites-and-your-site - about duplicate content and my answer slowly ballooned into more of a tech article than a quick reply.

There are hundreds (maybe thousands) of google bots out there trawling the pages to generate a massive list of URLs - example: one of my sites has had 400 hits from googlebot today in 12 hours from about 8 different IP addresses so 8 different datacenters.

Google has hundreds of datacenters around the globe so when we do a search we get the 'best' DC for where we are/least busy etc and these DC's can have a DIFFERENT set of results to look into for us

Don’t belive me? - Goto http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/multiple-datacenter-google-search/ and do a search for [google datacenter] (remove the []), select the 35 from the dropdown and on the results page you will see each datacenter's results for the search term, scroll down and you will see that the results are the sort of the same and the number of results is different

Results 1 - 10 of about 7,890,000

Results 1 - 10 of about 7,900,000 etc

Why the difference? – now the fun stuff

Each Googlebot stores it list of found URLs in it’s own datacenter and from time to time this massive list is taken offline and the pages are cached locally so they can be crunched by a load of servers inside this DC this builds a new search index that it will use to show us the results for our search make sense?

Doing it this way makes real sense form an IT/hardware point of view, it means you can do this massive amount of data analysis at anytime without affecting the user who is trying to search for free a delivery pizza in their area.
Because the pages are cached locally in the DC they can be compared to older versions or instantly be seen as new pages, flagged as duplicate etc

It also means that the new index can be tested with

Obviously this is where the magic happens – throw in some google algorithms, hop on one foot, do the secret handshake, close one eye, do a little dance, make a little love – you get the picture. Out pops an update to the google index, still steaming ready to be pushed to the live index.

All of this new indexed data is made available to the DC is and mixed up with the old data – hence the number of results can be different across the DC’s

The big data replication bit comes next, this is a data nightmare when you think about the volume…I mean millions or billions of rows of data that has to be the checked etc.

On a scheduled basis every DC will slowly replicate it’s data and propagate it’s changes to every other DC, but because this happens completely independently to the offline data crunching then the DC’s will never ever be 100% the same unless everyone on the internet does not update their site for X amount of time to give google a chance to catch up and I doubt this will ever happen.

So my answer to the question;

One thing that makes me think that the duplicate content thing is tricky to track is the fact that there is no way that the ‘real first’ copy of any content can be tracked as every googlebot talks to different DC’s and spiders pages at different times, is stored locally at different times and is indexed at different times etc.

The problem with duplicate content is that because EVERY page fights against EVERY page for ranking then if you are psoting the same content across multiple sites (not a good idea) then the site that google ‘see’s as the most appropriate will probably get the higher result rankings.

This is not an exact science so anything could happen, but I think the best bet is to play safe and try and avoid duplicate content.

More stuff to get the brain working;

Floating DC’s http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-10034753-54.html

DC n a box http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/04/01/RoughNotesDataCenterEfficiencySummitPosting3.aspx

Live writer

2009-09-14T11:46:00.001Z

Well so far (only a few characters in though) so good.

Live writer (part of the Live essentials download) is pretty simple to use, install/download takes about 3-5 minutes (no restart needed) and once I remembered my password it all loaded nice and fast.

Obligatory screenshot:

I am impressed by the way it works, there are enough functions to keep someone like me happy, you can set daes to future publish blogs, copy/paste images straight in, preview/edit the blog etc.

The interface doesn’t look like is has been touched with the Office 2007 brush, very basic.

I wonder why they can’t have this functionality directly in word/OneNote etc?

Score 8/10

UPDATE:

Take off at least 4 from the 8/10 score as you cant upload images directly you blogger.com, guessing if it was a MS bloghost it would work though.

Just found the worlds longest URL can be beaten

2009-08-26T20:17:00.001Z

So how can I beat http://thelongestlistofthelongeststuffatthelongestdomainnameatlonglast.com/wearejustdoingthistobestupidnowsincethiscangoonforeverandeverandeverbutitstilllookskindaneatinthebrowsereventhoughitsabigwasteoftimeandenergyandhasnorealpointbutwehadtodoitanyways.html?

Easy see http://shor7.net/longestURL

Cheers!

short URL's made easy

2009-08-20T18:05:00.000Z

With many of us on twitter, tweeting about other websites can be difficult as you are limited to the number of characters you can use, so I went on a search for a good fast and free URL shortening site and found http://shor7.net/ where you can simply type in the link you want to ‘go to’ and the short (or shor7) title for this page, which gets turned into something like http://shor7.net/seo which will send you to http://www.chillfire.co.uk/seo/default.aspx, best bit is that it is SEO safe so you get all the strength of the site its on passed to on!

Shor7.net will also email you a link to view the stats for your shor7’s!

Goodluck with the tweets!

Hot August fringe festival London

2009-07-11T17:33:00.002Z

Everyone has to go to this!!!!

The first annual Fringe Festival at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern (www.theroyalvauxhalltavern.co.uk) is taking place from 27 July - 28 August 2009 featuring the best of London's alternative performance scene.

Performers include Rosie Wilby, Sarah-Louise Young, Dicke Beau, and David Hoyle, to name just a few

See up to four shows each night including cabaret, magic, music, theatre, sketch comedy and more.

£7 entry per show.

Shows start at 6:30pm and run through to 12am.

Check out www.hotaugustfringe.com for more details.

wemoot - it's alive!

2009-03-30T10:14:00.002Z

I have been building wemoot with Jorge Gonzalez in secret (kind of) for the last 8 months or so, fine tuning and redeveloping his idea to give everyone the oppurtunity to share/find and learn from a single place on the internet.

When asked what wemoot is I normally say "It's like Faceook with brains", don't get me wrong old facebook does a great job, but it doesn't have any 'information' in it, it's great for keeping in touch with friends, but I can't learn anything from it.

Wemoot gives me somewhere to share information I find/know and to do it easily, yes I could have gone to wikipedia to leave information, but I have tried that before and have had this information rewritten or deleted by other people, for me I wanted somewhere where I could write an article about web design for example or search engine optimisation and share it with a community of people in the knowledge that it was mine and it could not be edited by others, they should be able to discuss it and leave feedback etc, but it's still mine.

And that's why I thought Jorge's idea was a fantastic one and one I know will have great success and possibly change the way a lot of people interact with content.

I suppose the tech name for wemoot would be a content distribuition platform, with relted discussions and personal messaging. more wemoot tech stuff here.

The test site went live on the 9th of Febraury 2009 (929) and thanks to all the popel testing the full version went live last week!

If you have ever wanted to share some information you think others would be interested in or just want to throw some ideas out to a communtiy of people register and become part of the internet's coolest new cultural communitiy

www.wemoot.com

Open Space Code - a good day out

2009-03-29T08:50:00.000Z

I spent my saturday with a group of programmers form around London taking part in the 2nd openspacecode event, I had never heard about these types of events before but it seemed like a great idea.

As a sole developer it can be really hard to 'see' what is going on in the industry, especially when all of my projects are based loosely around the same technology and 'patterns & practices'.

The day started with a short group planning session, where everyone is given the oppurtunity to put forward topics to discuss.
Following a brief democratic process we had our morning topics inplace - I was off to learn about BDD - Behaviour Driven Development

Thanks to Ian Cooper for filling us in on BDD, the topic was covered well and I got 2 main things out of the 2 hours or so.

1- I need to spend a fair chunk of time learning more about testing
2- I should probably take some time out to move some of what I do to c#

We then all headed off to lunch at Nandos!

The afternoon started with a quick planning session to decide what was going to be discussed over the afternoon session - I went a long to the DSL - Domain Specific Langauge talk.
Which although is probably not something I will be doing in the near future it is defeinitely a part of software development that I will have to use.

The day finished off with everyone back together to discuss the day, pros and cons etc.

