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April 21 I've found Live Writer
Hey Hey, I installed Live writer ages ago via windows update and never could understand where it went to. I was recently told it's actually part of the Live Toolbar and now I've found it. I wonder why nothing told me where it was...maybe I didn't read something but for somebody who doesn't normally use the toolbar then I would never have found it although it did sound quite useful. Either way I've found it now so I can start rambling(blogging) again. June 25 www.SnapMonthly.comCannot remember if I ever announced this here. But my new photo website is up and running at:
It's a monthly photo competition website where you can submit pictures and comment on other peoples images. All for fun but it will hopefully keep pushing me to take better pictures with my new camera.
Please take a look and let me know how it could be improved.
November 21 Vista JoyWork
I'm not going to ramble on about my current pain points with running the final release of Windows Vista as my main PC as you have to take the rough with the smooth when you adopt so early and there are plenty of plus points also. Instead Im going to shout about the fact that we have managed to get our application certified in the Vista logo certification scheme. there are two Logo's you can use and we went for the Certified certification, http://microsoft.mrmpslc.com/InnovateOnWindowsVista/. More impressive is that we are one of the first 15 Independant software vendors to do this and the first client server application to get certified. Not bad for a little shop in Towcester.
Rest
I'm chilling out now trying to decide if I want to make any changes to my latest little web site. www.snapmonthly.com is a website where members can upload pictures for others to comment on them and each month there are a couple of categories to upload in. I bought myself a digital SLR camera so this is keeping me looking for photo opportunities.
Play
Looks like it might be the end of our 5 a side football games on a tuesday. I was half expecting it but it's a shame as I really enjoyed it. One positive is though it's forcing me to use my gym membership so it's not all bad. January 04 Hello 2006New year same old s~@T . Well no actually things are on the up. We did up our lounge and now it's actually a pleasure to sit in there now. The finishing touch was a new TV. I managed to get rid of the monster 47In Rear projection unit that actually made you feel like you were in there with whatever was on TV. This was cool watching the latest Pussycat Dolls video but not so good when watching Eastenders, I like to keep that joyfull lot at arms length. Anyhow I splashed out and got a Hitachi 42in Plasma. The smaller screen and thinner profile match the room much better and I've found it very hard to pull myself away from the front of it all over Xmas "Yes dear just one more hour".
The not so good news was that less than a week later they had reduced the thing by £200. Let's say I was slightly less than happy about this. I had managed to negotiate a £100 off the price at the time but I was still a bit miffed. Anyway as soon as the new year came I was down there (Comet) and quoting their price promise at them and I am pleased to report that I managed to negotiate another £130 refund (No quibble). Not quite an xbox 360 but it all helps. Well done to Comet for honouring their price promise just a pity they couldn't reduce it when I bought it.
On the subject of Hitachi a friend of mine who's into storage and all things hard, floppy and optical sent me a link. Apparently hitachi have developed a new way of storing data and have a nice animation on their web site to explain it all.
Had a quiet new year in comparison with previous years but it was still nice, a few friends and we ordered a chinease meal from a new delivery firm and it was very nice.
New years resolutions? well keep it simple, loose a stone in weight and preferably before 16th of Jan as we are going snowboarding in Meribel and i'd rather put less pressure on my old knees.
Dan from work came around one day over Xmas, xbox 360 in his pocket, we played PGR3 and had a look at some other games and i must report that it does indead look pretty cool. Although I must admit that my new tv has given my old xbox a new lease of life we had good fun playing EA's rugby and Fifa football over the break.
Work feels a bit hectic already as I'm writing custom Windows installer actions to deploy Code access security and installer prerequisiste checks for specific runtimes and libraries so that we can deploy the VSTO application that I worked on last year. All the while we are testing some exchange server/outlook appointment code that I origionally did over a year ago but there has suddely become an demand for this functionality. This is in addition to trying to get some traction with another major project and various beta schemes we have signed up with Microsoft. I get the feeling it's going to be a busy time.
