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Published on 05 Mar 2006 from
This week, we will be mostly innovating for... the
BBC. Excited!
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Published on 05 Mar 2006 from
As well as the original T4 colourizer posted by Modelisense, there's now a new kid on the block from Gaston Milano (as noted by Pedro).
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Published on 05 Mar 2006 from
I'm kinda proud at the moment, because for the first time there's a piece of sci-fi
that my girlfriend likes more than me - Invasion.
Personally, when I first saw the previews I thought it would be a bog standard three-act
TV movie shown over a weekend. But somehow they've managed to drag it out with over-long
sex scenes (hey, at least in Battlestar Galactica they're sexy) and family
drama. But nevertheless, it's good to be able to talk about aliens once in a while.
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Published on 05 Mar 2006 from
I really like KDE's Kate as an editor. It's got really intelligent syntax highlighting
(all the way down to heredocs), nice autocompletion, including DTD awareness. But
I cannot work out what I'm supposed to do with its session management.
I get scared to open the thing up, because I know it's going to try and load a couple
of local files, a few things over Samba, something from an FTP server, or whatever
else I was working on previously. And I can't turn off its session management because
it then refuses to remember any of the window settings I use.
So I can either put up with being presented with three username/password dialogs every
time I start my editor, or I can spend a minute dragging all the tools to where I
need them. It's infuriating, and I've had no luck Googling for a workaround.
Does anyone know how to separate the window settings from the other session features?
I'd like to be able to close Kate once in a while without worrying what'll happen
when I open it again.
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Published on 05 Mar 2006 from
Over the weekend I updated the LGGD website and added a new funky little extra... a click through image for all those people who love and support the London Girl Geek Dinners events. All you need to do is copy the code into your blog and you will automatically link through to our website. :) click on the picture below to get your very own London Girl Geek click through!
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Published on 05 Mar 2006 from
I had a thank you email from Pete LePage on the Web Development Tools team the other day - letting me know that I was one of the top ten valid bug finders (as in, bugs that were actually fixed) for the VS 2005 product cycle... It's always nice to know that we can all make a difference to the finished product.
In other news.... those of you who know me will be aware that I've been building up to a long trip away for some time - who needs to get a full-time job when you can delay it by travelling? Well... I'm off travelling a week today - and won't be back home until the end of August. I still can't quite believe it! If you're interested, keep an eye on my joint travel blog , which I'll be trying to update, along with photos, as I move around. Stops on the way include Thailand, Australia, Fiji, New Zealand, Mexico, LA, Toronto and New York. I can't wait...!!
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Published on 05 Mar 2006 from
Which is precisely why he's leaving. Poor Rupert has been trying to spend more time with the rest of the .NET team doing cool stuff, but he keeps getting dragged off to fix the old SCLABE* system.
Any time a tweak is required, Rupert's manager gets Rupert to do it, because he's been here the longest, knows it the most, and can fix it the quickest. And he knows exactly why an extra column is added on alternate weekends - a previous customer was having problems with their invoicing, so this was introduced to get round it.
But now Rupert's off, all his manager can think to do is get him to document what he knows about SCLABE. The thing is, Rupert's motivation percentage is equal to the number of days left at the company; today there are 17 days left, so he is 17% motivated. So Rupert adds a table of contents to the document, changes the headers and footers, tweaks "Heading 2" so it has 6pt spacing before and 12pt afterwards. He writes about the objectives of the system, describes the main areas of the system as an overview, and spends the rest of the day trying to get Visio to draw something resembling a diagram of the system.
In other words, he's wasting everyone's time.
To be fair, he's asked what he needs to write, and the answer was "enough for someone else to take over from you". Well, to take over, they need to know what the thing does, right? But that doesn't really help the next guy (who had better not be me) when the next tweak is required. There isn't any documentation that will help. There can't possibly be. Why? Because it isn't Rupert's knowledge that needs to be passed on, it's his experience. And that can't be passed on in a document. I can read a document telling me how to do a backside footplant wallride, but that doesn't mean I understand it, let alone have any success with it.