Then something I have been looking to do for quite awile - I got to play on one of the few 'Microsoft Surface' devices in the world!
This is a cool piece of technology, if I had a spare £12k I would really like one, not sure what I would use it for, but there would never be a shortage of conversation starters (for those who haven't seen/heard about Surface, this one was an interactive coffee table with brains).

Special thanks to Alan Dean for organising a great event and to cochango for letting us use their really nice offices and allowing some of us to play on the Surface!

If you are a software developer and live in London and are keen to see how other developers do what they do, these events are what you are looking for!

be carfeul of skype when editing your website!

2009-01-16T16:12:00.002Z

I have been building websites for a number of years so many in fact I now build websites to buld websites (content management systems), so it came as a surprised that while I was editing a customers live website I noticed a lrage number of missing images on the contact page.

This was easily fixed by turning the skype browser button OFF and removing the skype injected code from the editor before I saved the HTML again.

It's interesting to note that when this skype bar is turned on it has rendering control over every page you view, that is it can inject its own html/javascript into the page as its being rendered by your faithful browser. - is this some kind of loop hole int he broswer security?

So if you do use a web based wyziwyg editor, be careful of toolbar injectors, they can create a LOT of code that you will never need to use.

Dundas is reborm as MSchart

2008-12-02T21:44:00.003Z

Well well, the purchase of Dundas by Microsoft has given us developers some new free tools for the asp.net framework.

And they look really good, oh did I mention they are free......

http://reddevnews.com/news/article.aspx?editorialsid=10419

cheers,

moving a database from sql 2005 to sql2000.....

2008-11-24T15:31:00.003Z

This I would have thought would have been a fairly easy task, as the DB in question used to be hosted on a SQL2000 server and was detached, then attached to the SQL2005 development server to be adjusted etc etc. I even left the compatibility set to 80.

The only structural changes were via the aspnet provider script + the odd new table/stored proc etc

However when I came to move the DB back to the live server all hell broke loose. Well I might be exaggarating a bit there, but it felt like it.

To cut a long story short I followed these steps to get it all to work;

1- Script Database as .... Create to ...
2- Run the installProviders.sql for aspnet
3- Task ... Generate scripts ... (then manually edit this to remove any of references already created by the installProviders.sql above, also had to manually remove a number of the unusual SQL2005 extra bits)
4- Add required sql users
5- I used Redgate SQL Compare (trial edition) to move the actual data across (the SQL 2005 export tool failed)
6- crossed fingers and it seems to have worked...

It seems annoying that even if you set the compat to SQL2000t hat its still won't work, but I know now. ha ha.

As soon as possible I think the live server will get an upgrade....

Startup Zone

2008-11-06T21:01:00.002Z

This is a great site from Microsoft for all new businesses to look at.

If you are an IT service provider like us, you can add you profile for others to find you, or if you are after some IT services there are loads of company profiles to look through.

Best of all if you are a IT type person and use microsoft products you can get tthem free if you register!!!

http://www.microsoftstartupzone.com/pages/home.aspx

New Google Analytics Feature: Event Tracking

2008-11-01T10:53:00.002Z

This little dittybelow from the big 'G' will mean loads more data for SEO'ers and developers to work with, currently any action within an AJAX upadate panel for example is not seen by Google analytics.
Now it seems that is about to change, well at least for some sites they have selected in the pilot, keep an eye out as the launch of this to every other account may not be advertised and the functionality may just 'appear', so to make sure you can access this as soon its available it moght be worth updating your sites to use the new urchin javascript!

cheers,
craig

Greetings from Google Analytics,

We are happy to let you know that a new feature called Event Tracking is now available in the following Google Analytics profiles: www.visalogic.net. Please note that you are receiving this email update since you are an 'Admin' for the profiles listed above.
When you log in to these profiles, you will see a new set of reports called "Event Tracking" under the Content section. As posted on our blog, this is a limited release currently available only to select profiles.

Event Tracking allows you to track interactions with Web 2.0 style content such as Flash, AJAX, Adobe Air, Silverlight, social networking apps, etc. It essentially allows you to track interactions beyond just pageviews.

To use Event Tracking, you will need to upgrade your site to use the new ga.js javascript. Detailed instructions on how to set up Event Tracking on your site are available on our newly launched CodeSite. To find your ga.js code snippet, edit the settings for your profile and click the "Check Status" link on the upper right corner of the page.

Sincerely,

The Google Analytics Team

ciao to microsoft

2008-10-29T20:01:00.003Z

I spoke to a guy from ciao.com yesterday at the e-commerce expo in London (uk) and he mentioned that Microsoft had just bought www.ciao.com?

Apparently the wheels had only just started moving so he had no idea of what the merger/acquisition would mean for us in the real world, but they had been informed MS would be looking after the data center side of things and investing into the infrastructure, interesting for MS to go into paid user based reviews?

This will be interesting as they will now know (before anyone else does I suppose) what the average person thinks about just about every product around, nice info to have if you are looking to launch your own.....?????

even the big boys can have problems

2008-10-27T18:58:00.004Z

Looks like www.microsoft.co.uk is being updated and someone forgot to flick one of the switches.

The link redirects to http://www.microsoft.com/en/gb/ and not http://www.microsoft.com/en/gb/default.aspx

oh dear...

.

cms woes

2008-10-27T14:47:00.002Z

Question from Ray Stewart ICPA FCCA MICB CB.Dip PM.Dip on UK Businesslabs

I have been watching with interest how my two main websites have been performing in google. My little blog, with it's page rank of 0/10 continually pops up very high in searches and has decent traffic to it but the main site with it's (much larger!) page rank of 1/10 doesn't feature much in searches but is still getting a fair bit of traffic.

I don't really like the joomla look of the main site but it is simple to update and refresh. Is that important to google & co?

My question really is, would I be better converting the main site into a wordpress one like the blog? would it help it perform better in google & co?

Would I be better to combine the two somehow to economize on effort?

I have always thought the way my wordpress blog and the joomla site name the pages when written was helpful to the search engines. Is this true? or would I be better using just numbers for posts like lots of blogs seem to instead?

Is this the kind of stuff an SEO expert helps with - never having known one, or asked one, until now? I have just relied on reading bits and pieces on things like this and not got very far

and my response,

Hi,

my 2 pence (as a CMS developer/seo guy), one thing that I have noticed with google (and other SE's) is that although the CMS you use doesn't have much affect there are things that it does that can do.

- Speed of rendering, the page has to be delivered to the spider quickly, remember web spiders dont 'see' the images so ignore them (thats a usability issue), but some CMS, build their pages slowly, or the databse they connect to is slow etc etc. I have used this before and found it good to help tune my CMS's in the past http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

- Page Errors, this can really harm your site. Every CMS should display some kind of user message if an error occurs, but what if the error only happens when a spider hits the page? I would advise using google webmaster tools and Yahoo site explorer with your site, at tleast this way you can see any errors that the spiders are showing up.

- Fancy controls/Ajax etc, My CMS uses very little ajax to display content, and there are no fancy javascripted menus/controls anywehere to be seen, its all plain old HTML, rememebr the spiders on read text, so how it looks is irrelevant, the best looking site can get 0 search results. Ajax and javascript can is used incorrectly actually hide your content (if used well it can help your content too) from the spiders

- HTML structure, this is the biggest problem with any web page (not just CMS based ones), the page must follow the basic HTML structure. So Meta tags, CSS and javascript in the HEAD area (except google analytics move them to the bottom of the page), content in the BODY area, Header tags in the correct order on the page, H1 at the top, then H2 etc etc, use P tags for each section of relevant content, use UL/LI for lists, etc etc.
A spider will index the structured content faster if its in the right place.