Add to this I think I'm going to attempt to replicate the Formula 1 Dream team site me and a friend run by doing it with ASP 2.0 instead of the current PHP scripting and this should allow us to easily add the extra funtionality we need to make it a bit more interesting. I cannot make any promises about this as time is quickly running out and I do have a war to win (Call of Duty 2 on my PC) which reminds me. "C'mon lads get the bloody w.............. " November 23 iPod VideoI nearly forgot.....had a chance to see these new iPod video thingys today. Danny & Mike at work have both got them. The screen is larger than the previous iPod but the device is slimmer. One bit prob tho is that they have removed the little multimedia connection that you can use for the FM trasmitters etc etc.
Why have they done this is anyones guess. So what is the picture like? Remaredly good actually. Its not jerky and you can covert existing video files although I think it's another bit of software that you have to buy.
Danny had downloaded the Thiller video and converted some Family Guy episodes. Mike on the other had had a far more interesting Vid.
Rachel Stevens video mmmmm rewind play...pause..play...rewind.....pause..... Now I know why these things were designed for one handed operation....pause..... low battery warning.....play...play....play A blog about nothingWell Liverpool are not exactly setting the world alight. I've got bored watching it now so I'll have a liddle blogette instead.
As we brace ourselves for a blizzard (a light dusting in these parts) I look forward to the journey home taking 3 hours tomorrow as everybody drives at 5mph no doubt due to the snow blindness.
Must get to landRover tomorrow as I've ordered some more bolt on bits for our Disco. I've also just found out I've just won an auction on ebay for an origional sales manul for our car, why do I want that you may ask..well I don't really know...I suppose I'm just a bit sad.
Work is a bit mad at the moment really getting stuck into the wonderful world of web services the talkin's over gotta get our hands dirty now and get stuck into producing something. Been looking into the new WSE3 stuff from Microsoft and I've still not got my head around the best model to use for security bearing in mind we are going to have public web sites and services as well as private ones. The only posistive is that I thinkw ecan worry out it later as we can apply the WSE3.0 stuff at a later date....who needs security anyway nobodys going to attack our web site are they!!! the world is full of nice people.
Final whisltle's just gone Liverpool through to the next phase of the Champions league zzzzzzzzzzzz wake me up when the game starts.
November 21 PSE & WSEWell… I think I’ve recovered. Went to Twickenham to watch England Vs the All Blacks on Saturday and it’s amazing how watching a rugby game can make your legs go all wobbly and blur your vision….for two days!!! Thanks to Craig for getting the tickets and we were doubly privileged to be in the company of Ben Cohen’s jeans (Craig has some of his cast off's). If there is a down side to the whole thing it’s that I missed a 4-0 victory for Northampton Town Vs Bristol Rovers. Bet they don’t repeat that again this season although apparently the result flattered them.
Met with a couple of chaps from Microsoft today at work for an architecture discussion and it was quite refreshing. Firstly the architecture we were thinking of for our new project they pretty much agreed with and explained that the new Web service enhancements WSE3 is the mechanism we should be looking towards for our inter application communication.
I feel quite excited moving forward towards this as I always felt we needed a web service based model but was unsure how effective it would be and how we could use it to pass documents around in a secure manner. I think we’ve now found the answer just need to get down and do it. November 17 Bit like busses these bloggs...Was at a firework party last saturday and somebody grassed me up. How do I know? well I had this chap drift over in my direction and utter those immortal words, " So your a computer expert then?". Computer expert hmmm I'm sure if you ask the people I work with they would have an answer for that. I suddenly had a thought, maybe a genuine question is about to emerge, maybe he just wants to ask me about the new generic types in C#, or do I prefer using interfaces or abstract classes. "Err well I know a bit whats the problem?" managed to escape my lips, I don't know how it sneaked out, if I'd been thinking straight I could have said "yes I am, I've got an xbox and I've just completed level 71 of poke the ferrett" but I didn't think on my feet, as usual, and the drawbridge was open so let me have it....."I've got this digital camera and it's suddeenly stopped transferring pictures" shot 1 "OK how old is it?" "I've had it about 4 years" Alarm bells starting to sound over in the distance. "and how do you connect it to your PC?" "via the USB port was the response". Now I'm going to play the Ace card. "Oh you've got Windows 98 then havn't you...yeah the USB support is a bit flaky, re-install your camera software" An educated guess based on the age of the camera and bullseye!! "Oh, You really wanna upgrade to XP everything becomes a lot easier". I should be on commision from microsoft for the number of times I've said to people "Get XP". Win 98 unsupported, well it is by me and don't even start me on ME.
