Recently a few of the items in my start menu have stopped working. Everytime I try to open the Run box I get a error message saying that windows cannot create a shortcut. I can get around this by doing Windows-Key + R. Help and support has the same error. However, if I leave it too long, the whole of the start menu stops working then it's time to kill the explorer process and reload it. I tried rolling back to a previous state, and this seemed to have fixed it for a while. But it has started happening again. I've read somewhere that regsrvr shell32.dll will work, but I've tried it with no success. I haven't found any fix to this issue, and neither does anyone else. I'm investigating but we'll have to see if I'm going to have to rebuild my OS. If I do - I'll be really annoyed.
As someone who knows a thing or two about computers I'm frequently asked to fix problems. When I do some work on a family PC I always give it a checkup: Virus scan, autorus from sysinternals, and a few other sys admin tasks. Recently I've noticed a huge increase in the amount of spyware that has found its way onto my family computers. So I took the decision to set Mozilla Firefox as the default browser. No one seems to have noticed any difference yet so that's a real bonus. Anyway I had my support hat on earlier today while talking my dad through a problem he had with word, I sent him a link to open office: Dad: OK, I double clicked the link and its opening it in mozzarella firefox.
Well I had to laugh!
I'm not quite sure I'd go as far as Vishnu Vyas in his first paragraph, but it's such a good title.
What he does describe so elegantly is the two distinctly different
disciplines you have to enjoy as a programmer. I've always taken more
enjoyment out of fixing a bug than in creating a new application.
Some developers hate working on bugs, they see it analogous to a
plumber looking at blocked toilet. At worst bug fixing is wonderful
mental work out quick and rewarding. At best it is a challenge more
akin to a brain surgeon trying to detect and fix a nervous tick in a
patient. Of all the aspects of IT that I will miss it is this area.
Apparently there are 75 bands in this picture:
To get you started:
B52s
The Eagles
Gorillaz
etc..
Raymond Chen's latest blog entry: Another Schadenfreude-filled look back at the dot-com zaniness reminds me of my brief life as a developer in a dot-com failure.
It certainly wasn't the biggest company that bit the dust, but to those
of us working there it was big enough. We had a very similar aggregate
buying model as Mercata, letsbuyit and a few others. However, in the 2
years that we were going one month stands out as spectacular. From the
beginning the business model was clear and for a successful business
our sales graph needed to look like a hockey stick. For months we were
at the botton of the hockey stick never really making any sales.
Then, suddenly, in a single month we made more sales than the previous
6 months combined. We were finally going in the right direction. Sadly
it turned out that all the deliveries of the widescreen tvs were being
delivered to an empty house and all the sales that month had been
bought using a stolen credit card. Celebrations were short lived and
the company closed shortly after that debarcle
Nevertheless it was a great time.
The internet is abuzz with the latest offerings from Google.
The last fortnight has seen Google Base, and Google Analytics being
released. I've signed up for Google Analytics already as I understand
what this is for, and what I can get out of it: Pretty pictures of the
world. Sadly the service doesn't seem to be working as well as it should
As for Google Base. I feel that I'm missing the point. So yes it's a
way of giving Google loads of data and then allowing you to search for
that data. Isn't this traditionally googlebot's job? If I were
googlebot I'd be worried. I just can't get that excited this.
Nevertheless, what I can get excited about is that not a day goes past
without some announcement from the big three IT companies. It's almost
like being back at the start of the dot-com boom again. All of a sudden
tools and technology that used to be expensive are being given away
free. Visual Studio Express, Google Analytics, Google Maps, Antispyware
software, practivally unlimited online storage.
Naturally, all this goodwill from the big three is just posturing, but
with all the attention they are getting it has to be good for the
industry as a whole.
I've noticed a couple of times recently that Google has been returning a different format of search results.
I've just performed the a search for the phrase md5hash. Instead of
returning all the results for I've been sent three sections of results.
The first few are for "md5hash" then a new section with a few results
for "md5 hash".
What I don't understand is to what the results of the last section refer.
UPDATE: This is what I was looking for after all: Command Line Message Digest Utility
Now I've moved on from my old work horse, I need to get all the tools that I relied on so heavily, thankfully I don't need to wrack my brains
any longer I just need to look here:
Scott Hanselman's 2005 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List:
There are a few extras I would add:
Text editors
http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html .
The website may not be much to look at, but the tool itself is absolutely amazing.
Development tools
Fiddler
Browser additions
Security
Password recovery and sniffing - www.oxid.it
- ideal for recovering those passwords stored automatically by IE.
fport
returns a list of all open ports on which process owns that port.
Well it's the end of an era. Finally after 3 years working for the same company(ish) I've finally managed to get away.
Given the circumstances I've also taken the step to leave the IT world
and move into something more rewarding both personally and
professionally by becoming a teacher. I'm obviously still passionate
about IT and as such intend to continue with my blog, certainly until I
start training which won't start until next September.
In the meantime I've managed to get back into the contract market,
which currently looks in much better health than when I left it, I just
hope it'll stay that way for the next 10 months.
I'm not a major fan of films, having a 4 month old baby doesn't
really allow you much opportunity to go out to the cinema. Anyway, for
some reason I googled for Domino and the first result returned was for
the film and a new section I've never found before:
http://www.google.co.uk/reviews?cid=badcf32d6c5a6f44&client=showtimes&fq=domino
It seems that you can enter pretty much any current film title and get a choice of reviews.
The disclaimer says it all:
The selection and placement of reviews on this page
were determined automatically by a computer program. No film critics
were harmed or even used in the making of this page.
I've had a few referrals for spider eating a chicken. As it's
something I saw earlier in the week, this maybe what they are looking
for.
