brain dump

SQL Server Express - How Not To Install It!

2012-01-03T22:13:00.000Z

So new year, new job and new laptop. This is a great way to start the new year.

Working for a new company has meant installing a new Microsoft based development environment, part of which is the freely available SQL Sever Express. Installing it should have been a breeze using the free to download installer (or I believe you can also install using the Web Installer). However, as I had already installed the ASP.Net framework stack it turned into a rather long process.

SQL Express does ship with Management Studio which I think is brilliant considering it's all free! However, when I installed SQL Express there was no option to install Management Studio. I, wrongly, assumed this would just be installed by default. When the install finished I looked for Management Studio but realised it was not installed. After much reading and research I found out that if you install SQL Express as part of the .Net framework installation you are unable to then install Management Studio tools as part of a subsequent instance installation.

That's really not very helpful!

The short version of the rest of the story is that you need to uninstall all instances of SQL server Express and then re install it again. Once you restart the installation you find you have the option to include Management Studio Tools.

Now don't get me started about not being able to change the servers default collation ....

Google Video Chat Fix

2011-12-21T13:25:00.000Z

My wife and I tend to communicate through gtalk and recently the video chat. However, a couple of nights ago her laptop stopped allowing her to invite people to video call.

After realising it was something to do with the flash plugin I installed the latest version and applied all of the updates to no avail.

After a little Googling I found the answer to be the following and I thought I would post it here in case it's useful to anyone else.

Basically, go to your GMail account settings and find the Labs tab. Scroll right down to the bottom and there should be a Lab for Video Chat Enhancements. Click "Enable" for that lab and then save your settings. It worked a treat and she is now back up and running.

This issue seemed to effect both Chrome and Firefox although other people I have read about only seem to be effected if you use Chrome. Either way that solve her problem.

Arch Linux - LibreOffice Displaying Non English

2011-10-04T22:41:00.000+01:00

When LibreOffice was first released I instantly installed it (via pacman) on Arch Linux. Having read lots about the grand work the project was doing to finally bring the project upto date since forking Open Office I was interested to see what they had achieved. I was quite impressed.

I don't do a lot of document based work on my Arch laptop (and there have been a number of updates since I last used it) but I went to type up a letter for the wife tonight and fired up LibreOffice and found the UI was rendering in what appeared to be Russian (which I do not read or write).

After a bit of digging about it appeared I made a fatal error in installing the libreoffice-uk language pack. Turns out that is the Ukrainian language pack ... oops!

It turns out that I am not alone in making this assumption and if you happen to hit this issue and you actually need English and not Ukrainian then install the libreoffice-en-GB language pack and all will be well (and readable) again.

Visual Studion 2010 Debugging Time Out.

2011-08-09T17:03:00.000+01:00

One thing that has started to bother me since going to a VS 2010/IIS7 setup is that by default the time-out on the debugger is incredible short. You start looking into a problem and be on the point of realisation when a Message Box pops up saying that the thread is aborting.

Helpful, that is not.

After a little digging about I found that it has something to do with the application pool settings in IIS. To increase the time the thread is available open IIS Manager, open the application pool your site is running on and click "Advanced Settings". In the property dialog that comes up there is an item labelled "Ping Maximum Response Time (seconds)". Set this value to your desired value and click OK.

I have mine now set to 6000 which should be enough for now.

Arch KDE SC 4.7 Missing KDM Background

2011-08-08T19:20:00.000+01:00

If after upgrading KDE to 4.7 on Arch you notice that your KDM theme is missing you need to run the following:

pacman -S kde-wallpapers

It turns out the KDM default theme use's an image from the KDE Wallpapers package which has been split out on it's own from 4.7.

Arch Linux Zope Interface Update Issue

2011-08-03T22:23:00.000+01:00

The issue is old now, I have ignored it for about a month of pacman -Syu but in updating to KDE 4.7 tonight I hit it again.

If you pacman -Syu and get

error: failed to commit transaction (conflicting files)
python2-zope-interface: /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/zope.interface-3.6.3-py2.7.egg-info/ exists in filesystem

The you need to go to this page and follow the two simple commands.

It would appear to be a simple bug in pacmans conflict resolution handling. It had to happen sometime I guess!!

Disable Visual Studio 2010 w3wp Warning

2011-08-03T11:29:00.000+01:00

So I have finally got to switch to my new laptop (windows 7, i5 lots of RAM!) and reinstalled all my tools.

This first thing that started to really annoy me was that every time I attempted to attach to the w3wp.exe process to debug Visual Studio showed a message telling me it might be a bit dangerous to do so. Clicking OK allows you to attach and debug as usual. I had to find a way to disable that message.

Apparently you can and I have! Thanks to a great little post over at thethoughtfulcoder.com it appears this can be turned off in the registry.

This is great and saved me some keystrokes however, it is the kind of thing you should be able to disable in Visual Studio itself rather than have to dig about in the registry for.

C# Closing A Form In The Constructor

2011-06-09T22:51:00.000+01:00

I had an odd need to close an application if a user failed to set some basic user data in a C# application tonight. The flow was that a very simple dialog was displayed during the main windows constructor call and if they dismissed the dialog the application was to end.

After some head scratching I found the only way to do this was with ...

this.BeginInvoke(new MethodInvoker(this.Close));

Install Dropbox in KDE

2011-06-05T21:44:00.000+01:00

I set up a new Linux distro today and the first thing I like to do is install Dropbox.

As a KDE user this is slightly more involved than for those that like to play with Garden Ornaments!

I did post previously a simple guide that showed how to do this but the article has gone! So below is how I set up Dropbox.

First download the Dropbox package. The following two links (32 and 64 bit) should point to the latest builds :

Save the file somewhere in your /home directory and the use an extraction tool to extract the contents into your /home/USERNAME directory. (This should be your /home directory as in /home/andy). This will create a folder called .dropbox-dist (note the . character, this is a hidden folder).

Go to the KDE System Settings application and navigate to the "Startup and Shutdown" node and then the "Autostart" node. Click Add Script and use the file dialog to select the dropboxd file within the .dropbox-dist folder (and yes that is the dropboxd and not dropbox, this is a daemon that will be started on each logon).

Once the dropboxd file name is selected click OK. That is the daemon set up and ready to use.

Now to save logging out and back in again, open your file manager and navigate to the /.dropbox-dist/ directory (once again you will have to enable viewing hidden files and directories to see it), and double click the dropboxd file. This will start the daemon running and will display the Dropbox setup wizard. Within the wizard you can choose to create a new account or connect to your existing account.

openSuse 11.4

2011-06-05T21:30:00.000+01:00

Today I have been sorting my work laptops Linux partition.