Back to what I was doing now. You can stop reading now this bit is dull.
Getting ready to reinstall Team Foundation server and I was just attaching my databases again and one of them is telling me it has a full text catalog [ STS_ServerName_1 ] and do I want to browse to locate it. Now that I find odd as I thought the full text catalogs were now contained within the main database and not seperate any more in SQL 2005. Obviously I wasn't listening properly at that point. November 16 Full Moon tonightI feel a bad moon arising
I feel there's trouble everywhere
Have you seen the moon tonight? with the frost on the ground it's almost daylight out there.
I've just watched Batman begins. Great film slow start and builds up, good feel to it dark and gothic but not too dark that you can't see what's happening. In fact it was that good that I stayed awake through it. that's some endorsement. I hope they do some more.
Do you like my music applet. I've chosen the Killers as this song was played a few times at the professional Developers Conference before keynote sessions as the background music while they blasted us with Windows Vista screenshots. I probably get lynched by the copy protection brigade so I'll have to look into recording my own song.
Just installed the release version of SQL server 2005 on my server VPC (@ the second attempt number 1 failed on reporting services). I'm gonna put the beta3 refresh of foundation server on now... or perhaps I should go to bed. I am a little scared though on nights like this....don't go on the Moors....stay on the road.
Don't go out tonight
there's bound to be a fight
there's a bad moon on the rise November 15 You get what you pay forPoor old Coral (my daughter) I told her 6 months ago that if she got 3 weeks of 10/10 with her spellings I'd get her a new computer. Well she finally did it and 2 weeks ago a computer arrived. Monday last week it was on it's way back as it would not stay switched on , instead choosing to switch itself off at random intervals requiring I yank the power cable out of the back before switching back on.
An apparently quick turnaround ensued only for Amtrak to be unable to locate our office and it finally arrived today a week and a half after it was returned, Tuesday.
So I switch it on and No hard drive???? WTF It had to be done, so I cracked the case open and there it was and there was the end of the SATA cable not attached where it should be. The cable was so flimsy that it just falls off so I replaced with a spare I have lying around.
Power back up and TADA we have Windows. I then try and install some software and again it switches off grrrrrr.. I'm going to try and avoid sending it back again at £20 a go only for them to fnd nothing wrong. It's currently running a load of benchmarking software on a loop so I'll see how it gets on. If I remember all the switch offs have been when the CD is running I think the vibrations of the drive are shaking a connection loose somewhere.
I nearly bought another Dell system but by the time I had spammed it up to level that would give it some longevity it was getting to be silly money (double what I paid for this box of bits n bobs).
So far my experience has been:
No UK plug on Monitor cable.
Computer that keeps switching off.
Sent back and get them to change the case to one similar to what I origionally ordered.
Wait extra 4 days while it doesn't arrive thanks to agency driver at Amtrak.
Fire up replacement to find no hard drive.
Fix problem myself and replace dodgy SATA cable.
2 of the 4 screws on the case have stripped threads 2 are missing altogether.
Case is also scratched/dented down one edge.
Other than that there is nothing wrong. The guys at Charisma Information Systems have been very helpful just a pity they don't put the same care into building their systems.
October 31 Surfing TAFWell back to work today after a week in Wales doing a bit of surfing.
It was way cool, I was stoked. I hired a stick and threw a slash right in the impact zone. Got mullered by a heavy wave and got well 'locked in'. It was tres cool and by the end of the week I was doing laybacks in the soup and I took my foamie back to the shop to get a more extreme plank only to get worked as the rip increased and I pulled a perl and went over the falls.
All good stuff even the grommets enjoyed it. October 18 The Highs and Lows of a new PCI've started using a new workstation at work. Not sure what spec it is I think it's actually powered by the fusion of minute particles of matter and anti matter. By exposing matter to anti matter extreme power is generated and thats probably why my legs are getting warm under the desk where the case lives. If you are wondering where the hell that statement came from, I've been reading Angels and Demons by Dan Brown.