Lots of info, I am sure some will disagree, however these are all things I have had to look into over the last 2 years of developing OCRE and the best bit is every site that uses it has been indexed by google pretty quickly and all have relatively good search results.

hope that helps
craig

ah the joy of cross browser CSS...

2008-10-24T11:07:00.002Z

I have always disliked the fact that every (well most) internet browser renders my CSS differently, its not platform specific either IE6 renders some CSS tags differently to IE7.

Now dont get me wrong IE7 is better than IE6 for consistency, and it does a lot of things the same as Firefox, but someone really needs to work out an industry standard.

Anyway my latest problem was caused by a padding issue that only affected IE7, the fix was easy, but as all searches on the interent, it takes a few ties to actually find the real answer.

I found it here - IE7 css padding problem?

And it works, although it wont validate I dont care, as long as it looks the same on every browser and is accessible!

cheers,
craig

asp.net Code snippet mangement for multiple development machines

2008-10-07T10:51:00.003Z

I run 2-3 development machines and normally save my snippets on the toolbox 'General' tab, but as I move around the differrent PCs (not on same logins etc) I use its tough to get these code bits in a manageable state and up to date on every machine.

So I have started using Mark Manella Code snippet add in on all of my machines, this is an amazing extra for VS2008.

As the code snippets are all stored in the same relative folder, I can just update this folder on each machine.

For this I use syncToy 2.0 its a cool syncing app, very easy to use, and will sync folders across the network/pc.

Now there are probably other ways to do all of this, like running bat file to copy the snippets on login etc etc, but I like to know when the files are being updated.

cheers,
craig

server 2008 64 bit - install 1st go

2008-10-05T21:10:00.003Z

Well so far so good, my first server 2008 install has gone without a hitch.
Platform install was aroun 30mins, server roles 15mins, Active directory including all the AD prep stuff on the current DC took about 20 mins.

Now installing Exchange 2007 (+ SP2 for Exchange 2003 on my old mail server first), so far its taken 45 mins and looks like it will be another 15mins or so.

Its been awhile since I have installed a mail server and had no time for a dozen cups of coffee, fingers crossed when I move the mailboxes over (with the inbuilt 'move mailboxes' tool it'll all go as well...

importing Excel to SQL2005

2008-10-05T13:57:00.003Z

Such an annopyingly easy fix, just not too well documented.

I had 200 rows in an excel 2007 (this will work for most excel versions) worksheet I needed to insert into a sql table I was building.
You used to be able to use DTS in SQl 2000, but there doesn't seem to be any easy way to bring in this type of data.

First stop: http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1381738&SiteID=1 with no luck, just odd SQL errors and I had no time to find the solution unitl...

This is where I found an answer that I could work with: http://www.mssqltips.com/tip.asp?tip=1430

Now this wont suit everybody as it wont work 100% of the time with tables that already have a Primary Key, I had to delete all other table columns except the title column I was after. Once the data is pasted in, I re-added the columns back in again.

I was lucky I had only just started using this table....its always annoying to have a linked tabel used in and around the database that you then have to go and wipe/re-fill with new rows.

cheers,
craig

seasick!!!!

2008-10-01T07:48:00.002Z

I might be a bit late to hop on the seasick steve bandwagon, but I like rock music and this guy just plays it like it is.
Wicked blues/rock music, foot stomping stuff

seasicksteve.com

He is playing the Albert Hall tonight in London!

thanks to Sara Ford

2008-09-29T10:40:00.003Z

I would like to say thanks to Sara Ford, I have just found her blog (thanks to Alex from devevening.co.uk for telling me about it).

Sara is a microsoft employee who knows way more about the visual studio IDE than most of us developers.....well probably all of us. Her blog has some great tips and tricks about getting the IDE to work for you, some are obvious (I only foun out about the forward/back navigation within documents last week....) others are hidden but all are good to know.

thanks again,
craig

Search Engine Presentation: Devevening.co.uk - .net User Group

2008-09-28T19:53:00.003Z

If anyone is after the slides from my recent 'Search Engines?' presentation for Devevening.co.uk they are available from the devevening archive .

Thanks to everyone who attended.

cheers,
craig

OCRE vs a new project

2008-09-18T09:01:00.000Z

The new OCRE platform has been placed on hold as I have been asked to build a social networking/educational/cool web platform for a web startup, I cant mention anything just yet as until its launched its all very hush hush.
Needless to say its a very cool idea and although its a simple UI, the job of coding is a big one.

More details will be addedas soon as I can.

cheers,craig

New metallica album

2008-08-20T08:37:00.002Z

I dont normally post about new albums and advise people to buy them, but as a metallica fan since high school, well what else could I do.

Death Magnetic is out on the 12th September 2008, you can pre-order the Standard Edition or the Box Magnetic Death In A Coffin Edition from amazon now.

This is going to be the biggest album release so far this year (well at least until ACDC release their one in October!

Surrey .Net user group

2008-07-28T20:04:00.000Z

I found a link to a local user group and thought I would have a look.

I ended up going the other night to the Devevening group's 2nd meeting and was dropped straight into LINQ and SQL business intelligence presentations (slides and code).
The night was really good, there were around a dozen or so developers, some freelance, some 9-5ers, a really good mix of age and skill levels too.

If anyone is interested in coming along (details for evenings) drop me a mail or contact Alex mackey via his blog or you can register directly.
There are also social gatherings at a local pub on alternate months too!

cheers,craig

dynamic CSS - its a start

2008-06-05T12:57:00.003Z

Thanks to Christophe @ (http://cfouquet.blogspot.com/2006/06/making-dynamic-css-content-with-aspnet.html) for making my afternoon a little more productive. His blog post about injecting variables into CSS is simplicity at its best.

I had to add one addition to the sample to get it to work on the CSS page (css.aspx) I changed :

<%@ Page Language="VB" %>

to

<%@ Page Language="VB" ContentType="text/css" %>

the full source code for my VB version is here:

--> css.aspx
<%@ Page Language="VB" ContentType="text/css" %>
* { padding:0; margin:0;}
body { font-size:62.5%; background-color:rgb(255,255,255); font-family:verdana,arial,sans-serif;}
h1{ color:red;}
H1 { background-color:<%= ColourManager.Color %> ; }

--> default.aspx
<%@ Page Language="VB" AutoEventWireup="false" CodeFile="Default.aspx.vb" Inherits="dynamicCSS_Default" %>

< script runat="server">
Protected Sub Bt1_Click(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As EventArgs)
ColourManager.Color = IIf((ColourManager.Color = "red"), "blue", "red")
End Sub

< html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
< head runat="server">
< title>Untitled Page
< link href="css.aspx" type="text/css" rel="Stylesheet">
< /head>
< body>
< form id="form1" runat="server">
< div id="header">
header
< /div>
< h1 class="tit">hello world
< asp:button runat="server" id="Bt1" onclick="Bt1_Click" text="Change Color">
< asp:hyperlink text="See CSS" runat="server" id="ToCSS" navigateurl="css.aspx">
< /form>
< /body>
< /html>

-->colourchanger (in app_code folder)

Imports Microsoft.VisualBasic

Public Class ColourManager
Public Shared Property Color() As String
Get
If HttpContext.Current.Session("H1COLOR") = Nothing Then
Return "red"
End If
Return DirectCast(HttpContext.Current.Session("H1COLOR"), String)
End Get
Set(ByVal value As String)
HttpContext.Current.Session("H1COLOR") = value
End Set
End Property
End Class

I have never been a fan but now - Identity 'at risk' on Facebook

2008-05-01T12:57:00.002Z

ANyone who has asked me about facebook has probably heard me say at some stage or other that I am not a big fan of Facebook/myspace etc, I dont know but I like to 'meet' people, not get poked by them and throwing sheep at a mate?

Anyway, it seems the BBC have found a hole in the facebook security, this article is well worth reading if you are a big facebooker (is that a word) as you will be the type of person who adds application to your page without thinking about your personal information....

