Community developer blogs

Adrian Bateman

Recent Posts

• What if there already was broad support for XHTML?

  Posted: 24 Nov 2008 at 05:43

  W3C XHTML 1.0 Appendix C: This appendix summarizes design guidelines for authors who wish their XHTML documents to render on existing HTML user agents. W3C XHTML Media Types: The use of 'text/html' for XHTML SHOULD be limited for the purpose of rendering on existing HTML user agents, and SHOULD be l

• Investigating git

  Posted: 23 Nov 2008 at 22:41

  Sam Ruby: Whenever I find myself updating a script I wrote months or even years ago, these days my first step is to do a git init. Over the last few months, I’ve seen quite a few people commenting about how git is a “better” source control system than Subversion. Today I watched this video as Linus

• Well-formed mark-up?

  Posted: 17 Nov 2008 at 02:44

  There’s an interesting debate going on in the W3C HTML working group about whether well-formed HTML is important in the specification process for HTML5. It feels to me somehow intellectually that well-formedness is a valuable goal but when it comes down to explaining why it matters I’m finding it ha

• Installing Vista unattended

  Posted: 16 Nov 2008 at 18:40

  I’ve been spending some time on a side project to create a Vista boot image that installs unattended and configures a development machine with all the tools I want configured they way I want them. The goal is to install everything including Visual Studio and all the little utilities that I use frequ

• Comfy Chair

  Posted: 14 Nov 2008 at 04:53

  I finally got around to buying a proper chair to sit on to use my PC at home. My hope is that now it is more comfortable to sit here I might actually get around to reading RSS feeds and even posting to my blog. :)

• Have another SWIG...

  Posted: 09 Sep 2008 at 13:10 by Adrian Bateman

  This is mostly a bookmark for me because this isn’t something I need right now but is definitely something I can see needing in the future. According to the fine members of the win_tech_off_topic group, SWIG is a good tool for building the interop layer between C/C++ code and another runtime, be it

• XMLStarlet Command Line XML Toolkit

  Posted: 08 Sep 2008 at 13:15 by Adrian Bateman

  I’ve recently been writing some scripts to automate a test harness. The test harness takes in an XML file as it’s input. It turns out that most of the tests we want a slight variations of the same scenario and this means small tweaks to the XML file. When I started, I ended up with a new XML file f

• A trip to the US Embassy for a visa interview

  Posted: 07 Sep 2008 at 23:15 by Adrian Bateman

  Back in early July, I had to head off to the US Embassy in London for the interview for my work visa to come and live out in Seattle. While there was lots of official information about what you needed to do, I didn’t find much discussion of the experience and so I thought I’d share mine here. First

• Running managed code from a network share

  Posted: 07 Sep 2008 at 02:01 by Adrian Bateman

  Since the launch of .NET all those years ago now, one issue keeps coming up for me. You create a quick proof-of-concept and stick it on a network share so that you can either run it on another PC (or get someone to try it for you) so that you can avoid those “well, it runs on my PC” conversations. U

• Upgrading to Subtext 2.0

  Posted: 07 Sep 2008 at 01:25 by Adrian Bateman

  I followed the last few changes to Subtext 2.0 through the Subtext mailing list over the last couple of months and fully intended to upgrade to the pre-release version and then to the version as soon as it was released but somehow never found the time. Finally today I went through and updated the en

• Puddle Jumping

  Posted: 04 Aug 2008 at 12:45 by Adrian Bateman

  I realise that this post is way overdue but I've finally made the time to sit down and write up my news. Back in April/May, I had a few phone/video calls with some of the guys working in the Internet Explorer product group out in Redmond about a role opening up on the team. Having worked on IE from

• What does “done” mean to you?

  Posted: 29 Jun 2008 at 19:48 by Adrian Bateman

  Scott Hanselman discusses Scrum with Ken Schwaber in his recent Hanselminutes podcast. A large part of the conversation centres on the meaning of “done”. When your developers say they are done and have completed a piece of work, what does that mean? Ken argues that unless it means ready to deploy a

• Nostalgia

  Posted: 21 Jun 2008 at 16:02 by Adrian Bateman

  Clearing out my loft I came across my collection of Sinclair paraphernalia. I worked my way up through the Sinclair systems, ZX-81, ZX-Spectrum and ultimately a Sinclair QL, all of which I still own. Bizarrely, since I can't remember when, I must have acquired a second ZX-81 because I find I now hav

• Cake irony

  Posted: 20 Jun 2008 at 16:24 by Adrian Bateman

  Apparently, the IE team sent a celebration cake to Mozilla to congratulate them on shipping Firefox 3. It's ironic that the mozillalinks.org page describing this with photos doesn't exactly display correctly in IE7. However, if you use IE8's new standards rendering mode then you do get the page as y

• MVC vs. MVP

  Posted: 18 Jun 2008 at 16:44 by Adrian Bateman

  Phil Haack has a succinct description of the difference between MVC and MVP based on an explanation of why MVP evolved. Good stuff.

• My AutoHotkey Script

  Posted: 01 May 2008 at 22:28 by Adrian Bateman

  James asked for the script I use. It's actually very simple and doesn't take advantage of any advanced features of AutoHotkey at present. Here it is: #w::Run iexplore #h::Run "C:\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\Help 9\dexplore.exe" /helpcol ms-help://ms.vscc.v90 /LaunchNamedUrlTopic Defa

• Elevated command prompt from a hotkey

  Posted: 30 Apr 2008 at 15:05 by Adrian Bateman

  While I think UAC is a good thing, it gets pretty annoying when running lots of commands at the command line that just turn around and say "sorry, I need to be elevated". I've blogged before about using AutoHotkey to run commands bound to keyboard shortcuts and I use Win+P to pull up a command promp

• Dell's lack of service - no M1330 after all

  Posted: 10 Feb 2008 at 01:36 by Adrian Bateman

  I ordered the Dell XPS M1330 with a specific trip in mind. Before ordering, I confirmed with their online sales agent whether if I ordered at that moment I would receive the laptop before I needed to leave. I was told that if I selected the 9 cell battery then it would be scheduled to be received no

• Dell's lack of service - no M1330 after all

  Posted: 09 Feb 2008 at 17:36 by Adrian Bateman

  I ordered the Dell XPS M1330 with a specific trip in mind. Before ordering, I confirmed with their online sales agent whether if I ordered at that moment I would receive the laptop before I needed to leave. I was told that if I selected the 9 cell battery then it would be scheduled to be received no

• Dell XPS M1330

  Posted: 01 Feb 2008 at 22:46 by Adrian Bateman

  I've been considering buying a new laptop for home for a little while. I want something I can take away with me that contains no work stuff so that, especially when I'm on holiday, I can keep in touch with friends and family but not be lured into looking at work. I toyed briefly with the idea of a f