Owner: Bell End URL:http://doogalbellend.blogspot.com Join Date: Sat, 24 Mar 2007 17:04:06 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: "quite amusing and drastically geeky at the same time" Site statistics:Click here
Dell vs HP 2006-09-16 23:42:00 I've got a new computer from Dell and now my HP DeskJet 5550 doesn't work. Funnily enough the reason I've got the printer is because my de-facto mother-in-law bought a Dell computer and the printer wouldn't work for her either. Who's to blame for this I wonder? I've been fiddling around with it for most of the day and can't get it to work. I can print out the HP test page but any other page refuses to do very much except throw out a blank sheet of paper. Based on my experiences with the new computer that have been mostly positive (except for the shitload of rubbish software it came installed with) I'm going to blame Hewlett Packard.
Diabolical dialogs 2006-04-25 15:59:00 Apparently Windows Vista will have a whole slew of new dialog boxes for us to contend with. This is all in the name of security so perhaps there is some reason behind the apparent insanity, but us programmers have a bit of a soft spot for dialog boxes and our users don't.For a programmer, a dialog box is often the easy way out. What's the alternative? It depends on the scenario, but the typical situation where we would consider popping up a dialog is when the user is about to do something that could lead to some kind of data loss, so we throw up a dialog saying 'Are you sure?'. The alternative here is to have some kind of undo functionality and that can be pretty tricky to implement.So why don't users like dialogs? Because they interrupt workflow. The user is merrily going about their business when up pops a dialog and they have to think about the answer. After a while of course they learn to ignore the dialog and just hit the Enter key, which is another problem with dialogs that
SonicWall VPN Client for Vista beta 2007-04-30 00:40:00 One of the problems I've had with Vista
is the fact the SonicWall VPN Client
doesn't work with it and SonicWall haven't released a new version for Vista. Well they've finally got their arse in gear and released a beta version of the VPN client. Send an email with “subscribe” as the subject of the email to gvc40-join@listserv.sonicwall.com if you’re interested in participating in the beta program. It kind of works for me, although after a while Vista complains that two PCs are connected to the network with the same IP address. Then everything falls apart. Restarting the VPN client and my wireless connection fixes the problem.
Phew, it's not just me 2007-04-29 21:33:00 First off, Canary Wharf is one weird place. I haven't been there for a while but it's almost like it has a dress code, everybody is wearing a suit, or shirt and trousers at the very least. So when I rolled out of the station in my old jeans with a few days facial hair growth I thought I'd be picked up by the police as a terrorist suspect. Fortunately I didn't bump into any police men. I was fairly sure Credit Suisse wouldn't let me in either but perhaps they'd been warned that a group of geeks was visiting. I was attending a London .NET User Group meeting for a talk about Windows Workflow. The first part of this talk was reasonably interesting, although it was clear the presenter has been reading the same book as me, so a lot of it wasn't new to me. But things got interesting when one of the guys who's been developing a WF application at Credit Suisse talked about their experiences. The things that came up were pretty much the same issues that I've come up against. First
iTunes and Windows Live Writer love-in 2006-10-27 18:15:00 For the past few months I've been using my Toshiba Gigabeat to listen to music in my office, but something has been bugging me about it for a while. The random play functionality is completely whacked out. It seems to be random based on the artist, so if you've got one track by an artist, that artist will get as much coverage as an artist with 100 tracks. So I decided to move my MP3 collection on to my new PC and use iTunes
instead. That in itself was a bit of a pain. The Gigabeat converts MP3s into a file with a SAT extension so you can't just copy them back across, since nothing but the Gigabeat knows what a SAT file is. But if you plug it in right, Windows
recognises it as a media player and knows what to do with the files and does the conversion on the fly. All seems a bit odd really, but I could now listen to my MP3s through iTunes. And now I've found a very nice plugin (well two actually) that lets you insert the track you're currently listening to into your Read more:Writer
, Windows Live
More Windows Live Writer 2006-08-18 00:07:00 A comment to my previous post from Spike Washburn (of the Windows
Live Writer
team no less!) suggests image uploading won't be supported until Blogger improve their API, which is a shame. So Blogger, get your finger out! And apologies if it appeared that I was suggesting Windows Live Writer
deliberately wasn't supporting image uploads to Blogger. A couple of other points about Writer. First, I'm very pleased to see it is a managed application. Great to see MS dogfooding the .NET Framework and proving it's possible to produce professional apps using WinForms. Second, it's great to see developers from MS responding to blog posts from little old me. Fact is I'm a Z-list blogger that no-one reads but I've had two lots of feedback from MS people. That kind of communication will really help build a good feeling towards MS in the IT community. And yes, I'm using Writer to write this post.