Advice: only put up the information you wouldn't mind a complete stranger knowing about you.

* Identity 'at risk' on Facebook **
Personal details of Facebook users could potentially be stolen by malicious hackers, BBC's Click discovers.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/1/hi/programmes/click_online/7375772.stm >

** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all in one daily e-mail <>

Many changes afoot

2008-04-23T08:27:00.002Z

Its been awhile since I sat down to write about whats going on at chillfire, well in short 'heaps' of work has taken place.

Ocre 3.1 development has slowed (see below) a little as we have launched 7 new sites using ocre 2.1 (see the top of the portfolio list on the left. They are a mixture of new builds, skinned static sites which now have a CMS and 2 are sites that have been moved from a php opensource CMS to the ocre cms platform.

Its been a long few months, but the all new ocre-cart will be going live shortly on www.nelsonshomeopathy.com its fully integrated with HSBC's e-payment gateway and it looks like there will be approx 1500+ products being uploaded into the cart in the near future.

Ocre-cart will be ported to ProTx for the new ski-link site which is on the drawing board for development, we are looking at releasing this for Gavin and the team during the summer ready for the 08-09 ski season.

The flagship project at visalogic running Ocre 3.0, we recently added support for google web optimiser so they can test adsense campaigns/content etc.
I think the whole marketing management system will be split from out as a standalone system as its extremely powerful and is slowing eclipsing the CMS itself as a strong contender for a fully blown product of its own.

If you are interested in any of the products of have feedback/ideas on any of the chillfire suite please feel free to contact us via chillfire.co.uk.

cheers,
the chillfire team

microsoft.co.uk - live to code?

2008-04-23T08:15:00.002Z

I check the microsoft site regularily, but this morning i went to http://microsoft.co.uk and something big had changed....

This may be a DNS problem, but the live to code thing is part of channel9/Josh holmes' world.
Its an interesting move by microsoft, or maybe bill is playing a joke on them as he leaves?

any ideas?

New christmas mobo issue

2007-12-29T15:15:00.001Z

Merry Christmas everyone,

There is nothing like treating yourself to a new motherboard for Christmas…. Remember it’s always worth checking the legacy hardware you have to make sure its compatible, even when the manufacturer says yes it is… things can still go wrong. As Steve found out;

Message: After I upgraded my mo/bo to asus extreme striker all the h/w seems to be good, but I can't repair windows xp or even get a new installation of it to talk to the modem. Given that this has put me offline maybe calling me would be a good idea...

- I recommended changing the RAM out one by one, as I have had dodgy RAM do all sorts of weird and wonderful things…

Thanks for your reply - I stayed up all night last night and fixed it... It was bad hardware but it was the sound card from my old system that was the problem. When repairing windows xp it would try to find drivers for it but then hang so I couldn't tell it to skip it. I ripped the old card out and put the new one from asus in. The old mobo was foxconn with a creative soundblaster sound card. the new mobo is asus extreme striker and a new q6600 processor. Then windows repaired itself - I got all my old stuff back and was able to go on the net as before. Your ram point is also good - an early prob was a bad mixture of ram so I pulled all but the newest stick. It ran like shit but at least it ran. 2Gig of OCZ fixed that. I learned a helluva lot last night... Steve.

Old hardware can always be a pain, if you are upgrading a large piece of hardware (or even to a new OS) its always a good idea to start with a barebones machine and add the bits and bobs after you get it to boot. It will take longer this way but it will narrow down the bugs as they happen…

Happy computing..

//craig

Mitel Your Assistant Error on XP SP2

2007-10-10T13:14:00.000Z

This is the error

System.ArgumentException: Delegate to an instance method cannot have null 'this'.
at System.MulticastDelegate.ThrowNullThisInDelegateToInstance()
at NewHeights.YA3.MainWindowController.OnBootProgress(ProgressEventArgs args)
at NewHeights.BootStrapper.BootManager.ProgressEventHandler.Invoke(ProgressEventArgs args)
at NewHeights.BootStrapper.BootManager.OnProgress(ProgressEventArgs args)
at NewHeights.BootStrapper.BootManager.Shutdown(ArrayList bootables, BootableType bootableType)
at NewHeights.BootStrapper.BootManager.ShutdownImpl()
at NewHeights.BootStrapper.BootManager.Boot()
at NewHeights.YA3.MainClass.Start(BootManager bootman)

My PC is XP SP2, after a Restore to factory settings I installed Mitel Your Assistant, it wouldn't even load up.

Simple fix, install .net Framework 1.1!

Why this is needed as the product states .net 1.1 and later, it should say you can runany version of the .net framework, as long as you install 1.1 as well.

Google Earth easter egg

2007-10-10T09:51:00.000Z

If you have google earth (version 4.2) and have a few minutes to spare.

danger this could be addictive.

open google earth, hold down CTRL + Windows + A

then goto here for more instructions, its very cool, great idea, microsoft did this once in Excel from memory!

aquent financial scam!!

2007-10-05T09:59:00.000Z

I just recieved this sms text message:

You have recieved J30 from a friend! To collect them go to AqueuntFinance.com/login, temporary username: a571tnk password: gh2x3
best regards, Aquent Financial

The site is very new although it says copyright 2002 on the bottom, and apparently I had £30 in my account, lucky me!

ALl I had to do was leave my personal details and login in to my bank account via their Flash player widget....so easy......

The best bit is this - http://aquentfinance.com/fastcash/test-esl.swf just before they take your login details....

I smelt a rat so did a few google searches, and came up with aquent UK (http://www.aquent.co.uk/Contact/Locations/Europe/london.html) . They offer services to freelance/IT professionals. So the scammers are being dumb and targeting geeks...

I called Aquent UK and they said it was a fraudulent sms and to ignore it, there is an Aquent Finance in th eUSA but it is not the company running the aquentfinancial.co.uk site.

Aquent UK are investigating the scam, so drop them a lime if you get the sms.

Scamming is now coming to a mobile phone near you.

update: 13:51 BST - WHOIS details for anyone looking to find these guys

Domain Name: aquentfinance.com

Status: ok

Registrar: MELBOURNE IT, LTD. D/B/A INTERNET NAMES WORLDWIDE
Whois Server: whois.melbourneit.com
Referral URL: http://www.melbourneit.com

Expiration Date: 2008-10-04
Creation Date: 2007-10-04
Last Update Date: 2007-10-04

Name Servers:
ns1.aquentfinance.com
ns2.aquentfinance.com

IP Address: 72.232.255.59
Website Status: active
Server Type: Apache 3
Cache Date: 2007-10-05 12:49:05 MST

2007-09-27T09:49:00.000Z

After being asked everyday 'how to find a good immigration company/consultant?'

I have put together a PDF of a few things to look out for, a checklist if you want to call it that.

How to find a good immigration consultant (pdf download)

its free, there is no advertising, and best of all it will hopefully stop you from being ripped off by dodgy visa companies.

we aren't OISC registered, but then we dont give visa advice make sure they are!!

good luck with the visa!

Workpermit Advice Gateway team

touch local Woking / Guildford, keeping it local

2007-09-26T19:47:00.001Z

If you live in Woking/Guildford have a look at what we can do for you

http://www.touchguildford.com/business/list/bid/5614098

Honest IT support

2007-09-21T09:05:00.000Z

Well the need ageek service has started, my aim is simple, to make your IT lives easy.

I get calls from friends and customers everyday asking for help doing what I would call the simple IT stuff, but I do this day in and day out, know most of the shortcuts and generally know how it works inside.

So need a geek was setup to break the barriers of IT mysticism, I dont use techie talk with customers, everything is in plain english. ANd we educate you to make it easier next time.