It takes a while to get used to the new speed and I am convinced it's that fast that it is doing things before I actually click on them. Take today for example I got some spam email that I wasn't at all interested in and in it was a link to pictures of Rachel Stevens in the nude. Before I knew what was happening it was launching the web site and I am sure I hadn't even clicked on it. I studied the site for about half an hour and I couldn't work out how it had happened. It fact I could work out much at all after that.
Then of course I get home back on my trusty machine and it's so slow in comparison that I actually took the sides of the case off to check if the hamster had died in it's wheel. After the clouds of dust had settled I decided it all looked ok, wound it up a few more turns and continued to use it. Of course it's not helping that I've now got Visual Studio 2005 on my machine which has more features and makes it easier to do most tasks which is a good job really because now it's taking the computer twice as long to do the same thing that it used to in the 2003 version.
Well it's gone midnight again and I am going to the gym tomorrow even if it kills me, actually I shouldn't joke about that really the way my body is feeling at the moment. October 16 My WeekendWell here is a summary of my weekend....
Sold a car - bought a watch
Ate too much - drank too little
Finished Half life 2 - Started Halo (pc version)
Now I'm going to do something constructive and put Visual Studio 2005 on my machine at home. Did I say constructive, with my poor old PC that could be considered destructive, Hey but Xmas is coming and I have been writing letters to Santa regarding that new Alienware PC. I do believe I do I do I do.... October 12 Windows Media Player - the return of the Info ViewWell a hack to make it return at least.
Just having a bit of a clear out on my main PC at home and it suddenly occurred to me that I must be some sort of nerdy squirrel. I don’t collect nuts though, no I collect software, I bury it away on my computer just in case one day I may need it. Well winters coming again, I’m seriously analysing if I need a new computer or not and I thought maybe if I have a bit of a clear out I can hang the inevitable upgrade out a bit longer, or at least until Windows Vista is released. So what have here? Various video/media decoders Xvid, Divx, Windows Media , Real player!!!! yes you heard right the Real Player virus made it onto my machine, but hang on a minute haven’t they just been given hundreds of millions of Dollars from Microsoft and about to get into bed with them by bloating the already bulging MSN with more….more….words escape me to describe what they are going to bloat it with. This got me started on the subject, I do love MSN Messenger and Spaces but since they broke Windows Media Player from version 10 onwards I have fallen out with the sight of the MSN logo. Now I know I’ve lost you…let me explain. In Media player ver 9 if I was playing some music I could select Info Centre View and it would display information about the song I was playing. I could then drill down and read about the band or other records they have done. Now since the version 10 upgrade instead of the excellent info centre it’s replaced with a MSN music shopping page trying to flog me "similar" music. This wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the fact that often the music is often unrelated and they have the cheek to still call it Info Centre view. It’s about as informative as your average FHM magazine article. Ok lets put a Smashing Pumpkins track on, for no other reason than to prove a point. Top tracks, Coldplay Gwen Stafani, Bruce Springsteen well if that’s the top recommendations lets see the others, Eminem????? Detinys Child sorry I just don’t see the link. I did have a hack that worked for a while but it eventually stopped working. Well this is how bored I was tonight. I’ve re worked the hack and I’ll show you how to get Media information back. Lets first see what I don’t like.
This is now displaying the ghastly MSN store or whatever music store you currently have configured. Follow these instructions, no matter how bizarre, to get the real info centre view.
Having information like this is one of the reason I love the Internet and connected smart client applications. It’s just a shame when money grabbing antics spoil it, If I want to shop I’ll choose when I want to do it thank you… October 11 Team Foundation Server UpdateWell It all went pear shaped again. 3 server rebuilds and we still could not create projects. I've been on the forums on the Microsoft site and somebody posted some usefull information regarding checks I could perform. I tried their suggestions on my VPC and I could actually create Team Projects. So using this information I think we are going to have another try tomorrow on the server proper.