Up until recently I have been using Kubuntu on Kermit my work laptop. This was down to it being the CD I had to hand when setting the laptop up for some Linux based development work. Kubuntu was OK but it never seemed as fluid as Arch which is the distro I use by choice. When it came to running the upgrade between 10.10 and 4.11, it just failed and bricked the partition. If ever I loved Arch's rolling release model more it was then! So today, wanting a distro that I could just install and use, I opted to try openSuse 11.4. I haven't used Suse since about version 9.3, so it has been a while. So far I am very impressed. It boots fast and looks great. I have set up my standard apps and over the next few days I will get my development environment set up so fingers crossed I can use this for a while without issues.

The KDE implementation seems to be much more polished than Kubuntu. In fact I would say this is the best, most well integrated and polished 4.6 implementation I have seen so far.

The only gotcha I have faced was that the installer defaulted the host name to some standard string. It's easy to fix, open the /etc/HOSTNAME file in your favorite editor as root and change the single entry to the desired host name. Save the file and all is well in the world. Simple fix but it would be nicer if the installer did a better job with regard to this.

Console - Shell Manager

2011-05-18T10:36:00.000+01:00

When working on Windows I need Bash. Command prompt is not a patch and I have automated a number of actions using some simple and some not so simple scripts.

Today I found console a nice little shell manager along the lines of Konsole (see what they did there?).

From the Console website ...

Console is a Windows console window enhancement. Console features include: multiple tabs, text editor-like text selection, different background types, alpha and color-key transparency, configurable font, different window styles

This appears to be a great little application and makes it easy to configure Cygwin. You can even defined different shells by the look of it and open tabs based on the shell type. So if you needed to you can have cmd and bash live side by side.

File Expert - Android File Manager

2011-05-09T22:34:00.000+01:00

Android rocks. I could write post after post about how much I think it makes a mobile phone fun and useful. However, millions of others have done that already and there is more to life ...

Tonight though I had a need to upload a BIG video file to my phone and no cable. I have had File Expert installed for a while. This seemed like a great little file manager app and I have used it as such.

Tonight however, I found that not only can you use it to FTP files to your phone but that it has a basic web server which you can enable which allows you to access your phones file system from a browser. Problem solved.

To do this just click the "share" menu item and choose WEB SHARING. It will give you the ip address to connect to (including port) and a user name and password.

It also has a smb client (Samba) client which I have yet to try fully.

All this from a free app!

Arch wicd upgrade

2011-04-22T21:39:00.000+01:00

Just ran a system update on my Arch install and it failed to commit due to some changes in the wicd package structure.

This post on the forums has a couple of solutions but I ended up forcing an upgrade (-f) on the wicd package and the updated as usual and all was well with my world once again.

Arch LibreOffice Spell Checking

2011-03-20T20:49:00.000Z

I have switched from OpenOffice to LibreOffice. I was interested to see what all the fuss was about and from what I have read I see that the most interesting developments will happen on LibreOffice and OpenOffice will be left as an Oracle application.

So far I have been very impressed. It is fast and everything seems good. I run Arch linux and installed the standard packages. The only issue I found was with spell checking. The standard spell checking packages would not work for me so I have installed hunspell (pacman -S hunspell-foo where foo is your language).

I can only recommend switching.

KDE 4.6.1 Is Out

2011-03-06T07:21:00.000Z

KDE has announced the release of KDE SC 4.6.1, the first set of fixes and updates for the 4.6 release. Here are the full details.

KDE 4.6 Is Out!

2011-01-27T13:35:00.002Z

KDE 4.6 Is Out. There are lots of new features to play with (although no new PIM software, that should make it out in the first monthly update) and the full release note can be read here.

Arch (as always) have new packages already in extra and the full details can be read here. pacman -Syu now!

Arch Reinstall Gotchas 101

2011-01-23T22:55:00.001Z

I have used Arch Linux for some time now (3+ years from memory) coming to it from a Debian/Slackware background. I love it it allows me to run a bang up to date KDE desktop on a rolling release basis. For those that would like a more honest review then Kevin Bush did a great review over at Linux Journal very recently.

In the time I have run it I have only installed it twice before and now I am only installing again because I got a shiny new 500gb laptop drive for Gonzo (my Thinkpad!) at Christmas.

One of Arch's many benefits is the documentation and forums. When you install Arch you only install a base system and can then go and build your system your way. No desktop, not many services and only a terminal to log in with.

People have been known to moan abut this approach but I like it. In one evening I had a full KDE desktop (I use the standard Arch Packages for day to day use) up and running. However, I did hit a couple of gotchas which I thought I would document here in case they help anyone else :

NetworkManager has not improved since my last attempt to get networking working with it. I recommend Wicd all the way.
KDE would not shut down. I spent some time investigating this but ended up on this thread on the forums which helped me to pin it down to the Phonon backend that was being used (Xine). I updated to use the gstreamer backend and all was well.
Getting Dropbox working without installing lots of gnome libraries. For this I found this article which did the job perfectly in about 6 steps. Once done, reboot and on next start up the Dropbox installer will guide you through the rest.

Now I am back up and running I can look forward to a few nights setting all my preferences, data and look and feel up. Then I can forget about installing and get on with using.

KDE Dolphin Dropbox Service.

2010-12-28T22:26:00.001Z

This article I have just seen via the KDE Planet details a new service for allowing Dropbox browsing from Dolphin. Looks promising and I will try and install tomorrow and play.

KDE & K16 ... Send Your Pitch

2010-12-21T22:14:00.000Z

So the KDE team have thrown open a challenge. What do users and developers want from KDE and where should it head in the next 5 years. They are going to hold a meeting of users, visionaries and developers early next year called K16 and they have thrown open an invitation for users to "pitch" their ideas in a one page document which can be sent to k16@kde.org for the chance to attend and sell your idea to the project. The organising team and KDE e.V. will select 15 people to attend and even cover travel costs.

I think this is a GREAT idea and one that shows despite the criticisms from some voices in the media the project does care about what people want and is in fact not a developer centric project.

However, it is quite clear from some posts I have read and some of the comments in the announcement that some users are still bemoaning issues surrounding KDE 4 and the stability of the Software. In some case's I agree that while the project has transformed from a slightly poor 4.0 release, 4.5 and soon 4.6 have polished up rather nicely. I know that some feel that certain changes from the version 3 code have not been wise but at the end of the day KDE is still a mainly volunteer FOSS project and people will work on what interests them and inspires them. If there is a feature from 3 that is really important to you then file a request, get coding yourself or inspire someone to code it.

It's funny how comments like "-Make dolphin open instant and respond better." and "-a replacement for "ark" is desperately needed" make me smile. Opening Dolphin on my Thinkpad R61e takes less than a second. How much faster does it need to be? What distro is the culprit and may have modified it, bloated it?? I like KDE plain and simple so I run Arch.