Windows Live Writer 2006-08-17 14:47:00 Just playing around with Windows
Live Writer
and it's mostly pretty cool. The first problem I've encountered is the lack of image support on Blogger, which is pretty much a showstopper. Odd really, because Blogger does support images, but I guess this is a beta... Read more:Windows Live
, Windows Live Writer
The Road To Guantanamo 2006-03-11 00:16:00 I've always followed the career of film director Michael Winterbottom since he went to the same school as me. He directed the great '24 Hour Party People', chronicling the coolest record label of my teeenage years. He also did '9 Songs', the most sexually explicit film to get a certificate in this country, a record that I'm sure will be highlighted in the school's old boys' magazine...Anyway, I saw his latest, 'The Road To Guantanamo', last night and it was great, in a horrendously depressing kind of way. Yes, the 11th of September attacks were horrific but can that excuse the kind of treatment that was handed out to these people (and is still being handed out to the 500 people still there). We protect our democracy by ignoring all the rights that democracy confers on people?Of course it can be said that the film isn't entirely objective, based as it is on the accounts of the inmates. But since the US doesn't seem too keen on letting anybody else in there to see what's rea
The IT Crowd 2006-03-03 23:15:00 Written by the same bloke who wrote 'Father Ted', starring Chris Morris and being about IT people, how could 'The IT Crowd' fail to deliver? Well it was reasonably amusing but was never quite the sum of its parts. I think the basic problem was that to hit the mark it would need to make techy jokes that would be lost on the general population. So the fact it is about IT people is kind of irrelevant, it's just another bunch of misfits in an on office sitcom. Saying that, I watched every episode, which is unusual since I don't really watch the telly anymore (unless you count CBeebies).The ending suggested there'll be another series, so perhaps that will allow the characters to grow somewhat.
More on tick marks in HTML 2007-05-02 23:30:00 My original post about displaying a tick mark in HTML is one of the more popular hits on this site. This fact and the increasing usage of IE7 and FireFox drove me to come up with a nicer solution than the one proposed there (using the lowest common denominator checkbox input field). Internet Explorer supports something called conditional comments. Using these you can serve up different content to different browsers directly in your HTML, rather than doing funky server-side things. I have to use this approach since I'm generating a static HTML file. So here is the markup - <!--[if IE 7]><!--> ✓ <!--<![endif]--><!--[if lt IE 7]><input type="checkbox" disabled checked><!--<![endif]-->The if IE 7 comment will be rendered by IE7 and any other browser. The if lt IE 7 comment should only be rendered by IE6 and below. I've tested it in IE6, IE7 and FireFox 2, which covers enough bases for my needs. And here is the output, which hope
JScript try catch syntax 2007-05-02 14:34:00 I alway forget the syntax for JScript exception handling and searching on the web always seems to bring up the wrong thing, so here is an example as my own personal reminder. try { // do stuff return "blah"; } catch(e) { return e.message; }Yeh, I know, I should be able to remember that... I blame it on the crap JScript editors, none of which provide the mental crutch of code completion.Remember too, JScript requires the e, you can't use catch().