We deal with all of LOndon and most of surrey, offering IT support, training, Home worker support, networking advice, wireless networking security/setup, home cinema help, virus removal, broadband setup etc etc etc, basically if it plugs in and has buttons on the front we can deal with it.

So dont be afraid, book your date with a geek (we promise they wont turn up with tape holding the middle of their specs toghether) at www.chillfire.co.uk/geek

following on from Outlook via HTTPS://

2007-09-13T08:33:00.001Z

I missed something off the earlier posts regarding setting up Outlook to connect to your exchange server via https;

When you try and connect (after it asks for your login details) this message appears in a pop up;

There is a problem with the proxy servers security certificate.
The security certificate is not from a trusted certifying authority.

Outlook is unavailable to connect to the proxy server
mail.xxxxxxxxx.net (error code 8)

I forgot to add the certificate that the mail server creates to the trusted certifcates on my laptop. There is probably a fix so this is not a required step, but for me it makes sense as I dont want 'public' access anyway, I can control which PC/laptop/user has access this way.

so to fix: (thanks to some info here: http://www.thebitguru.com/articles/13-Importing+a+Trusted+Root+Certification+Authority+in+Windows+Vista/188-Installing+the+Certificate )

save rar file attachment, extract content (1 file) to c:\

hold windows key and hit the 'R' key
type certmgr.msc
right click on 'Trusted Root Certification Authority' - click 'All Tasks' then 'import'
Click next
click browse - find the .crt file from the mail server
click next
click next
click finish
then ok if it asks you if you are sure you want to do this.

bingo!

Securing IIS with Https

2007-08-20T13:55:00.000Z

Really easy step by step for securing IIS 6.0 with Https://

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/324069

Pounds SHillings and Sense

2007-08-19T21:51:00.000Z

A New OCRE site launched - Pounds Shillings and Sense for Cascade Resources Ltd.
This site will form the basis of our new "Small Business Site", please email us at ocresmb@chillfire.co.uk for more information regarding pricing.

Lead time at the moment is approximately 3days/

No access to hotmail from outlook

2007-08-19T20:23:00.000Z

After 3 days of hotmail and outlook not talking I deceided to find out why and found this

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=7aad7e6a-931e-438a-950c-5e9ea66322d4&displaylang=en

Micrsoft have released their office connector plugin for Outllook 2007/2003. I ahve been using the beta version for quite a while now and it looks like it just stops working without telling you it has.

After downloading th plugin install it, follow all the prompts, then restart outlook.
Got to tools -> options -> mail setup -> email accounts

(your hotmail may have been removed but you have to add it again)

Clcik new, then select the tick box for 'Microsoft Office Connector', on the next screen fill in your hotmail details.

Done.

linkedin Q & A transcript; - linked.com - moving site to CMS/wordpress

2007-08-14T14:35:00.000Z

RE: Converting 5mil pageviews site to Wordpress. Question: Adsense

Hi Tom,

Right I have had a look at the vbSEO site, and it looks like most of what it does you can probably do yourself, although it may take a bit longer.

Quick question what do you mena by static url? All urls are static event he dynamic ones ie: http://www.tier1-workpermit.com/tier-2-work-permits_ocre4.aspx is a dynamic page, but the URL is static - it will never change during the life of the page.

Secondly I am not big on ad revenues, I know there are people that make money with ads and banners etc, but the times I have been involved the return is small, with 5mil pages though you might be alright if you can get the volume through.

Most CMSes are pretty much the same, its apersonal preference on which one you go with, my own one OCRE is live on a number of sites, so far no complaints.

I generally steer clear of any 'big corporate' system ie word press and write my own. So I cant really comment on them.

Structure is really important, using folders for example is a good way to give the site URL structure, my.com/news and my.com/new/uk for example are a guide to the user as well of where they are in the site. Although not everyone uses the URL like this web/technical people do as they know how it works.

I use _ instead of folders sometimes as its an easy way to parse sections out of urls ie: http://www.visalogic.net/United-Kingdom_Immigration-Compliance_pie.aspx?t=4&t2=22
where Immigration Compliance is the page title (and meta title and H1 title etc etc), and United Kingdom is the section.

Before the site is changed site down and pencil out a URL structure that makes sense to you and hopefully makes sense to the client. then try and stick to it.

Remember to set up the redirects for any pages you are moving to point to the new page correctly.

goodluck, and fire any questions you have and I will ahve a go at answering them.

//craig

On 8/14/07 6:22 AM, Tom Goh wrote:
--------------------
Hi Craig

I'm not exactly trying to convert the whole site. I must have not put down my question properly.

I am looking at converting the news/features/content part of the site to a wordpress version or something like that, which could easily solve my problems on search engine friendliness, user friendliness and ease of managing and developing content.

I have VBSeo which apparently is claimed to boost search engine optimisation with static urls and some tweaks that also includes sitemaps creation and notification.

the 5mil pagviews comes from the forums which includes discussions and classifieds section.

I agree with the speed being a problem. In fact, i have a huge problem with speed and processing power. The current servers just can't keep up with the traffic and possibly the sql queries increased with these search engine optimising features. I am looking at moving the site to a much better server(s)

What do you think? regarding the adsense revenues from wordpress based sites or other CMSes and possibly your though on the structure of the site, which you may be able to give me some pointers?

Thanks so much for your reply!

Tom

On 8/14/07 5:42 AM, Craig Hogan wrote:
--------------------
I agree with Stuart, google (and other search engines) doesn't really care about what CMS/ content engine you use to generate your page.
It does look at lots of variables, ie speed of display, traffic volumes, links to pages etc.

With that many pages some of them will be old and out of date? Because google spider your pages for new content all the time it may be worth looking into adding a sitemap (XML) that shows the newest pages at the top so older pages are spidered last.

I dont think you should worry about changing the sites back end system too much as if it upsets the structure of any of the site all your PR/value will be lost. I always advise 'tweaking' the current site before trying to start from scratch - better the devil you know.

If you need a hand feel free to contact me

Question Details:
--------------------
Converting 5mil pageviews site to Wordpress. Question: Adsense

I currently run an automotive website that is based of vbulletin. The CMS i used is Vbadvanced.

I am looking to convert the CMS main page into a Wordpress based one.

Why:
-Realised the advantages of wordpress being google-friendliest
-Ease of use for me my contributors
-Limitles plugins
-Expandability
-Extremely well designed piece of software
-Loads very well
-End-User Friendly

I need to know, from all web publishers and people who's have similar experiences:
-How does it score with Google Adsense with the classic placements:
----Top link unit.
----Adsense units within and between 3 latest articles
----Adsense units within full articles

Do high traffic wordpress based sites get better revenues when converted from say custom main pages, cms, drupal, joomla and etc?

Or do any web publishers forsee greater revenues from Wordpress sites?

Thanks!
Tom

Compiler Error Message: BC30456: 'InitializeCulture'

2007-08-10T08:53:00.000Z

This error:

Compiler Error Message: BC30456: 'InitializeCulture'

just arrived on our live server?
It was only affecting the home page, a page that hadn't achnaged for over 4 weeks.
The site is not a compiled site, ie all code behind files are on the live server, (not the best way, however we change the code alot so its quicker to make chanegs).
The error was not found, but I am sure it is caused by a multiple files with the same class name, ie default.

Fixed it by removing the codebehind reference, I was lucky this page has no requirement for code as all content is driven by web user controls, not the page itself.

Google index and PR (Page Rank)

2007-08-08T12:18:00.000Z

I am going to go out on a limb.

After much debate and discussion in the office I have come up with a hypothesis on googles index updates and PR updates.

Many of you would have seen your sites lisings change in the last few weeks on your key keywords. Some good changes and some not so good probably, keep those meta tags up to date and change them to be current with your content.