I do think that while the project plans for the next 5 years they should also keep polishing and improving what they have. However, a meeting like this may well bring some great ideas to the project that may otherwise not been thought of.

Personally, I would like to see a decent WebKit based Browser that is capable of giving Firefox and Chrome a serious run for it's money. I would like to see Tag Cloud based options in Save and Open dialogs. I would like to see decent a decent Bluetooth stack that is complete. And I would love to see changes to the UI that would make using the desktop as much fun as using my Android phone. Plasma widgets of real value and slick UI's that break the 25 year old mould and bring seamless connectivity to the KDE desktop and the web.

I might even put a page together on that one!

New Toy

2010-11-19T22:34:00.003Z

Life has been a little crazy of late. Work has been demanding as it always is in the later part of the year as some of our clients have their busiest times in the last few months in the run up to Christmas. This has left little time for much other than family time. However, I do have a new toy.

Last week I brought an Orange San Francisco mobile phone. I am a bit of a phone freak and have always been buying new ones and trying out the latest low end models. I am a funny phone user as I tend to use Pay as You Go models as my needs really have never warranted a contract.

At the start of the year I brought a Blackberry Pearl. I got it cheap with Orange and found having my mail and Twitter and Facebook and the internet a great use. In fact I was using it more for internet based activity than I was using it as a phone. However, the small screen and the fact it was slow and had a habit of rebooting and freezing led me to take note of some of the new low end Android phones that have been hitting the market.

I was about to find a Huawei Ideos which is the new low end Google phone which is reported to be going on sale for less than £100 and while searching came across the reviews for the San Francisco. I was immediately hooked and went and brought one.

The phone is basically a re-badged ZTE Blade running Android 2.1. It has a 3.2mp camera (no flash but with good light does quite well) 3g, wifi connectivity, bluetooth and Android. I can not say how much Android has impressed me and how it has made the phone genuinely useful. I started it up and entered my Google account details and within seconds I had my calendar, contacts and email all on the phone. Orange have hacked the phone slightly to add various applications (such as a push email client) and add their branding.

With the limited time I have had I have added the obligatory Facebook, Myspace and Twitter applications. All the official applications of the related site and all are brilliant, fast and well thought out applications. I have installed the Dropbox client and the Evernote clients and find that I am able to do almost all of what I can achieve with a PC.

Did I mention how impressed I am with Android?

Other stand out items that I have been impressed with are the ability to install a bar-code reader which can then be used to install applications and download images and themes? Seriously, install the bar-code reader application and start it up, point your camera at the screen with the applications bar-code on it and the camera will scan the code and the image or application is downloaded. Seriously user friendly. Then there is the Android Market. This makes searching and installing applications so easy that it takes no thought.

So far I have only found two issues with the phone in the week that I have had it. The first is that Orange have for some reason removed Google Talk. Why? I know not but this seems a little stupid. I found This article detailing how to install the application and with my trusty bar-code application had it downloaded and running in minutes.

The other slightly more annoying issue was that the wifi would drop connections when the phone went to sleep and not reconnect. This appears to be a major bug with the model is well documented over the internet. I found a great wiki on the ZTE Blade which recommended using and application call

KDE Articles

2010-09-12T21:50:00.004+01:00

Having been caught up with real work this week I have only just really caught up with my RSS feeds. Within which this week I find a number of interesting articles on various elements of KDE.

The first two are Bruce Byfields 7 Things you can do in KDE but not in Windows 7 and KDE and the Expansion of the Desktop. Both articles offer some interesting and articulate advice regarding KDE's Virtual Desktops, Activities, KWin effects and more. It's nice to see Bruce standing up for a desktop that only a couple of years ago he was so critical of.

A Look At KDE Desktop Effects does just that and provides a nice step by step guide to using the "System Settings" to get the best from the effects offered by KWin.

Last, but not least is KDE SC 4.5 Desktop Activities Exposed which once again comes from an author who was critical of the KDE activity implementation but after play with it and reading further articles himself (see article for links) comes to the conclusion that they might not be so bad after all.

RIP Sidux ... aptosid Is born!

2010-09-12T21:34:00.004+01:00

A long time ago before I switched to Arch for my main distro I spent sometime running Sidux.

Sidux was a Debian based distro based and built on the Sid repositories which contain the unstable Debian branch code. Sidux was great. I could install a whole basic KDE desktop in about 5 minutes and then spend the rest of an evening setting it up and installing on the applications I wanted. It provided a rolling basis so that a quick drop to the shell meant I could stay bleeding edge with no reinstalls.

I read only recently that the project appeared to be suffering some issues and after heading over to the project page tonight (after reading that Mint Debian will only ship GNOME!?!?) I find that the project is now dead. RIP Sidux.

Their wikipedia page has been updated with some very minor details regarding what to do now but confirming that as of yesterday the project is dead.

However, what both the Sidux website and the above wikipedia article state is that the developers have started a new project to continue in Sidux's footsteps. The new project is called aptosid. The new site is quite limited but it is day one of a free software project! I will be watching with interest what happens to the project and if they can recapture the following they once had by providing the slickest Debian Sid experience to be found.

KDE SC 4.5 3D Issues Or Not

2010-09-07T20:02:00.004+01:00

I have read numerous posts and articles since KDE SC 4.5 was released last month bemoaning the abilities of graphics drivers, or lack of, in coping with the rendering requirements of KWin. For some reason members of the web press and some users seem to have ignored the advice of the both the KWin developers and the distribution developers. I suspect there are some "issues" with some of the open source drivers however, it's not right or fair to blame the KWin or it's developers.

Martin Gräßlin has an opinion post on his blog that details the checks that KWin performs when it hits issues with 3D and openGL rendering. They seem quite sensible to me.

I run Arch on a Thinkpad with a crumby Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller. I use the standard open source driver and when I upgraded I followed the advice from the Arch developers (posted on the KDE SC 4.5 release announcement) and added the following to my ~/.bash_profile :

export LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=1

Once I had added that and re-enabled "Desktop Effects" in System Settings I have not suffered any problems. I'm not saying it's a magic "cure all" for all driver/card combinations but rather that perhaps following the advice of the developers is the best place to start when you have issues.

KDE SC 4.5 Activities

2010-09-05T22:24:00.001+01:00

I have just read this great article which details various options within KDE SC 4.5 Plasma Desktop such as Activities and Folder View.

Very much worth a read.

Google Wave - Further Code To Be Outsourced

2010-09-03T08:12:00.004+01:00

Google Wave was a great idea I felt. We adopted it at work for collaborative discussions and found it a better way to communicate than just IM and Email. Sadly, Google have decided not to continue developing the application.

