June 2003 Entries
I love Harry Potter books, I've just finished reading the new book, it's long but
it is a book which will keep you reading until the end (I've read it in a little over
12 hours). Very good book, which progresses the story in many ways (and doesn't feature
as much Quidditch for reasons you'll discover). This is very much a darker book than
the previous ones and yes, someone does die - I won't tell you who but it is a pretty
impressive death....
Perhaps a true revolution is starting, this
article from Wired basically points out that despite having significantly
fewer resources, Apple is still surviving - and prospering. This got me to thinking,
the Open Source movement thus far has been largely disorganised - there are exceptions,
Apache and Linux being notable exceptions. If the Open Source labour force becomes
organised and focussed on providing cohesive, real applications life could get interesting
for the likes of Microsoft. Take a look at projects like Evolution,
...
Over the years I've pretty much used every anti-spam measure in existence. The only
one I've found that actually works (and it is pretty much faultless, 100+ spams caught
daily, 0 false positives!) is SpamNet, this has recently become pay-ware ($3.99 a
month or $1.99 if you were a beat tester). I have recently bought two subscriptions
(work and home). It really is worth it...go on! http://www.cloudmark.com.
Nope, not a porn site, remember the little expandable boxes on MSDN (before it went
all 1996)...this is doing pretty much the same thing...
http://www.codeproject.com/aspnet/WebPartsControl.asp
The war isn't over. This is the best source I've found for whats' still happening
- http://dear_raed.blogspot.com/ ,
funny, honest and thought-provoking, if your only source of information about Iraq
is what the mainstream media portrays (for or against...), do yourself a favour and
have a look at this site...
Any English shopkeeper out there...read this..Scottish Money is LEGAL TENDER IN ENGLAND!!!
UPDATE: Was told this by a guy at work - no
bank notes are legal tender in Scotland - (checked it out and it appears
to be true!). So the guy in the shop who turned down a Scottish £20 was just dumb
-...
Just got home after a very long day, was meant to be a short day but...well...
This was the day we planned to deploy the big site we've been developing for the past
8 months to its' final hosting environment. Unfortunately, the environment wasn't
configured as had been requested, so I spent the day trying to come up with workarounds.
Problem boled down to...
So, Microsoft is stopping development of IE on the Mac...http://tantek.com/log/2003/06.html#L20030613t1318.
It has also announced that no new versions of IE will exist before longhorn. This
is a very odd situation and the implications of this decision are showing already,
Mozilla is now on the rise (Firebird / Phoenix now seem like pretty appropriate names!).
The essential point of MS's arguement seems to be that...
Got you interested! This site odd...but may prove very popular! » link Hmm..must
get a camera phone...Found this through the little geoUrl link at the bottom of this
page on this
blog...
Well, just killed my motherboard...more about that later when then hurt subsides :-P.
So, currently using my laptop foggy as my main machine (new MB on order!). I've been
thinking about what the future holds for me - priotiry one is get a social life again
- I only started learning the whole .NET thing in any serious way about 9 months ago,
and...
Help...I'm in my 4th hour of watching Futurama. They have evilly put a Play All function
on the discs...ah well only 7 hours to go...oh and then I have to watch it again with
the commentary :-) Best series yet - go, buy it now
Just noticed, the final versions of the ASP.NET starter kits have been released, you
can find them here.
These are useful starting points for many applications.
Whilst changing the site, I noticed a couple of comments, almost all were realy nice,
but one was a simple, dumb insult. To be honest I don't care what you think of this
site, nor do I mind if you never come back, with this in mind, I've decided not to
include comments in my future versions of the blog software (I say my versions, it
is of course just a modification of BlogX by Chris
Anderson, I'm just changing bits to make it more...
Got a new book "Don't
Make Me Think!" by Steve Krug. This is a fantastic book and very short - important,
it means I'll actually read it. Along with a series
of articles by Joel Spolsky I think that this should be compulsory reading for
every web developer. Too many sites are ruined by being a pain to use.