Even more on tick marks in HTML 2007-05-04 12:39:00 It's always the seemingly simplest probems that have the most long-winded solutions. So my last post was wrong, although that solution worked in some HTML docs, as soon as I switched to HTML 4.01 FireFox started showing extra crud, as you'll notice if you're viewing this in FireFox. So here's a solution for tick marks in HTML 4.01, still using conditional comments, which works in IE6, IE7 and FireFox 2, probably...<![if !IE]> ✓<![endif]><!--[if IE 7]> ✓<![endif]--><!--[if lt IE 7]> <input type="checkbox" disabled="disabled" checked="checked" /> <![endif]--> And to complete the whole thing, here's an XSLT template to put a tick mark in your HTML output. <xsl:template name="outputTickMark"> <xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes"> <![if !IE]> ✓ <![endif]> <!--[if IE 7]> ✓ <![endif]--> <!--[if lt
Virtual Earth vs Google Maps part 3 2007-05-08 22:51:00 Many moons ago I tried out Windows Live Local (now called Virtual Earth
I think) and decided it didn't meet my needs since it didn't show any London tube stations or train stations which made getting round London kind of difficult. I checked it out again today and it now has got tube and train stations. This is actually a step ahead of Google
Maps that only show tube stations. However it seems to be a bit buggy currently since sometimes stations appear at one zoom level, disappear when you zoom in, then re-appear again after more zooming, which I presume is not by design. Check out Herne Hill. So finally these Web 2.0 sites have almost caught up with Streetmap, which I don't think has been updated in about 5 years. Kind of shows up the 'we move in a fast moving industry' mantra as a complete lie. Read more:Virtual Earth
, Google Maps
Why I'm not using UAC 2007-05-15 21:16:00 Lots of people keep saying I should switch User Access Control on. So I thought I'd give it a try since I wanted to see how painful it was or if it was actually not so painful after all. And of course I'd like my software to run with UAC enabled without causing any issues. But here's the problem. Vista is already screwed up on my machine, what with no sound, a SonicWall VPN client that screws up TCP/IP and complete machine freezes every couple of days. And UAC makes it even worse! Internet Explorer has some serious problems when UAC is enabled. It won't print, links that open new windows don't work and the dropdown menu on the back button doesn't work. Explorer always opens folders in a new window, even though it is set up to reuse the same window. Lots of applications won't work at all unless I run them as administrator (Visual Studio being the obvious example) which rather defeats the point of UAC. And these are the problems I've found after using UAC for about two
How the web was won 2007-05-14 23:31:00 In one of my previous jobs I was responsible for helping to develop a native Windows client. At the same time, a web client was developed by another team. Although the native client had some advantages (it was much quicker and generally more reliable*), the web client was much more successful. I suspect this was mostly down to the deployment issues you have with a native Windows client. Even now in a world of ClickOnce deployment, web clients are still preferred by a lot of customers. But one thing that has become apparent to me since doing more integration work is that web clients also have one other major advantage over native clients. Whether you intend to or not, when you develop a web client you get a plugin architecture for free. Doing the same thing in a native client takes a lot of thought and development time, but anybody can hack around with a web client to make it look like they want or do what they want, via CSS, Javascript or even server-
More on JScript exceptions 2007-05-23 07:18:00 I don't know much about JScript, so when I need to find out anything I head off to Google. So that's what I did when I wanted to know about throwing exceptions. Almost every example I've seen shows something like - throw "something went wrong";Initially I thought this would be wrapped up as an exception by the JScript runtime, but it turns out it is actually a string that gets thrown. Which may be fine in some cases. The problem comes when you want to catch exceptions. If you want catch all exceptions thrown in a bit of code (yeh I know, bad idea, but this is JScript not software engineering...) then things will get complicated. The runtime will throw exceptions but your own code is throwing strings, so you have to deal with them differently. Turns out the solution is pretty straighforward -throw new Error("something went wrong");Now everything is an exception and life is good.As a side note, I've not considered throwing anything other than an exception before.