These changes happen when google (and other search engines) decide to rollout their new index of sites/pages they have found while spidering the internet.
This is normally done every few months to keep the results they show you when you do a search up to date and 'real'.
They all have secret algorithms they use to generate this list and these are tweaked to adapt to to the way the web is used/searched etc.

The last update seemed to take a long time, actually we have seen pages from some of our sites move up and down the search lists continuously for the last month or so. Some on a daily basis.

So I am guessing that the index changes are going to continue all the time and the days of big index updates may be a thing of the past.
As an SEO person this is good and bad. Good it makes it harder for 'black hat' search engine companies to achieve faked/forced ranking, Bad I have to work harder and more efficiantly to amke sure all of your sites are stabile.

Remember there is no 100% guaruntee with search engine listings, they can go down as well as up, with these changes it just menas the time they stay where they are is not set in stone anymore, a year or so ago you could have said it would stay put for a month maybe 2 in the same palce, now well, its like watching the tide come in and go out over a piecec of driftwood.

I could be completely wrong, it may just be a really big update and algorithm change, I cant be sure.

Check it yourself, this is a good idea to do anyway irrespective of this scenario, open a spreadsheet, add a column with your keywords in it and a nother with todays date. Do a search in google (or any other search engine), count how many sites are listed before your and chuck that number in the corresponding cell.
Next week do the same, and so on and so on.

Please leave any results here (or email me) as I am really keen to see what the results will be.

goodluck with the SEO results

August

2007-08-08T12:07:00.000Z

It has been a while since I have added anything here, it has been a busy month, with moving house and getting ready for a wedding, not long now.

I have updated (at last) my Linked In profile

Please leave any feedback here for me and my future customers to read and review.

Ocre CMS has had number of additons, mainly to fix external problems with search engines spidering bad urls. The 404 page not found system if finished and will be rolled in to the next release.

Lambert Howarth Plc - has gone live recently, thanks to Darren and Ian for the help over there with the issues.

The new chillfire site is on the drawing board (up to v5 now, cant make my mind up), I am looking to have a full customer support system, tickets, forum etc built in and an online crm, once its done I will post the screenshots of the new additions.

Thanks to everyone who has helpeed with Ocre, a new interface will be available in the next few months, I know the black and orange can be a bit depressing, if anyone has ideas for colour schems please drop me a mail.

Windows Server 2003 R2 - network connection error

2007-07-17T13:11:00.000Z

This is a weird one that I have heard about from one other person,

I have just installed Windows Server 2003 R2 onto an HP DX2000 desktop, setup went perfect, very fast and simple. I liked the fact that nothing installed by default so install time was approx 40mins from CD Boot.

However 3 hours later I still could not connect to the LAN?
And as this release of the server family is supposedly the easiest to configure and get going I was perplexed. I installed every version of the network drivers available.
Still the same error, the network would connect and start dhcp then drop after a few seconds then a few minutes later the same over and over etc etc.

A few years ago I was told of aadsl modem that would not connect to a certain brand (top level one - red) of firewall with similiar symptoms, this was caused by something to do with the phasing of the network card firmware. I am not an expert so if anyone can shed some light on how this really works I am interested in hearing the real explanation.
As far as I understand the sitch/hub/router trys to talk with the network card at random intervals, and the network card does the same to the sitch/hub etc.

But what if they both are using the same algorithm to guess when to talk next?....

I fixed my problem the same I was shown to fix the firewall modem put a hub/switch between them and hey presto it works as the in between device will get both lots of talk at the same time but adjusts the pasing to suit itself... easy

Would have been a quicker fix if I had remembered it earlier.

safe SEO - asp redirect

2007-07-05T10:47:00.000Z

Is it a permitanent redirect? or tenporary?

If permanent;
In the index.asp (or default.asp) put the code below in the <> section, the location url has to Fully qualified

<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently";
Response.AddHeader("Location","http://www.new-url.com/");
%>

If temp change 301 to 302 in the script

once in place check the redirect is giving a 301 status, otherwise search engines may see it as a spamm site

http://www.webconfs.com/redirect-check.php

new microsoft surface is here!

2007-06-25T08:38:00.000Z

I saw this in development via the web about three years ago, and now out of (seemingly) nowhere microsoft launch it as "Surface", based on the silverlight platform, it is the next step in the 'flas' type platform where web/interfaces are now multimedia rich applications, the surface platform just adds the touch sreen world to this and combined makes my job as a web developer tough (I am not complainin though).

No more will people be happy with flat, no media websites, they will want by default a feature rich site that works on all browsers with embedded video, sound, moving living information.

To be honest I am happy, the 'web' at last can break free from its static life (I am not a great fan of flash as its not SEO friendly, silverlight is written in XAML (text) so can be 'read' by search engines) and move into the realms of desktop software where everything is live now not waiting for a click of a mouse etc.

It may be a while before Surface and Silverlight make it into everyday websites/stores, when it does it will definately change the face of both highstreet and web experiences and bring them so much closer.

semi conducter geekness

2007-06-18T14:14:00.000Z

It is amazing who you meet at weddings.
I was chatting to a guy called B , who said he was an engineer, he was german over 2m tall.
His job is to make things smaller, if you have ever thought to yourself, 'there is no way thy can make my mobile any smaller' and then a week later you see they have.... Well B is one of the men on the planet that understands all of those IT articles that explain how stuff is stored onto semiconducter chips (ie flash memory.....). Not ony does he understand it he has a pretty good idea how to fit more information into the same space.

The smallest amount of space we can have curenntly without going into quantum physics is one atom big, from memory we are in the 600nm (Nanometre - approx 3 atoms per nanometer), so if moores law holds true we will be naring capacity shortly (a few years...) Oh no he says that is only if we use 2 dimensional storage....

I cant recall alot of the conversation after this I was just like the thought of a 200Gb SD card, a few years ago these were limited to 32Mb of storage, now you can but 4Gb cards, albeit pricey.

It looks like the age of solidstate storage is going to hit shortly and the ideas are endless, can you imagine downloading an entire DVD and storing it on a piece of silicon the size of a grain of rice?
Its all poosible before we even get to quantum ideas.

You sometimes forget there are people out there who are passionate about their job, we take them for granted but thout people like B and the companies they work for we would still be draggin briefcase size mobile phones around while waiting for the post to arrive...

hats off to all those who do the work we all take for granted!

Summer is on its way - albeit not today

2007-05-30T11:40:00.000Z

With summer on its way (its raining today, but I am assurred the English summer will be here soon) its that time of year again that I wonder if the old server sitting in the corner in the sun will survive just one more year.

To quote a blog post - "Note to future IT hopefuls:Computers make heat. Heat is BAD."

PCs, servers especially run hot, all the time, there are warning stickers on some of the servers I have seen that say 'Do not run this server with this side panel off'.
Every time you Server/PC shuts down due to heat (called a thermo-shutdown, its normally automatic once Processor gets to 60+ deg C) it looses 1 yr of its life and they are not designed to last forever (well some are - HP competiton )

So with a scorching summer on its way here are a few tips to keep it cool, (note they dont run under water);
- Air con is good, it may be hard on the electricity bill and maybe the environment but the cost of downtime and early server retirement may be worth it)
- Keep access to the servers limited, I have seen a server room door left open to cool the rest of the office as there was only one air con unit in the place and in the open plan space
- You could look at virtualising some of the server functions - consolidating the number of machines running your company will mean less heat created etc, leaving the released servers to be used as backups?
- Keep the severs in the same cooled or at least well vetilated room, this aids security as well.

I currently have 4 servers in the crypt of a church....cool no really it is, as the room is below ground level under the chapel it is naturally cooler down there. With a portable air con unit on standby incase it gets too hot, the room sits at around 35 de C, which is probably a little warm, but the aircon cant cool it any more than 30 deg C as the heat outlet pipe heats the room up as its cooling. However the system works well.