Video: Camel Spider Eats A Meal
And about time too, it's been more than a year since I forecast the entry into the IM market. Google have finally joined in the fray:
http://talk.google.com/
It's more like the very first yahoo messenger I used in 1998, no icons, no group chats. The windows do dock rather nicely, and it has an exceptionally small footprint. The gmail notifier is also vastly improved allowing you to navigate a preview of your emails.
Unsurprisingly it's in beta, but that's to be expected atleast for the next few years.
Strange ideas flow through your mind when you are frantically soothing a child for an hour early in the morning, one such thought is:
If sunflowers follow the sun what would happen if one were planted at the arctic. Assuming of course that you could find a suitable growing medium.
There are so many software development methodologies to use, and each of them has a set of desirable attributes. They have always seemed bloaty and unnecessarily complex and very much a "perfect world" way of programming. I've always worked for small development teams - never really more than 5 coders. In this environment the approach to development has always been a case of do what it takes to get the job done as soon as possible. If you're a good enough developer then some of the time you avoid the pitfalls of development debt.
I stumbled upon this article today: http://weblogs.asp.net/alex_papadimoulis/archive/2005/05/05/405747.aspx
It seems I may have found a methodology I can use, it may have something to do with this methodology being closest to the way I work now.
I have some knowledge about the stretch of road mentioned by Bruce Schneier. I still know a good number of people who use that stretch of the M4 regularly. In the main, rather unsurprisingly, these speed cameras aren't welcome. Mainly I suspect because people enjoy speeding and feel a bit put out that they are being asked to control their speed or pay the penalty of a fine and points. I understand that the police are trying to convince motorists that speeding is an anti-social activity in the same vein as drink driving. In terms of the campaigns there are some parallels between the two, I've heard the following arguments from both "anti-campaigns" in the past:
Drink / speed driving actually makes you more aware because you are high on adrenaline.
Drink / speed driving in the early hours of the morning is perfectly safe because there are no others on the road at that time.
Anyway the stretch of the M4 approximately lies between Swindon and Bristol. I made that journey pretty much every working day for about 2 years, in that time I saw many accidents, and far too many road works. On average I'd say that the 50 mile trip to work would take about 65 minutes. If there were roadworks or an accident then this time would exceed 90 minutes.
Curiously, the best travel times I had were during the fuel protests where the average speed on the motorway was set lower which also carried the bonus of reducing my fuel bill.
Yay, I've just had a holiday, my first break since Xmas and the first proper holiday since last July, suddenly my nervous twitch has stopped.
We went to Cornwall for the week and had a wonderful time visiting the Eden Project and fish and chips for our wedding anniversary.
Also worth a mention was the Ship Inn, Mousehole and Sofia's in Penzance, great fish dishes as you'd expect from Cornwall.
Anyway, back to the daily grind.
I had an idea a few weeks ago to implement ajax. I haven't had any time to chase up the idea but basically it involves hijacking the _doPostBack() function to make a call to the server using XMLHttp.
The server code intercepts the postback call and send the client an xml stream with the respective changes. The serverside would need to track any changes to webcontrols and build a document of changes to be applied on the by the client.
For simple controls like textboxes this would be a synch, however more complicated beasts, datagrids etc. would involve much more tracking.
Maybe when I get some time I can chase this more thoroughly, vaguely I have the idea that generics may be a very good solution.
I can't remember the last time that this has happened.
Cymru am byth!
I think i've found atleast 15 names for the baby. Now it's just the order of the names that needs deciding :)
I've just completed the Sex ID on the BBC site. My results were good, although I realised I messed up the shapes test because I misread the rubric, so scored 50% on that.
Anyway towards the end of the quiz one of the questions referers to what split you would accept from £50. Here's a screen shot - can you spot the mistake?
My overall result by the way was 0.
I've just been to http://slashdot.org and the site seems broken at the end of the HTML stream there's another stream
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2005 12:49:55 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.33 (Unix) mod_gzip/1.3.26.1a mod_perl/1.29
SLASH_LOG_DATA: shtml
X-Powered-By: Slash 2.003000
X-Bender: An upgrade? I thought we all agreed I was perfect.
Cache-Control: private
Pragma: private
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Content-Encoding: gzip
then a stream of random data.... The full, broken page can be viewed here: download the html of the broken page
The gzipped body of the html seems to be what would normally the body of the page.
Many yonks ago as a exercise to learn c# I took some metaphone C code and ported it to c# then added a few extras like the vowel sounds. While it certainly is by no means complete I took a look at yesterday and I'm still quite pleased with it.
The actual code is not at all pretty, completely devoid of any comments (tut tut) but nevertheless I've dug it out and strapped it into an aspx page.
If anyone wants the code then it's available but you'll have to ask kindly for it and not poke fun when you read it. Maybe if I get the call I can make it proper release standard code and let it loose on the world.
Because of the site move most of the links to my site from the internet have broken. I've wrapped a band-aid round this for the time being by writing a custom BadPage handler.
So I'm storing the failed requests and then redirecting to the new home. The RSS feed was the first to be fixed, next I have to fix all the requests for Multisite, CSS Edit, etc.
I'll be mentioning in more detail shortly.
I've added all the previous entries from my old blogging software. the old software was stored as a very basic RSS file.
I found the quickest way to convert that format to the DasBlog format was by writing a quick script, it could have been done via XSL but given that I had to create the files I found a console app just as quick.
To try out some of the features of DasBlog, here's the code, in theory it could be made to work for anyold rss feed:
using System;
using System.Xml;
using System.IO;
namespace CreateDasblogFromRss
{
/// <summary>
/// Summary description for Class1.
/// </summary>
class Class1
{
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