However, as announced yesterday, Google are going to Open Source more of the Wave code and even bundle many of the elements into a complete solution.

I will be following this as Wave and Etherpad and co are really execllent tools with a lot of potential.

KDE SC 4.5.1 Is Available

2010-09-01T08:38:00.001+01:00

KDE have released the first in their maintenance release's for the 4.5 version of the KDE SC.

This page details the contents.

Time for an upgrade.

Jack Wallen's KDE SC 4.5 Review

2010-09-01T08:30:00.003+01:00

This is a link to a great review of the KDE SC 4.5. I have followed Jacks reviews of the KDE release's for some time and can say that he honestly hated the initial 4.0 release's and said so.

So it's nice to see the hard work of the KDE developers being reported in such a positive way.

Internet Exporer 7 Running On Vista In Protected Mode

2010-08-23T11:24:00.004+01:00

I have just found the cause of an odd error that has been occurring for certain users of our web application.

A tester was reporting a JavaScript error when clicking on a link to open a new window to an external site. Looking at the script the code looked fine. I tracked the code down to the line reported in the error and found it was falling over on window.open().

After a small amount of research I ended up on the MSDN documentation site and found that apparently for IE7 running in protected mode on Vista (the default setting by all accounts), window.open() may not return a valid reference to the new window. So code that calls
var w = window.open() and then attempts to use w will fail as w will be null.

You can read more here.

Unhelpful is a word that springs to mind.

KDE SC 4.5 Available Now

2010-08-14T22:48:00.002+01:00

While I took a week off of life to have fun with the wife and son on our summer holiday, the KDE project released version 4.5 of the projects Software Compilation.

The KDE site has all the details but I am pacman -Syu as we speak.

KDE 4.5 SC Delayed For A Week

2010-08-05T09:36:00.002+01:00

For those that have not heard, the KDE Release Team have decided to move the release date for the KDE 4.5 SC back a week. This is due to some last minute fix's made after the last RC3 release.

As is right and proper Aaron has a blog post up with the details.

Tips For Running An OSS Project From Damien Katz

2010-08-03T08:23:00.005+01:00

Damien Katz is the guy behind couchDB the document-orientated database app. He has just posted a great write up on his views on running an OSS project and getting the project to a Version 1.0 release.

A very worthy read.

Why Open Source Software Can Get Itself A Bad Name

2010-08-02T08:44:00.003+01:00

There is a LOT of good things about the Open Source Development model. However, the fact that is open can mean that anyone and everyone will be looking at not only the code that a project produces but the related files and issues etc.

I came across a blog in my feeds this morning which relates to what a developer read in release notes from the GIT project. Most people now know GIT is the excellent decentralised Source Control project start by Linus Torvolds. Over the last 5 years it has grown and become an excellent product which is both powerful and to me at least quite simple to use. It has been ported to Windows and I use it on both Windows and Linux without issue. However, the author of the blog, Tim Barcz, did have an issue. He installed a later release to see if the issue was resolved and found in the release notes the following :

“…All hopes to the contrary, Git for Windows is backed by only a handful of developers, in spite of being downloaded almost one hundred thousand times. You can expect developers to be enthusiastic to fix others' issues in such a situation only for so long. In short: Do not expect other people to fix your issues for you.”

This is not a good enough and is harmful to OSS development. My reaction is that if you code on a project then you should at least be respectful and polite to your users. It may be that there are misunderstandings and it may be that the user is trying to do things with you application that it is not intended to do. However, to promote your project, even one started by Mr Grumpy himself, you take time to discuss issue and problems with your users and you aim to keep them informed of solutions and decisions the project takes.

In short OSS projects should treat their users like paying clients when it comes to communications.

The other main problem with the entry in the release notes is that you should not neglect one platform for another if you or your project decide to support multiple platforms. It may be you favour Linux over Windows but if you have chosen to port to Windows you should support it equally. By making your project available to everyone you may find more people opt for your chosen platform on the basis of your application.

KDE 4.5 Screenshot Tour

2010-08-01T21:56:00.002+01:00

I came across this screen shot tour of the new KDE SC 4.5 based on Beta 2. It highlights some of the new things that will be appearing in version 4.5 when it is released on Wednesday.

KDE - New Developer Projects

2010-07-31T20:35:00.002+01:00

I have just read this post from Lydia Pintscher who has been trying to find projects within the KDE community that are in need of some love and which would provide a great way to get started in contributing to the KDE community.

There are a few varied idea, although any part of the community could do with more developers, technical writers or even people happy to help on the forums.

Why not join the mailing lists and get contributing.

SQL Optional Parameters

2010-07-19T21:34:00.001+01:00

A simple explanation that I usually forget to bookmark ... not anymore!

KDE Desktop Tricks

2010-07-10T21:03:00.002+01:00

This is a great blog on achieving various things within KDE SC 4.

The article covers everything from changing Icons and Themes to sorting issues with your panels.

IDE's vs Vim

2010-07-08T16:49:00.002+01:00

This is an interesting article on why a developer has stopped using IDE's in favour of VIM.

I have to say I agree with his point of view.

KDE

2010-06-30T16:25:00.001+01:00

The KDE project has released the KDE Software Compilation 4.4.5, the last of the 4.4 maintenance release's.

You can find further details here.

.Net vs Java (and Open Source)

2010-06-29T09:39:00.001+01:00

This is a link to a very funny video promoting the use of Java for cross platform development.

I don't know who made it but it had me in stitch's!

Google Command Line Tool

2010-06-22T12:53:00.002+01:00

This is a link to a post about a new command line program developed by Google to allow the user to hook up with various web services.

It looks quite interesting.

Inovating Open Source Software

2010-05-27T08:25:00.002+01:00

This is a great article over at info world about Open Source Software that is "doing it's own thing". Seven applications that are not based on existing products and which are developing new ideas and pushing software in new directions.

Nice to see the KDE SC social desktop stuff makes it in the list.

KDE SC 4.5 Beta 1 Is Out!

2010-05-26T22:27:00.003+01:00

This release notice has been posted on the

Code Leaders and Beautiful Teams

2010-05-26T22:23:00.004+01:00

I sometimes listen to presentations on technology subjects while I work. Especially when I am working on stuff that requires not too much thought!

Today I listened to Code Leaders and Beautiful Teams. This was a very funny and entertaining presentation and I found the presenter, Roy Osherove, gave some really simple advice which when you step back and think about it makes you wonder why you have never thought of it before.

KDE 4.5 Activities

2010-05-24T22:49:00.000+01:00

Chani has created a screen cast to show off the work on activities that will be included in the upcoming 4.5 release of the KDE SC.

Watch it here

Linux Software Development.