So what to do? For Rupert's boss, not a lot, except learn for next time. Rupert's experience needs to be passed on, which can only be achieved by showing someone. Although I've never been a manager, if I was stuck managing SCLABE, I would find a volunteer or two (willing or otherwise) to learn from Rupert. When a tweak is required, the volunteer, let's call her Ingrid, would sit at the keyboard, with Rupert next to her. Rupert would tell her how to navigate through the code, what to look for, how to implement the change, how to test it, where to deploy it to, and everything else, without actually doing it himself. Rupert would answer questions, and sometimes withhold information to make sure Ingrid thought about what she was doing. She would either work it out, or have to ask the right questions.
In this way, Ingrid would actually experience the system, and start to understand it. After a few of these sessions, she may be able to fix some things by herself. This would free up Rupert to get on with the cool AJAX stuff. If Rupert spent time with others in the team, then it would seem fair, and people could take turns. If Rupert left, then SCLABE fixes wouldn't be a major trauma, as someone else could do it. Rupert would be less likely to leave anyway, as he's now a confident, successful mentor, and even has time to write some Ruby on skis.
* SCLABE is a fictional legacy system written in COBOL on an AS/400. Rupert is a fictional developer, whose resemblance to anyone you know is the whole point of this exercise.
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Published on 05 Mar 2006 from
I won a copy of CSS Mastery from Andy Budd's website a couple of weeks ago, and it is excellent. It's practical and useful, in that it shows the reader how to write the most common layouts; 2-column, 3-column, fixed, liquid, elastic etc. As well showing how to do things, it also explains why things have to be done a certain way, such as differences in box models, different browser versions and so on.
I tried out one of the layouts, and it took about 15 minutes, and just worked. I understood exactly what was going on, and knew why I had to do some of the stranger things.
It seems that CSS is like chess. Before reading this book, I knew the rules, what the pieces were and how they moved. After reading the book, I feel like I know how to use the pieces together, some standard openings, and how to actually win at it. Fantastic.
There's a free sample chapter on the book's website, so you can see for yourself.
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Published on 05 Mar 2006 from
Shocking as this may sound, The Simpsons (once a famed cartoon) will turn into a real-life version with human actors playing the comical characters... I cant post pictures of the cast due to copyright but take a look at the Bizarre Online article
MAKERS of the hit cartoon The Simpsons have a filmed the show's opening titles using real actors. In the hit viral going around the world we get to see what Bart, Homer, Marg, Lisa and Maggie would look like if they were humans.
Visit the site to watch the openning titles.
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Published on 05 Mar 2006 from
Shocking as this may sound, The Simpsons (once a famed cartoon) will turn into a real-life version with human actors playing the comical characters... I cant post pictures of the cast due to copyright but take a look at the Bizarre Online article
MAKERS of the hit cartoon The Simpsons have a filmed the show's opening titles using real actors. In the hit viral going around the world we get to see what Bart, Homer, Marg, Lisa and Maggie would look like if they were humans.
Visit the site to watch the openning titles.
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Published on 05 Mar 2006 from
A single pretty important thing to mention, which held me up half an hour or so – for some reason, the installation program for the SDK doesn’t work correctly when used with the mouse. Specifically, the Next button on the first page and the radio buttons to accept the license do their jobs only when [...]
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Published on 05 Mar 2006 from
Maybe it’s just me.
Maybe I’m just having a bad day.
Or maybe the Help isn’t as intuitive in VS2005 as it was in VS 2003.
Or maybe it’s just that there’s so darn much new stuff in VB/VS2005 that I just can’t track it all down in the Help files.
Whatever the reason, I really do feel as though I’m spending far longer trying to pinpoint the answers to relatively easy questions these days.
Today, for instance, I wanted to put some code in the OnPaint event of a Windows Form. (OK, I know that I could just as easily have used the basic Paint event, but OnPaint is what I’m used to, and OnPaint is what I wanted. )
In the earlier versions of Visual Studio there is that convenient little line in the Code Window’s left hand drop down list. But when you go to select this feature in VS2005 you’ll discover that it’s no longer available. When I hit this point I then spent an awful lot of time trying to work out a way of getting this feature back into the IDE thinking – wrongly – that this was probably a matter of tweaking one of the settings in the Visual Studio configuration.
After what seemed like an endless search I eventually found that the fix for this was something quite different. What you have to do is to type in the word “Overrides” into the code window main area itself and when you do this an Intellisense list of options will appear.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m all for improvements and I can see that once you know about it that the new approach is just as easy as the old one – and it even comes with a few additional benefits.