Make sure you have a backup system in place as the heat can kill: http://h40059.www4.hp.com/campaigns/golddust/index.htm

If you need any advice on server virtualisation, cooling or security feel free to drop me an email craig.hogan@chillfire.co.uk

goodluck with the summer heat.

new google product

2007-05-23T11:48:00.000Z

I have just found http://www.google.com/tisp/ it looks like a great concept for broadband, and with google backing it all the way, who knows how far it will go.

goodluck with the free 8mbps 'trickle line'

SEO forums - worth weight in gold

2007-05-22T07:48:00.000Z

Well with the development of the new CMS out of the way I am back into the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) forums (www.v7n.com).

This is a great place to find information out about the how-to side of good/ethical SEO.
The moderators do a great job of 'keeping it clean' and people are quite open about how they do what they do so well.

check out my latest post http://www.v7n.com/forums/google-forum/57537-thanks-v7n-1-site-links-now-has-pr2.html

Any SEO benchmarking required?

freelancers.net profile

2007-05-15T11:00:00.000Z

I have been using freelancers.net for a number of years and finally have got around to posting about them.

The site is a very good place for freelancers to start looking for projects, jobs and even business alliances.
It has a simple layout and a good reputation amongst reelance professionals, it is mainly geared towards IT/design etc, however there are always jobs from other sectors posted.

my profile is http://craighogan.freelancers.net

goodluck on the job hunt.
//craig

Yeah Nah Umm Bro - more T-shirts

2007-05-15T09:54:00.000Z

I have just added a few new Yeah Nah Umm Bro designs and products!

I saw couple of guys at the Walkabout Embankment (London) wearing them, great to see!

remember to 'keep speaking kiwi'

Paypal will be a bank

2007-05-15T09:50:00.000Z

I heard on the news this morning that PayPal will become a real bank, with offices in Luxemburg.

Its amazing that this was started form nothing a few years ago.
Looks like Yahoo is onto a winner here.

Bring on the PayPal credit card.

new ocre CMS on the way

2007-05-15T09:11:00.000Z

I am about to release the latest version of ocre CMS.
There is new functionality along with a new database system, some of the older versions (1.x) are not compatible at the moment, but am happy to port them across if you want need to (your webserver will nee to be upgraded - see below).

Ocre is now asp.net 2.0 compatible and implements some of the new Atlas toolkit controls, these help to create a really nice interface and more of a desktop feel to the admin tools.

Some of the new features:
- Multi content ability, you can have differnet content on the same URL depending on where people have come from, this is perfect for 'content specific Landing pages'.
- News feed reader and editor, add newsd directly form any number of RSS/XML feeds.
- Social Bookmark me - using addthis.com
- Customer reporting, more in depth tracking of people using your site.
- E-commerce package plugin for ProTx, take payments online via ProTx (paypal as well)
- Multi level navigation, up to 3 levels deep
- Cross browser drop-down menus, and content

All old features have been updated to use the new framework and atlas
I have not used the public release of the Atlas toolkit as this needs to be installed on the hosts server and as most of you are hosted on remote servers the controls (and site) will not work.

What about the speed, there as never been an issue with the speed of the content engine in ocre, however with the internet/computers getting faster I am looking at making the engine more efficient.

I will keep you all posted about this.

If there are any issues with your current ocre install or if you would like information please drop me an email ocre@chillfire.co.uk .

regards,
Craig

Yeah Nah Umm Bro

2007-05-12T12:23:00.000Z

Kiwi T-shirts for teh international Kiwi....

http://chillfire.spreadshirt.co.uk

Yeah Nah Umm Bro!
Speakg Kiwi For Ages

new google analytics

2007-05-12T12:15:00.000Z

Google launched a new Beta version of their web analytics tools.

The interface is very 'google', they are using the latest flash plugin to display graphs, images etc.
It is completely different from the old one, however it is very functional and with the move of 'seldom used' menu items the experience is much cleaner and easier to use.

Will be interesting to see what new tools are added before the Beta version is released 'live'

exchange 2003 vs active directory distribution/securituy lists

2007-04-20T12:39:00.000Z

A simple problem I thought, I use Active directory security groups for group email list.
I know this isn't best however when I set the security group up I needed it for security of folders not for distribuiton of group emails and it worked as an group email address for my users in outlook.

However when new users were added to the group they would/would not appear int he DL.
After much umming and arring I decided to change the security group into a DL.....Not advisable unless you check where its used and if you do it may not take effect straight away, it can catch up with you.
And got the message that some of the users in the security group had the group as their 'Primary Group'.
Each user user in this position were missing from outlook's group email list.

Fixed by editing the users primary group to be 'Domain Users', all done.
It never occurred that having your primary group would remove you from the email list?

Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35' or one of its depend

2007-04-18T10:36:00.000Z

Have been building www.nffw.net for Northland Family Four Wheelers (New Zealand off road club my family helped set up).
The site was working fine on my test server, however once it was ftp'd this message appeared:

Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.

After deleting the problem lines out of the web.config file I realised the problem was the Ajax extensions. Although I never used them in the site I had created the site form the Visual Studio Ajax template (not the Atlas Toolkit one the new Ajax 2.0 release) which it seems you need to have installed in the host server GAC.

The old Atlas Toolkit still works on any server running .net Frameowrk 2.0, as it has its own .dll that sits in the bin folder of the project. However the Ajax release for .net is part of the framework so need to be installed onto the server.

Be careful: Make sure the hosting company has it installed before you start developing the site, if they dont you will have to unpick the entire application and replace all controls with the ctp/version (if they existed).

ext link to asp.net forums: http://forums.asp.net/thread/1499963.aspx

hotmail blocking emails

2007-04-04T08:45:00.000Z

It looks like hotmail is blocking emails, possibly in a bid to stop spam?
I have emailed my hotmail account from 5 different domains, and only one is going through without any delay (tiscali) 1 is taking an age and the other 3 are being dumped, there is no 'NDR' - Non Delivery Report, no bounce message, no notification that the message hasn't gone anywhere.
Very frustrating, they (hotmail) used to dump a lot of emails into the junk mail folder, now it seems it just doesn't arrive at all?

3 weeks in new zealand

2007-04-02T13:06:00.000Z

Well after one week of work its time to think about my holiday again...
3 weeks in New Zealand, a well needed holiday, I spent the entire time at my brothers/parents farm without broadband (not even rubberband speed), so checking an average email account is painful... I went to an internet cafe in whangarei, but they didn't have plug and play capibilty for my laptop....
I spent about 4hr online at 56kbps.... and sent 5 email, and read few here and there that looked important.

The world without broadband is a bit unusual, from using the web for everything - tv schedules, music, recipes etc I was left pondering what to do next.
So I braved the outside world, and remembered that pre internet life wasn't that bad. Okay I couldn't buy stuff on ebay or buy songs online, so I went to a record shop (they even had records) and bought 5 LPs (dont have an LP player....) and 3 CDs (all of which are now part of my MP3 library).

I realised I spend way too much time at the monitor/keyboard, not a life changing revelation but a good reminder to get out a bit more.
Broadband in the north of New Zealand is fairly few and far between, you can get dialup 115kbps, or 336kpbs on GPRS/3G but pretty much anything over that is a business only level.
Telephone exchanges are being upgraded all the time, but with only 4million people living there and a land mass approx same as most of england you can see where the problem is.

One thing that made my holiday was the music, NZ has a massive rock following, try www.therock.net.nz for a very good rock station - definately 5 stars for quaity of music.