2010-05-19T21:07:00.009+01:00

I came across this article by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols regarding the the fact that Linux needs to do more for programmers and ISV's. He argues that Microsoft tends to do more for ISV's with better tools and resources.

Although I can see exactly where Steven is coming from I do not exactly agree. Now do not get me wrong I am not trying to start an argument but rather pass comment from what I feel is a fair position.

By day I work with the .Net framework and Visual Studio (2008). I can see the point that Steven makes regarding the tools and resources that Microsoft provide but I would argue that they have it quite easy. Microsoft are only targeting their own platform. They produce the OS, an SDK for that OS and a development platform that sits on top of that OS. Their tools while comprehensive are full of utilities to make life easy for developers and for novice coders.

Now take the Linux platform. At present there are over 300 Linux distro's on distrowatch. They may all share the Linux Kernel and there will be a lot of variations of other distro's but there will be a mass of differences between lots of them. Then you take the various languages and tool kits that are available compared to Microsoft's handful. Lastly you consider the difference in development methodology. Microsoft provide a limited set of tools to drive the adoption of their core business (the OS) and to tie people into their platform. Linux and OSS developers do it because they want to a lot of the time. The OSS community has spawned a business market and not, as in Microsoft's case, created a community from a business.

Non paid OSS developers will always choose the tools, languages and utilities they want to develop their software and they should have that right. However, ISV's should not feel that they are not catered for. Qt is a great tool kit that provides a level of abstraction that allows developers to create software that is truly platform independent and not only that provides a great IDE and a very detailed documentation package. Mono, love it or not, also provides a large framework that not only provides easy to use tools and documentation but provides an easy move into Linux development for companies that have previously been involved in Microsoft based development.

I don't think that while Linux is as fragmented as it is one company could stand up and provide for developers as Microsoft does. Instead of the LDN providing more comprehensive documentation and guides it should be the companies that provide the languages and frameworks that sit on top of Linux that should do more to push their capabilities and knowledge.

New KDE Focused Podcast.

2010-05-17T14:18:00.002+01:00

This is a link to the new KDE focused podcast, KDE & The Masters Of The Universe.

Guillermo Amaral the host starts off by interviewing the one and only Aaron Seigo and has one question that makes Mr Seigo stop and think!

KDE Global Menu.

2010-05-11T23:20:00.003+01:00

I have just seen this article outlining a new global menu system developed by Aurelien Gateau.

The article does not provide much detail other then it is aimed for Netbooks and will be in the next Kubuntu release. Looks interesting but I was not aware this was something that many people would be interested in.

Visual Studio Styles

2010-05-07T12:44:00.002+01:00

I have just come across this site, studiostyles.info which not only house's loads of Visual Studio styles but it also has a style builder available for you to create your own.

When I get some time I will have a play but I am very happy with my own style at the moment

KDE 4.4.3 "Cuality" Is Out!

2010-05-05T20:18:00.003+01:00

KDE 4.4.3 is out. This is the monthly bugfix and translation release code name "Cuality".

The main highlights this month are :

* Numerous fixes in Konsole, KDE's terminal emulator, among them two possible crashers in session management
* Flash plugin support in KHTML has been enhanced to work with newest Youtube skins
* Case-sensitivity in renaming fixes in KIO, KDE's network-transparent I/O library
* Hiding the mouse cursor in some special cases in presentation mode and two possible crashers have been fixed

The full change log can be read here.

pacman here I come!

Crappy Programmers ... How to find them and then keep them.

2010-04-29T17:12:00.002+01:00

The following two posts really made me laugh, in much the same way that Dilbert does.

How To Find Crappy Programmers

How To Keep Crappy Programmers

KDE Articles.

2010-04-27T23:09:00.002+01:00

Found a couple of nice little KDE related articles covering 2 little mentioned parts of the SC.

How to Use KDE’s Clipboard and Klipper App covers Kipper the advanced system clipboard.

3 KDE Add-ons Worth Trying covers some little known KDE add ons.

Qt Creator Colour Scheme

2010-04-23T22:30:00.001+01:00

I am now using this colour scheme.

If I could be bothered I would sit and set up GVim's desert but I never seem to find time.

Arch Junior Developers

2010-04-23T12:45:00.001+01:00

Just saw this over on the Arch site. The Arch development team are looking for interested people to perhaps join the team as a junior developer.

If you've been using Arch for a while and are looking to give something back it sounds like a great opportunity.

KDE 4 Games Overview.

2010-04-21T23:05:00.001+01:00

This is a nice little overview of the games that can be found within KDE 4.

jQuery Event Handling - Mixing Inline Events With jQuery events

2010-04-21T10:46:00.001+01:00

I have been working with jQuery for the last couple of days attempting to get some dialog closing messages working within our application. One of the dialogs I was trying to work with had an embedded iframe which was loaded from an ASP.Net menu control. The menu control items fired an onclick event to load the iframe.

I created an event handler to attach to the menu items so that when clicked it checked for unsaved changes. If there where changes then display a confirm message box about leaving the page. It worked to a degree but the iframe was still loaded even if the bound jQuery event returned false.

I found the issue to be that mixing inline onclick events and jQuery events is not possible (or recommended), especially if one or more events can be cancelled.

So the solution was simple. I removed the inline onclick event and bound it with jQuery. As the url the iframe needed to load was dynamically created server side I even managed to get a HTML 5 new feature, custom non-visible data, in as well

KDE 4.4 Theme For Google

2010-04-19T09:10:00.005+01:00

Just came across a link to a couple of scripts which can be used to theme the standard Google search page inline with the latest KDE 4.4 SC theme.

You need to run the following two scripts and might need to add a Firefox extension (I tried it in Chrome and it looked great) :

Part 1
Part 2

I should mention that it only really works for standard Google search pages. If you use the iGoogle setup the styling goes a bit "wrong".

Enjoy!

Xp Users With No Sound

2010-04-18T20:52:00.004+01:00

At Christmas just gone I had to rebuild Kermit (my work laptop) as I succumb to my first ever virus. So after the usual cycle of trying to remove it and finding that it was still there, I finally formatted the drive and reinstalled XP (yes, we are still an XP based outfit). It should be noted that I got my first ever virus after being made to use Symentec instead of AVG which I have used on my windows based machines forever (apparently quite successfully).

In the hast of having to rebuild the laptop back to working order ASAP (and we are talking XP, Sp's, Visual Studio and SQL Server plus all of the odds and sods you have installed to do your job) I installed SP3 for XP without installing SP1 or 2 first.

Later on it dawned on me that I had not installed the sound driver. At this point I didn't think I would have any issue, I attempted to install the driver and after the first few failed attempts I started Googling like mad.