The new Google Analytics 2007-05-23 02:35:00 So there's a new version of GoogleAnalytics
available which is lovely and shiny and new. But they seem to have removed the ability to show data by month or hour. Monthly data is useful to get an overview of how traffic is increasing/decreasing over time, since daily data is too volatile. Hourly data is great to see what's happening on your site today. Read more:Google Analytics
A grey water experiment 2007-05-31 14:20:00 We are constantly told that investing in a water
butt to water our gardens is a good thing, it saves water and hence the planet. What is never mentioned is the fact that when you need it most, your water butt is probably not going to be much use to you. When it hasn't rained for several weeks and the inevitable hose-pipe ban is in place, you water-butt won't have a drop of water in it. Because of this, my water butt isn't getting filled up with rain water. Although the general consensus seems to be that using grey water for watering your garden may not be a good idea, as ever I decided to ignore any advice given to me and hooked our water butt up to the outlet from our bathroom. I'm not sure all houses are configured like ours, but the used water from our sink and bath goes out through a couple of pipes into a drainpipe so using this for the water butt was very simple. And it seems to work fine. The water can smell a bit, but it doesn't seem to kill our plants and we can water the
Ah, so flickr does have a business model 2007-06-01 15:58:00 I'd always presumed flickr was one of the web 2.0 sites that seemed to think it could somehow make money out of thin air. Then I was uploading some photos from the Random Pub Finder when I hit the site's 200 picture limit. Of course I can upgrade to a Pro account, but really it's not worth it for me. The only reason I was using flickr was to get some inbound links to the RPF and that isn't worth $24.95 a year. Because RPF's business model
is non-existent... Read more:business model
New version of Windows Live Writer 2007-06-01 13:33:00 There is a new version
of Windows
Live Writer
available. It looks prettier and has squiggly line spell checking but beyond that I don't know if it offers a lot. My problems with Live Writer in the past has been its inability to upload pictures to Blogger (which by all accounts is Blogger's fault) and its inability to check for new versions. I only found out about this new version after stumbling across a review of it. Admittedly, programs that do check for updates tend to upset me as well since they seem to require a new install every time I run them, so there's no pleasing me... Anyhoo, I'll see if it uploads images now. Time passes... OK, so it can't upload images to Blogger directly but it will upload them to an FTP site and hook them into the page. The FTP integration is pretty sweet, although I guess it'll be no use to a lot of punters. But it solves my problem. So that and the squiggly line spell-checking means I'll give it the thumbs up, even if Read more:Windows Live
, Windows Live Writer
Another way to get more hits to your site 2006-12-17 14:02:00 I guess like most sites the Random Pub Finder gets most of its hit through Google searches. But a drunken chat with a friend led to another way to drive more traffic to the site. I've uploaded all the pub images to Flickr and added links to the reviews on the site. So far results have not been spectacular but it means we have deep links into some of our pages so their PageRank should improve. And who knows, it might work for you.
Great photo 2007-06-06 16:00:00 How come my 4 year old daughter can take better photos than me? I have no idea what this is a photo of but I love it. She is also available for designing Olympics logos. Read more:Great
Bye bye eBay, hello Freecycle 2007-06-05 14:26:00 I've sold lots of my old crap on eBay, but I've got a little fed up with it. Most of the stuff I've sold isn't high value so the hassle of eBay just isn't worth it. It takes a long time to put together the sale details, take pictures and package the item and post it. Then eBay takes their cut (whether you manage to sell your item or not) and PayPal takes a cut. Then there are the problem buyers, who fail to pay or have to be chased up. So for quite a lot of work, the returns are pretty slim. So I've given up on it and I'm going to start giving stuff away on Freecycle. All I need to do is post a message and hopefully get a response. It has the added advantage of working at the local level, so goods aren't going to be transported half way across the world. Apparently there are over 3 million users already, pretty impressive.