I will post a few holiday snaps up on my site shortly, my brothers wedding went well (a week later and it would have bee 400mm under water) photos here http://www.craighogan.com/hogan-tucker , goodluck to Brett and Jo as well.

server flood in the uk

2007-04-02T12:40:00.000Z

Well the first week was fairly busy, we had a flood in the server room while I was away, luckily the water was no deeper than the height of the proliants plastic feet....(I would have really like a photo of this situation, bit sadistic, but ot see a room full of servers up to their bottoms in water and still running would make a cool poster to remind everyone to have a backup system in place),I will never take these off again, so lots of checks on systems etc to make sure all is well, looks like the the pc on the floor shorted out once it became submerged and blew the fuse, and all systems went down.

In the event we lost 2 desktops, one plugged in the other just full of silt now, very lucky, used all 9 server lives in this event.

I am not sure how we would have coped with the possibility of no database/files/data and a mail server under water....
I am guessing I would have built two virtual servers up as 'clones' until newhardware could be purchased via insurance etc. Not something have practised or even run through in my head before.

But in my backup system I never had a section for complete annihilation of company servers, I do now and am in the proces of setting up an offsite server (across a vpn) which will have copies of all data, mail, files etc.

Still a big job to recreate an office, but at least its a starting point.

Server has black logon screen

2007-02-26T15:49:00.000Z

We just had a power cut and when everything came back to life our exchange server (proliant) booted to a black screen, oddly enough it still seemed to work, if you know the order of the buttons you can still login....

weird,

after much hunting it seems that the system default colours in the registry have the odd bug that if the machines system drive runs out of space they may reset themselves to 0 0 0...

ALthough not the same cause,, definately the same problem, to fix this I did (and dont advise, so if you do and it doesn't work or the server becomes an expensive paper weight, there are no guaruntees, no liabilty etc);

1- using regedit on a pc on the same network, goto file -> connect to network registry
Type in the name of the server with the problem.

NOTE this is a live server do not adjust any settings you are not sure about (ie all of them) any false moves and your machine could be toast.

2- Got to the "HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Colors" entries, you will see they are all set to 0 0 0.
You can set these three numbers to any RGB (if you dont know what this is I would stop now) you like, the system defaults are below, change each color setting to the one listed

**********************
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Colors]
"ActiveBorder"="212 208 200"
"ActiveTitle"="10 36 106"
"AppWorkSpace"="128 128 128"
"Background"="102 111 116"
"ButtonAlternateFace"="181 181 181"
"ButtonDkShadow"="64 64 64"
"ButtonFace"="212 208 200"
"ButtonHilight"="255 255 255"
"ButtonLight"="212 208 200"
"ButtonShadow"="128 128 128"
"ButtonText"="0 0 0"
"GradientActiveTitle"="166 202 240"
"GradientInactiveTitle"="192 192 192"
"GrayText"="128 128 128"
"Hilight"="10 36 106"
"HilightText"="255 255 255"
"HotTrackingColor"="0 0 128"
"InactiveBorder"="212 208 200"
"InactiveTitle"="128 128 128"
"InactiveTitleText"="212 208 200"
"InfoText"="0 0 0"
"InfoWindow"="255 255 225"
"Menu"="212 208 200"
"MenuText"="0 0 0"
"Scrollbar"="212 208 200"
"TitleText"="255 255 255"
"Window"="255 255 255"
"WindowFrame"="0 0 0"
"WindowText"="0 0 0"
**********************

Now I can see my login screen!

see link for more info: http://www.flyhpr.com/blog/2005/02/windows-2003-black-login-screen.htm

resetting the default virtual directories for OWA 2003

2007-02-23T11:48:00.000Z

Everynow and then you will need to reset the directories for exchange 2003 OWA (outlook web access). I have been setting OWA up to run in https mode and playing with OMA (outlook mobile access) for my PDA, in doing so I got it working nut along the way needed to reset the directories, and rather than unpicking all the changes I ghad made I found this much easier and quicker.

The tasks are simple but i can never remember the order the link below has the answers;
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=883380

good luck.

Remember company details on all e-Docs.

2007-02-20T11:57:00.000Z

Company Details update
On January 01 2007 legislation from The Companies Act 2006 relating to electronic documents came into force. To avoid being in breach of the Act all companies in the UK must include certain regulatory information on their website and in certain e-mail correspondence:

"Every company must list its company registration number, place of registration and registered office address on its website as a result of an update to the legislation of 1985. The information, which must be in legible characters, should also appear on order forms and in emails. Such information is already required on 'business letters' but the duty is being extended to websites, order forms and electronic documents."

For further details on the Companies Act 2006 see http://www.dti.gov.uk/bbf/co-act-2006/index.html

Information that must be on your website
The name, geographic address and email address of the service provider. The name of the organisation with which the customer is contracting must be given. This might differ from the trading name. Any such difference should be explained – e.g. "ABC.co.uk is the trading name of ABC Limited."

It is not sufficient to include a 'contact us' form without also providing an email address and geographic address somewhere easily accessible on the site. A PO Box is unlikely to suffice as a geographic address; but a registered office address would. If the business is a company, the registered office address must be included.

If a company, the company's registration number should be given and, under the Companies Act, the place of registration should be stated (e.g. "ABC Limited is a company registered in England and Wales with company number 1234567") If the business is a member of a trade or professional association, membership details, including any registration number, should be provided.
If the business has a VAT number, it should be stated – even if the website is not being used for e-commerce transactions.
Prices on the website must be clear and unambiguous.
Also, state whether prices are inclusive of tax and delivery costs.

best SEO descrition I have read in a while

2007-02-08T13:17:00.000Z

Have a look at Matt Hockins breakdown of SEO here - http://www.interactivemarketinginc.com/seo-terms.html, the descriptions are very good and have a down to earth feel.
Any questions regarding SEO and your site drop me an email, or a the bottom of Matts page is a query request for an assessment from his company.

google back links

2007-02-06T12:04:00.000Z

After many changes in the google index and page ranks around the net google have changed how /what they tel us webmasters about our sites.

You can check the sites that link into your site (called a backlink) via google search, just type link:thesiteyouwanttocheck.com (ie link:www.chillfire.co.uk). This has never been 100% accurate as google has held back this information to stop black book SEO techniques and sites fighting over links etc (not a bad thing in the big scheme of things).

Google has chanegd its tune sightly in that if you have a google webmaster account (anyone can have one, you just need a site that you own - if you need one of these mail us: blog@chillfire.co.uk ) .

The webmaster toolkit is an online set of pages giving you access to the information that google has about your site, from web spider activity to highest ranking page this month. Now it breaks down you backlinks for you, very handy as you can check the quality of sites linking to your individual pages etc.

If you have any requirements for some SEO or just general website advice please dont hesitate to email us blog@chillfire.co.uk, we try and reply (no auto responder) withinin 24hrs, but you wont get a free hamburger if we dont.

live expo!

2007-02-01T20:19:00.000Z

Just posted an ad http://uk.expo.live.com/ViewListing.aspx?lid=2054082 on the new live expo, free ads site, bit like craigslist i suppose but with the might of microsoft live behind it.

SQL 2005 restoring backups files.....uncompessed?

2007-01-29T12:28:00.000Z

A simple task I thought, restoring an old SQL 2000 database into my new SQL 2005 server.

I was getting this error;

Create failed for Database 'Compressed_DB'. (Microsoft.SqlServer.Smo)

An exception occurred while executing a Transact-SQL statement or batch. (Microsoft.SqlServer.ConnectionInfo)

The file "D:\Compressed_DB.mdf" is compressed but does not reside in a read-only database or filegroup. The file must be decompressed.

CREATE DATABASE failed. Some file names listed could not be created. Check related errors. (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 5118)

I was completely stumped with the decompressed part of the message, found the solution though http://blogs.msdn.com/sanchan/archive/2006/06/04/617585.aspx .

- Simple fix is to restore the files back to my C drive which is uncompressed.
- Other fix would be to take compression off the offending d drive.

Understanding "login failed" (Error 18456) error messages in SQL Server 2005

2007-01-29T11:34:00.000Z