Having not really had the time to fix the issue I finally decided to crack it today. Long story short ... I ended up having to uninstall SP3 and then install SP1 and SP2 and finally SP3 for XP. Once I had uninstalled SP3 I installed the sound drivers and everything finally worked. A day of uninstalling and re-installing SPs is a little painful but at least I now have sound.

KDE 4.4 Positive Spin

2010-04-08T13:21:00.003+01:00

This is a nice, short, article on the Linux Journal website about the latest KDE SC release.

It's interesting to see that even now, 2 years down the line people are still bringing up the KDE 4.0 release. Perhaps it's me but I don't (either as a user or developer) feel that KDE 4.0 was labelled a "Complete" or "User ready" release. I feel that distros where far to quick to package it all up and release it to the users. Kubuntu took what I consider to be the correct path by offering both KDE 3.5 and 4.0 in their next available release. I have been reading some articles recently stating that they may do the same with GNOME 3.0. The approach they took allowed those users who wanted to try the new desktop to do so while vanilla users could carry on with 3.5 until they opted to upgrade.

I do agree that with the author in the article above that we really need to push the message to users that may have left KDE since the 4.0 release. KDE 4.4 is a GREAT release which many 3.5 users, I think, will find not only usable but a great step forward.

Visual Studio Fun & Games

2010-04-07T11:35:00.004+01:00

Further to my previous post I have found the following issues.

Settings - Once you have got your Visual Studio instal back to how you want it with SP1 you will have lost all of your settings. I recommend you Export them prior to altering your install

Add-ins - You will probably find most of your add-ins do not work as expected. I found it easiest to uninstall all of them and re-install them.

So much pain for something so simple.

Updating An Existing Visual Studio Installation.

2010-04-07T10:17:00.003+01:00

When I installed my current install of Visual Studio 2008 I only installed C# and VC++ as I never have a need for VB.Net and we (as in the company never use it).

That is until one of our developer's created a new tool which had a reliance on it. No problem... in goes the Visual Studio 2008 disk and we'll add it. Only it isn't that simple. Although Visual Studio run itself in to maintenance mode it would not allow VB.Net to install. It came up with the following error :

A selected drive is no longer valid. Please review your installation path settings before continuing with setup.

After a little googling I found that you need to install Visual Studio SP1 before amending your installation. So you need to uninstal SP 1, add or remove the required components and then reinstall SP 1.

Seems a little like too much hard work for a software amendment to me.

Visual Studio 2008 Free Spell Checker

2010-04-01T16:39:00.004+01:00

Ever since I have moved into developing web applications I have always tried to have a spell checker installed to check page text and comments/strings etc.

ComponentOne used to provide a nice free version which did the trick but since I had to rebuild kermit (my main work laptop) I found that they have started charging for it. So I started to have a quick look for a good free spell checker and I have settled on
ASP.NET/HTML Spell Checker for VS 2008.

It works based on Word dictionary integration and allows for custom words and exceptions and so does everything I need. Further details on where to grab it and how it works can be found here.

KDE Approach Kim Kardashian To Promote The Next SC

2010-04-01T11:16:00.002+01:00

Kim Kardashian has been approached to help market the next release of the KDE SC. This is great news and just what the project needs to lift it's profile.

Oh Look ... SCO Where Wrong ... Now There Is A Surprise!

2010-03-31T11:56:00.004+01:00

This is a link to the news that Novell have, once again, been confirmed as owners of the Unix copyrights. Therefore, the cheap and plain wrong accusations made by SCO regarding Linux and code contained within the kernel have been proved to be as valid as a glass hammer.

So anyone want to buy SCO for $1??

KDE SC 4.4.2, "Colibri", Released.

2010-03-30T22:15:00.008+01:00

Today the KDE community released the second maintenance release of the 4.4 series.

The full release note can be read here and the change log can be read here.

New IDE UI

2010-03-10T21:49:00.001Z

This is a link to a project that has been looking at designing a better IDE. The video is well worth a look.

Almost makes me want to work in Java!

KDE 4.4.1 Released

2010-03-03T22:12:00.002Z

Doesn't time fly when your having fun ...

The KDE project has now released the first in the monthly updates to the 4.4 release.

Codenamed "Clara", the 4.4.1 release notes can be found here.

pacman -Syu to happiness.

Vi Bindings For Chrome!

2010-02-27T22:37:00.001Z

These are Vi bindings for Chrome.

Arch KDE SC 4.4 Upgrade For KDevelop Users

2010-02-11T22:30:00.002Z

Further to other fun and games with the Arch KDE SC 4.4 upgrade I hit upon a problem tonight with a virtual box I use that has the following repository in the /etc/pacman.conf file :

[dstr-repo]
Server = http://dimon.homeftp.org/repo/i686

This is the repository that I use at present for KDevelop4. It seems there was a clash with certain files.

In order to get KDE SC 4.4 to upgrade I found I had to resort to pacman -Syuf which got it working.

Arch Upgrade To KDE SC 4.4

2010-02-10T22:51:00.003Z

So the hero's over at the Arch website had already flagged the fact that the upgrade to KDE SC 4.4 was not going to be a simple pacman -Syu. In fact I found I had to jump through a couple more hopes than those listed in their post (above) and so thought I would share how I got to -Syu to KDE SC 4.4.

The following commands should be run as root (or sudo if you have it installed):

$ pacman -Sy --asdeps qt
$ pacman -Su
$ pacman -Sy kdepim-runtime
$ pacman -Sy kdepimlibs
$ pacman -Syu

That got my upgrade underway. Hopefully this might help others. If you are still stuck let me know the errors you are experiencing and I will try and provide some help.

KDE 4.4 Is Released!

2010-02-10T12:05:00.003Z

KDE Software Compilation 4.4 has been released.

Codenamed "Caikaku" you can read the official release notification here.

There is also a Visual Guide. which covers this software compilation further.

Not only another great release by everyone involved in the KDE community but also a shiny new web site just in time for release of 4.4 which looks great.

For further info you can check out the following KDE related places on the internet :

Youtube

blip.tv

buzz.kde.org

flickr

Update/Install and enjoy.

Google Drops Old Browsers

2010-02-01T13:31:00.003Z

This is a link to a post from Google announcing that they are dropping support for older browsers.

This is a very bold but brilliant move which hopefully will cause other leading web sites/applications to follow.

Linux Kernel - Who Is Developing The Kernel

2010-01-21T08:10:00.002Z

Interesting little article here summarising another story about the breakdown in % of who develops the Linux Kernel:

18% code contributed by volunteers with no corporate affiliation
7% unclassified contributors (I’m not sure who this would be?)
75% from paid developers

Red Hat with 12%,
Intel with 8%
IBM and Novell with 6% each
Oracle 3%

I read the figures that large serious development house's want Linux to succeed in all areas of IT and that they are willing to put in serious effort to develop it.