If I ever get this cracked I'm going to write a step by step guide. The sort of thing I wish I could get my hands on now. October 09 Team Foundation - Here we go againJust downloading sharepoint with SP1 so time for a quick little bloggette. I don't have a lot of hair left so I refuse to tear any more out. After failing to be able to create projects on the Foundation server and messing with the security settings so much that the server was pretty shafted I've stripped everything off to start again. I’ve stripped everything off with the exception of SQL server. I may have to evaluate if reporting services needs re-installing. Hope not because the disk isn't in the server. I thought I was quite competent at this type of thing but experiences like this make you question your own ability to follow simple instructions. I followed the Team Foundation installation to the letter, or so that's what I thought. It just happened that when I downloaded Sharepoint services the version with SP2 included had just been released. Well that's, I believe, where I shafted myself. I have then noticed the following blog
http://blogs.msdn.com/robcaron/archive/2005/10/07/478336.aspx relating to differences with SP2 version of Sharepoint. Here is another article regarding the changes with SP2 http://support.microsoft.com/?id=832769 I'm not going to try and tweek with SP2 but I'm downloading the SP1 version Watch this space to see how I get on and bring some tissues to wipe my tears. Now you see me now you don'tWe've just had privacy glass fitted to our Disco. My friend Timbo struck a deal with a company over Peterborough to have both our cars done. Totally pointless but it looks good. Within an hour of having it done Coral had opened the window, luckily that didn't damage it as you are not supposed to do it for a couple of days, and the dog has scratched it a little, (what do you do with the pair of them) Had the car checked over the other day at a Land Rover specialist garage and they give it the OK so that cheered me up a bit, I still think it's pulling to the left a bit though but I may try switching the tyres to see if that makes a difference. Overall I'm pretty pleased with it just paranoid that all the electonic toys inside may pack up. October 03 And then he was goneWARNING: Don't read this if you are feeling a bit sensitive.
Saturday morning we awoke to the sounds of our son calling that the kitten was stuck. Suzanne has been had rearing some kittens and on this morning one of them had managed to get itself trapped under one of the chairs. To make matters worse the chair had somehow trapped it and squeezed all the life out of it. It still brings a chill to me now and it makes you wonder that sometimes in life some people/animals are just lucky. We had 3 kittens in the house and this one was the runt of the litter. Half the size of the others it had already gone through a period of loosing all it's fur. there is no doubt that in the wild it probably would not have survived and only the intervention of humans had kept it alive. Suzanne will often rear baby animals and I always try and distance myself because I don't like getting attached to them just in case something happens to them. With these pesky kittens I had just started coming around to them and that made it all the more sadder. If there are any positives to take out of something as grim as this then it's given the children the experience of loss without it affecting them in any long term way. My daughter Coral(7) carried it around for a while afterwards and I think she was convinced it would just wake up and you felt that she just wasn't understanding what had happened. If there is a kitty heavan then I'm sure scraggy will be having a whale of a time. I will help myself to another splash of 15yr old Malt and say here's to you scraggy, you weren't with us very long but in that short time you touched all our hearts. Team Foundation Client InfoAnother change to Team Foundation server since Beta 2. If you want to hook up your Visual Studio IDE to a Team Foundation Server now you have to install the extra Client stub that is located on the Server disk.
This is a change from Beta 2 where the client bits were installed as part of the Visual Studio Installation. What is slightly confusing is that the Visual Studio disk is actually called Team Suite but in fact offers no server connectivity. I have been assured that it's OK to install the beta 3 foundation client on the same machine as Release Candidate Visual Studio.
Tomorrw we shall see..watch this space. September 30 Team Foundation Server extra security configWell that was lucky. I was just about to create a new project in the team Foundation server and I noticed this blog posting. http://blogs.msdn.com/ejarvi/archive/2005/09/27/474483.aspx
As he says he cannot comment if this will still be the case when the product ships proper but I'm glad I saw it as it warns that even if you are a member of the administrators group on foundation server because a project has to create a sharepoint site and a reporting services site it will error when trying to create a new project.
Here goes then. What the blog above doesn't tell you is how to actually do all of this stuff. Make sure you are logged in with admin privelledges and browse to http://LocalHost. Then Site Settings >> Manage Users Here we can add ourself to the admins group. One thing I did notice is that the email was not set up as it didn't send alerts as I added users. I havn't been able to set this up this far it still failed. Never mind moving on. Reporting services security on my box is at http://localhost/reports/Pages/Folder.aspx then go to Site Settings. In there configure site wide security and add your account to admins role. Hopefully that should be it now and I can create team Projects.....we shall see |
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