I've started working on a modified version of BlogX. So you may notice a few features
disappearing over the next few days / weeks. You will also notice new features appearing.
I am disabling comments for the time being, if you feel a real need to comment on
something here and its' important, use the mail me link in the top right hand corner...
You can find some of the best 3d screensavers I've seen in a while here.
They really are pretty amazing, and come with full source code - if you fancy writing
some yourself (oh and you can code OpenGL in C++)!
From Kent Shrkeys' blog
(I know its' old, but it's new to me!) http://rinkworks.com/words/funwords.shtml
Sorry I haven't posted for the last day and a bit...we've been getting RC3 of our
Portal project ready for delivery. The Portal is able to support two authentication
mechanisms, Passport and Forms. Forms has worked perfectly from day one but the Passport
has been a real bugger. The Passport SDK says that to sign out you do this:::
...
One of the most frequent queries about dynamically added controls is how to get their values after postback... This is not as easy as it sounds if the value of these controls has a direct impact on the next set of controls bound to the page. There are various methods to do this - persisting the controls in Session state and reloading on init being one I've used in the past, there's also more code-intensive methods involving intercepting the postback event and reinding there. One of the most elegant methods I've encountered is Denis Bauers' Dynamic Controls placeholder » link ,...
Martin Fowler has written about a little device called Slimp3..it looks amazingly
cool...just what I was looking for in fact. » link
On of the worst omissions from .NET 1.0 and 1.1 is compression...and no-one has ever
really explained the reasons why we can't have it as part of the cor framework. Also,
why doesn't WSE include anything on message compression? Anyway, there is one way
to get compression in a totally .NET way (assuming you installed J#). This article
on MSDN explains how...» link.
Now, who wants to rewrite the Blowerly compression module using this??? I might just
have to do it at...
I'd love to see a more complete explanation of this system » link.
This type of system really appeals to my style of architecture. Only thing I would
be driven to ensure was that this system was secure...
WSel, got your attention...I found this entry really interesting regarding the future
(or not) of IE link on Scobles' blog...
I forget whos' blog I saw this on (post a comment and i'll link). This is essentially
the documentation and bits which .NET Passport should have always come with. The passport
toggler alone is totally indespensible for all developer using .NET passport. The
install is a bit buggy (some of the bits don't work for me).
...
Just came across this blog http://sqlblogs.com/salman/,
looks like it'll become a pretty useful blog for Sql...
On a trawl through my Sharpreader subscriptions...ShawnMors' blog had this link .
Some pretty cool toys for VS.NET...
...
Found this on Scobles'
blog...guidelines on UI design, I don't think any developers can read too much
of this stuff...if no-one can use it, why write it???
http://www.asktog.com/columns/022DesignedToGiveFitts.html
Noticed this over on Alex Lowes' blog,
link to the building
blocks page. Some very useful resources - I can see these being used more and
more in the community. We already use the Exception Management and Data Access Blocks
in our large Portal project, they really are excellent - and come with source, so
you can...
Someone asked what happened to the new server I was going to build...Umm well...I
got all the bits, including a swanky new heatsink - all from Ebuyer ,
which is the best online store I've ever found for bits - can't find the link to the
heatsink right now, but it was a Coolermaster one with a heatpipe..So in my entusiasm,
I tried to set...
I write more later, but I found it very interesting (oh and it has a sex scene...well
kind of!). Lots of people have written that they found the bit with the Architect
incomprehensible...I found it ok to be honest. Oh, and stay until after the credits,
there's a trailer for Matrix Revolutions...but the credits are very long!
I'm late for work (this is not unusual, I work strange hours). Anyway, does anyone
have any opinions of Flash MX as a front end for distributed .NET apps. I plan to
spend some time looking at this, looks like you can do decent interactions with web
services.
I used to work for a compnay called...