New Blackberry (And Ms Stobs Rated Software!)

2010-01-20T21:34:00.004Z

Life has been mad since the beginning of December. The end of the year is always busy at work as 3 high profile clients all undertake major work.

I have finally brought a new bike, a Suzuki Marauder no less, and now have had to buy a new phone. Being tight and being that it was on offer I brought a Blackberry Pearl 8120. Apart from the camera it is by far the best phone I have owned for a while. I will post more about it when I get time.

However, I did notice the latest brilliant post by Verity Stobs on rated software for your smart phone!

FOSS Documentation.

2009-12-04T08:28:00.003Z

I have just read this article on documentation or rather the lack of it in the Linux and FOSS communities.

To be honest I am currently about two weeks behind in my feed reading so have missed most of the comments and articles that seem to have been written on this. However, this is an area of Free Software where I think a lot can be done.

I have to say that in the 7 years I have been using Linux it's only really since I moved to Arch that I have appreciated having a good source or help and documentation. In my early days of using Linux I found the quality of help was very hit and miss. Some forums (i.e. LinuxQuestions.org) where brilliant and people would really try and help and point me in the right direction. Others leave one line comments which may make sense when you know the answer but which do nothing for those who know nothing. There is some documentation for some applications but it's usually out of date and non complete.

At the end of the day this problem is not FOSS specific. Having been a developer for nearly 10 years I have to say that it is incredibly rare for documentation to be written. The application I currently work on is a highly configurable web application with one source tree and each client having it's own configuration. We are two years into this application and have only a couple of documents covering a couple of points of the system. I am currently fighting to get them to at least add c# xml documentation comments so I can try and build some documentation using Doxygen. In previous applications I have been paid to work on we have not had any documentation written and I have fought the same battle. So this is obviously a problem that is to do with coders who seem to think that a good coder will get how it works by reading the code and users will just get it because it is obvious. However, not all users find all applications obvious.

In personal applications I have written that other people will use I have included at least a simple HTML page with a description of each menu and tool bar action and with lots of screen dumps. It works. I don't get any questions.... bug reports? yes! Errors? Oh yeah....! Questions about how to use it ... rarely.

This is an area where Linux and FOSS could take the lead. If we could start to build good quality documentation which meant my mum could install Linux and get up and running with little hassle more people would start using it. Windows applications have a standard help format and I think Linux could do with the same. My mum does not want to read man pages. Why would she? Big colourful html help files with lots of screen shots, kept up to date. Would that really be hard to do?

However, a major point that should be remembered is that, as with coders, people who contribute to FOSS do so in their own time and for little or no reward. Perhaps it is time that some of the big Linux vendors (Oracle, IBM, SuSe) ramp up the documentation effort.

KDE 4.3.4 "Cold" Is Out

2009-12-01T22:20:00.003Z

KDE are pleased to announced the release of the 4 maintenance release to the KDE 4.3 release, codenamed "Cold".

KDE 4.4 Review On Polishlinux.org

2009-12-01T21:58:00.006Z

This is the latest review of the next upcoming version of KDE from the guys over at Polishlinux.org. I have seen one of these balanced and fair reviews for each of the KDE 4 based releases.

As usual it covers the main changes in the up coming release.

My favourite so far is tabs within windows.

Google Chrome OS On A USB Key

2009-12-01T13:02:00.001Z

An article on gettin Google Chrome OS to run from a USB key.

Microsoft Geeks On How To Code...

2009-11-30T11:20:00.003Z

This is a very interesting article on the views of some of Microsoft's top developers on coding and the tools they use.

For me it has come at an interesting time as only last week my CTO was arguing the use of SQL diagrams over SQL code to get SQL Server development work done quicker. Most of us here prefer to hand code SQL as we're developers whereas he is more of a mathematical/logic type of user and prefers to see the code in diagrams.

Personally I am a keyboard and Editor type of developer. I need Vim and ViEmu for Visual Studio/SQL server and I am happy on Windows and on Linux I tend to use Konsole/Vim/GDB and now more and more Qt Creator. I prefer not to use graphical tools for anything over than UI design.

I'd be interested to find out what other people use and why?

KDE 4.4 Interview

2009-11-17T21:39:00.003Z

This is a great interview detailing whats coming up in KDE 4.4 which comes out in January.

Here are some nice shinny pictures.

Chromium Browser on Arch

2009-11-04T22:52:00.003Z

So new series of Spooks tonight (excellent viewing) and as I was just catching up on my feeds I noticed a thread on Google Chromium on Linux and it's speed.

Being a bit of a browser junkie I thought "I have never run it on Linux, why? It's my default windows browser". So a quick...

AurGet chromium-browser-bin

(AurGet being an excellent AUR grabbing script which I think I found on Arch Wiki)

... And I was watching a really smart installer whizzing along.

Five minutes later and I was sitting playing with Chromium. This is the open source version that Google released based on the initial Chrome browser.

My god it is fast!! As usual I set it up with Keyboardr.com and it flies. It is so fast I keep retrying things because I can't believe what I am seeing. The two things which I find I don't like is the GTK++ toolkit. I know, I know..... there is nothing wrong with it, it is just personal taste (and being a KDE only kinda guy!). The second is that I am at present unable to disable path searching. Whenever I type an address it wants to use the default search engine. I have only been playing for a 30 mins or so.

KDE 4.3.3 Is Out!

2009-11-04T19:48:00.002Z

The latest version of KDE (version 4.3.3) is out.

This is the third monthly release in the 4.3 series and is a bug fix and translation release.

Code named "Clockwork" the release announcement can be found here and the changelog can be found here.

Facebook and Twitter Costing The Uk Economy Billions

2009-10-26T20:00:00.004Z

According to this article Morse IT has commissioned a survey to find out how much time people spend on-line on sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

Apparently the cost to the UK economy is £1.38bn!!

Why?

Has to be the first question. Perhaps it is me but I tried Twitter and it was rubbish. I was getting "followed" by half the eastern blocks porn stars spamming me with tiny-url.com postings leading to their sites and people who really need to get out more if they want to follow whats going on in my life more than once a day. The only decent use I got was following KDE and other open source developers updates on code and projects. However, they all now use the rather much better identi ca open source stack based alternative to Twitter. So if you do want to follow me thats where to find me!

As far as Facebook goes all I get are friend invites from someone I once worked with or went to school with who would not speak to me in the flesh but wants to boost their Friend Count or stupid games dreamt up by teenage programmers thinking they are "cool". I do however, have a soft spot for Myspace and keep a relatively up to date page there for my second love of music.

The next question is why are more IT departments not locking down these sites. In my current role we do not but then if anyone at my present company spent that long on non work related items it would be noticed as we are so small. Now I know people will say "but if you lock it down then people will use their mobile devices .... " and your right they will.... but it will be at their cost and not their employers. It might also make it harder when they have to use their mobile as it would become more obvious as to what they are doing.