1. Firstly, it will intelligently auto-select the first letters of the Overrides as you type them in. That’s to say that – unlike the 2003 version – if you type in :
oncl
for example, you will be taken to the first entry that has all these four letters in that exact order (which just happens to be OnClick). Now, this is miles better than the very annoying feature in VS2003 which would have had you whizzing up and down the list and highlighting
OnActivated
NotifyInvalidate
ContextMenu
one after the other.
So that’s a great improvement.
2. Secondly, the Intellisense listing, in true Intellisense style, also includes the parameters; something not shown in the VS 2003 dropdown list.
3. And thirdly, once you have used one of the Overrides from the list and it exists as a code block in your code window, this choice of Override no longer appears in the Intellisense list.
So, now that I’ve found it, I do actually prefer the new way . I just wish I could have found the answer with a few well chosen keywords in the VS2005 Help and not had to spend ages digging round for it. I tried lots of search term variations but mostly I only found guidance on the use of Overrides in code or different ways of manipulating toolbars and menus in Visual Studio.
In the end, I did what I often seem to end up doing these days – I Googled with the same search terms that had failed in VS and fairly swiftly found the answer tucked away in the blog of Mike Carter, one of the VBIDE Team guys at Microsoft.
So there you are, that’s how you can code the Overrideable events now. If you’ve found your way to this blog at the end of a similar frustrating search, I hope you managed to get to the answer faster than I did!
Maybe I just wasn’t smart enough to come up with the right combination of search terms to home in on it in VS2005 Help.
Or maybe I’m just getting impatient in my old age :-}
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Published on 05 Mar 2006 from
My installation of Visual Studio 2003 Enterprise Architect doesn’t run through… I tried it twice and there’s a point where the current action is shown as “Removing registry entries” or something very similar to that, and that’s where suddenly some msiexec process starts gobbling up a lot of CPU and never terminates. Killing that process [...]
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Published on 05 Mar 2006 from
I had a thank you email from Pete LePage on the Web Development Tools team the other day - letting me know that I was one of the top ten valid bug finders (as in, bugs that were actually fixed) for the VS 2005 product cycle... It's always nice to know that we can all make a difference to the finished product.
In other news.... those of you who know me will be aware that I've been building up to a long trip away for some time - who needs to get a full-time job when you can delay it by travelling? Well... I'm off travelling a week today - and won't be back home until the end of August. I still can't quite believe it! If you're interested, keep an eye on my joint travel blog , which I'll be trying to update, along with photos, as I move around. Stops on the way include Thailand, Australia, Fiji, New Zealand, Mexico, LA, Toronto and New York. I can't wait...!!
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Published on 05 Mar 2006 from
I just found out the hard way that low-level drivers like the Nero driver for the Image Drive feature may not be compatible with Vista at all. Right after I activated the driver, Vista crashed with a BSOD and I wasn’t able to boot back into it, not even in safe mode. I was able [...]
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Published on 05 Mar 2006 from
Yesterday I managed to install Vista CTP build 5308 on my new Acer TravelMate 8204WLMi. This is what my BlogJet window looks like now:
In part it’s supposed to look like that, because the Glass effects of the new UI actually work pretty well on my system. In other parts it’s not as intended, for example [...]
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Published on 05 Mar 2006 from
My latest PC Pro column is now on the web at the PC Pro web site. Entitled Configuring ASP.NET,
you can get it at the Real World Computing: Configuring ASP.NETpage. Also - see http://www.reskit.net/pcpro for the links to the other (and future) articles.
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Published on 05 Mar 2006 from
NCover, NCoverExplorer, NUnit and TestDriven.NET
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Published on 05 Mar 2006 from
I have a high regard for Eric Meyer, whose books have taught me most of what I know about CSS. Meyer on IE7:
...there's every chance that IE7 will be close to being another Firefox (in the standards-support and layout-behavior senses)...
Encouraging, and necessary if we are going to stop designing the Web around IE6. More after Mix06.
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Published on 05 Mar 2006 from
I found a quick reference to HTTP headers. It has a list of all the HTTP 1.1 headers with a little description of each and it links into the W3C documentation.
My flatmate who's watching TV with me thinks this is a weird thing to get excited about on a Sunday morning. :)
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Published on 05 Mar 2006 from
I found a quick reference to HTTP headers. It has a list of all the HTTP 1.1 headers with a little description of each and it links into the W3C documentation.
My flatmate who's watching TV with me thinks this is a weird thing to get excited about on a Sunday morning. :)