House prices to reach ten times salary? Bollocks 2007-06-08 16:33:00 According to a report from a government think tank, house prices may be 10 times average salaries by 2025. It's all down to supply and demand apparently. Sure, looking at the figures in a simplistic fashion, with an increasing population and inadequate house building then house prices should continue to increase. But think about it a little longer and it clearly doesn't make any sense. Who will be buying these houses? First time buyers are already priced out of the market. Buy to letters might take up the slack but only if rents rise in line with house prices, otherwise they'd be better off investing their money elsewhere. So will rents rise as well? Given that a lot of our increase in population is driven by economic migrants, who generally are in pretty poorly paid jobs and renting, if rents rise dramatically, will they continue to come here? Probably not, since they'll be better off staying at home. So demand won't increase, meaning prices fall back to a more sensible level. Th Read more:House
, Bollocks
Browsers getting interesting again 2007-06-11 17:33:00 Well interesting
is perhaps stretching it, but certainly confusing. IE7 has been out for a long time now and it seems to have stalled at about 30% usage. Then today Apple released a version of Safari for Windows. So now I have yet another browser to worry about, because I'm guessing quite a few people will start using it, because it's not Microsoft. Yeh, it's based on Mozilla but it's bound to be different to FireFox and it's bound to be different to Safari on the Mac. And IE7 doesn't make life any easier. I can't forget about IE6, because most people are still using it, but enough people are using IE7 that I can't ignore that either. I will however continue to ignore Opera, Konqueror, Lynx, Netscape and any older versions of IE. Complain if you like, but I have better things to do with my time than worry about browsers with miniscule market share.
Validator for a custom activity in Windows Workflow 2007-06-16 09:41:00 Last time I talked about adding a property to a custom
activity, this time I'll talk about validating the value of that property. So we have a custom activity called UserActivity with a property called Form and we want to ensure the workflow designer has specified a value for this property. First thing to do is write our validator class, which looks like this - class UserActivityValidator : ActivityValidator { public override ValidationErrorCollection Validate(ValidationManager manager, object obj) { UserActivity activity = (UserActivity)obj; ValidationErrorCollection validationErrorCollection = base.Validate(manager, obj); // Don't validate when the activity is standalone if (activity.Parent == null) { return validationErrorCollection; } // check Form property has been set if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(activity.Form)) validationErrorCollection.Add(ValidationError.GetNotSetValidationError("Form")); retur Read more:Windows
, Workflow
, Windows Workflow
Activity properties in Windows Workflow 2007-06-15 14:39:00 I initially thought WindowsWorkflow
was horrendously complicated, needlessly so. I've since realised that it's just exceedingly extensible but one problem is that there aren't a great deal of internet resources to search through to find the answer. No surprise I guess since this is pretty new technology. So I've decided to add some little tidbits. I'll present a few very short posts about a very small subset of the functionality, a kind of Windows Workflow
for dummies. Given that I'm a dummy myself, I am perfectly placed to do this I reckon. Of course since I'm still learning all about WF, these posts may be incomplete or plain wrong. So first up, adding a property to a custom activity. Properties in WF don't work like properties in normal .NET classes, they are based around dependency properties, which are properties that can be attached to any class deriving from DependencyObject. All activities inherit from DependencyObject so they can use dependency properties. I Read more:Activity
Metastorm BPM 7.5 review 2007-06-14 10:43:00 It's been around a while so it's about time I wrote down my thoughts. If you want to see the official line take a look at the Metastorm Press Release, I'm just going to talk about things that interest me, which in general means the core product and any .NET integration pieces. One of the main reasons I wasn't particularly keen on version 7.0 was the requirement to disable DEP before installing. Although this was rectified in the first service release, installing still required disabling DEP, installing 7.0, re-enabling DEP then installing the service release. Thankfully this has all been fixed in 7.5 and I presume 7.5 can be installed straight over 6.6, although I haven't tried this yet. I've been running with 7.5 web client against some 6.6 engines to get a feel for it. Although this isn't supported and it does seem to have a few issues, it's pretty useful for testing out the various client-side hacks we've employed in the past. There's not been Read more:review
.NET 3, worst... name... ever... 2007-06-14 03:56:00 People have got their fingers burned in the past. Installing .NET 2 did cause some applications to break (OK, I can only think of Metastorm e-Work off the top of my head but most people I deal with are using that bit of software) so every time I tell them to install .NET 3 to use the wonders of Windows Workflow I have to include a disclaimer that .NET 3 isn't really a new version of .NET, it runs on top of .NET 2 so shouldn't break anything blah blah blah. Worst... name... ever...
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