Vim-fugative

2009-10-25T20:09:00.001Z

Git-hub link for a Gvim/Vim script to enable good git support.

Personal Productivity

2009-10-25T20:05:00.002Z

This is a (slighty light hearted) guide to improving your productivity. This is an area that I feel I could perhaps improve as I have me hands in many areas these days. I do have a remember the milk account but find it hard to use (not the software which is great just me remembering to actually use it!!)

From this article I love the idea of writing a card for the next day with 3 to 5 things on it and then doing them.

Linus Giving Windows 7 The Thumbs Up....

2009-10-24T13:22:00.007+01:00

Perhaps Kernel development will move to Windows 7.... hmm.... then again!

Creating a readonly Checkbox control

2009-10-22T13:26:00.003+01:00

I had to make an ASP.Net checkbox readonly today and found that adding the following :

w.AddAttribute("onClick", string.Format("javascript:{0}.checked = {1};", this.ID, this.Checked.ToString().ToLower()));

to the overridden Render() method of a control that inherits a standard Checkbox control did the trick. The call must be place before the call to the parent classes Render() method.

Amarok Issues.

2009-10-19T21:45:00.002+01:00

For a while I have been having a strange problem with Amarok. You could set up a playlist, let it play the first song and then wait upto five minutes before it moved to the next track.

Anyway, enough was enough tonight, (a guy needs Dave Grohl to run to!) I found this helpful little post on the Arch forums. Basically it is a known problem and if you switch to xine as your backend for phonon your good to go.

KDE 4.3.2

2009-10-07T11:28:00.002+01:00

Here is the latest release announcement for KDE 4.3. 4.3.2 is a maintenance release with fixes for core libraries, KMail and KWin amongst others.

Arora 0.10.1

2009-10-06T23:09:00.001+01:00

Already a major bug fix is out for Arora 0.10.

Grab the sources here

Chakra Alpha 3 Is Out

2009-10-05T21:46:00.001+01:00

This is a link for the latest Chakra alpha release. This release has been brewing for sometime and appears to contain a large number of fixes and improvements.

Chakra is a live cd based on Arch and KDE (from the team that package KDE-Mod).

Help the team out and give it a whirl.

Arora 0.10

2009-10-01T21:17:00.002+01:00

Just pacman -Syu my laptop to find a shinny new version of Arora waiting for me.

Arora is a Qt based Webkit browser which has now become my browser of choice on Windows (with keyboardr as the home page it just flys). This means that for now Google Chrome has been relegated to my second choice browser (since the v3 release anyway.... maybe it's me but it seems very buggy).

On Linux Arora and Firefox are fighting for my attention. Although I think for now at least I will use Arora for research and development work and Firefox for entertainment, rss and social.

GIMP 2.8 Features

2009-09-25T22:39:00.002+01:00

This post over at Gimpusers.com outlines some of the interesting things coming up in the 2.8 release.

Single window......praise be!!

Microsoft Developing Silverlight For Linux.

2009-09-24T08:28:00.002+01:00

In a story that might add to the recent (and in my view unrequired) arguments within the Linux community over the inclusion/use of Mono based software and development tools, it would seem that Microsoft are now porting Silverlight (thier Flash alternative) to Linux.

The full details of the story can be read at the link above but Microsoft are basically working with Intel to port Silverlight to the Moblin platform (Intels netbook desktop/distro).

All of this seems fine until you take a step back and think "Why did they not use Moonlight, the native Linux port developed by the Mono guys"?

Hmmm..... is this the start of what everyone expected? Perhaps not but it's still a worrying sign.

London Stock Exchange Migration.

2009-09-20T20:36:00.002+01:00

This article from Computerworld covers further developments from the LSE on the migration from a .Net based platform to a Linux/Unix/Oracle based system.

Apparently they liked it so much they brought the company. The full details are in the article,

Verity Stob - Abigail's Windows 7 Party

2009-09-20T20:27:00.002+01:00

After what has been a very long week in one way or another (both at work and at home) Vertiy's latest aritcle had me in stiches.

I guess that could be another sign that I am slip sliding my way to middle age but I did and still do find Abigails party an excellent play. The fact that the rather excellent Verity has made it a basis for her Windows 7 Launch Party piece was perfect.

Can for the life of me imagine where Microsoft got the idea for a launch party drive from!

A Sensible Linux Bot Opinion

2009-09-15T08:00:00.001+01:00

After lots of typical IT reporting this is a sensible opinion on the Linux Bot story.

RIP VSJ (Printed Version)

2009-09-12T20:12:00.002+01:00

After a number of years (about 8 I think !) VSJ has anouched its last printed version.

It's a shame as it was in my opinion a well written Journal. I will miss it dropping through the door.

Microsoft Still Like To Spread FUD!

2009-09-09T10:02:00.002+01:00

I just read this article in which Microsoft's training material for a PC selling chain's staff state that Linux apparently limits a PC's

The full details appear to have been posted here.

I find this at first amusing (as the stuff that they state does not work, well, does!) but then I start to get annoyed that they are still trying to convince people using FUD rather than dragging their dated, fat, slow and technically inferior product up to date.

NDesk.Options C# Command Args Parser.

2009-09-02T23:10:00.002+01:00

I have a small application that I am working on that can receive args passed it's Main() method. While looking for some nicer code than I could conjurer up I found NDesk Options a C# based parser written by Jonathan Pryor which makes parsing args a very easy task.

It has a Git repository which I cloned which includes documentation. It seems a simple but powerful solution to a boring problem.

Howto open a Visual Studio file from an application into a running Visual Studio instance.

2009-09-01T08:12:00.003+01:00

I have a little utility application that I have been working on for some time which is used to edit our applications .config files (note these are essentially the <appSettings> section from our web.config wrapped into client specific files). For a while I was struggling to solve what I thought was a simple issue. That was that I wanted to set the application as the default tool to open the .config files with within Visual Studio (right click on a file and Open With, this will let you set a tool to open the file with and even set it as the default).

The problem started when I next went to open the default web.config and it obviously tried to load it via my application (which does not handle the default web.config).

I amended the Main() method of my application to check for the file name (crude but it works) and only continue loading the file passed via the command line arguments if it matched a set patten. That worked..... kind of!!

The trouble was when ever the application came across a file it did not want to handle it would, as designed, open the file in Visual Studio. However, rather than in the running instance of Visual Studio it always opened a new instance of the application.

After much digging about and Spy'ing I discovered that you have to pass the /EDIT parameter to DEVENV to have the file open in a running instance. So DEVENV /EDIT $FileName is the pattern.