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Amen Corner - My Photo in Print

I’m pleased to announce that a photo I took a few years back was chosed to be the CD cover of american blue-grass band Railroad Earth (no, I hadn’t heard of them either). You can listen to most of the album on their web site if you want.

I’ve just received the pre-release CD and it’s great to see myself in print (and my name on the inside cover as well!)

Here’s a of shots of the finished work alongside the original:

Update: On the origins of my photo - I took the photo in Dec 2006. We actually have a street (or maybe its just the corner) called Amen Corner - it runs behind St Nicholas Cathedral in Newcastle (England).

The photo was taken during a winter festival called the Glow Festival that was run by the council - various light based art installations throughout Newcastle and Gateshead. This particular lamp had had its bulb changed to a red light - hence the colours in the photo.

I believe one of the band members found the photo on Flickr (see above link tot he original page) and suggested it to the rest of the band - and the rest as they say is history :)

29 May 2008 Photos Comments (3) Permalink

Virgin Media fixed my cable modem

I’d been having this strange problem with my Virgin Media (Telewest as was) broadband.

Basically, after about 5 minutes of trying to download files, the cable modem would ‘hang’ where the data light would stop flashing. The only way to get back to normal service was to unplug and reboot my cable modem.

I suffered this fault for a few weeks - the delay between reboot and crash seemed to vary between 5 minutes and a day (I suspect it was based on how much data had been downloaded, but I’m not sure). Then after two phone calls with Virgin Media tech support I eventually got it fixed, and I thought it might be useful to post the information here.

Disclaimer: If you follow any of the advice here and screw up your cable modem its not my fault! These instructions probably only apply to the WebStar cable modem I have as well.

First off, you can view your cable modem status page by going to http://192.168.100.1 in your browser. The following diagram shows the signal screen.

If you look carefully at the Downstream Frequency it reads 331000000Hz. Apparently either 331000000Hz or 339000000Hz are valid values, but mine was reading 3312500000Hz which isn’t a valid value, and hence was the cause (or symptom) of the problem.

So if your cable modem is having the same problem as this, and the status screen above doesn’t show a ‘correct’ value then this might be the cause of your problems.

Fixing the problem?

You can change this ’starting frequency’ on the following screen: http://192.168.100.1/gscan.htm

Double Disclaimer: Don’t blame me if this all goes pear shaped.

27 May 2008 General Comments (6) Permalink

How to use ECHO to output a blank line

I learnt something new today. You can use the DOS ‘ECHO’ command to output a line (or in fact any text you want) by putting a period ‘.’ immediately after the ECHO. i.e. The following will echo a blank line.

C:\> ECHO.

Also, if you want to echo some special characters you can put a carat ‘^’ before them:

C:\> ECHO ^>^>^>

>>>

C:\> ECHO >>>

> was unexpected at this time.

Read the comments on the following post to get more juicy tips:

The Old New Thing : How do I force the ECHO command to echo?

04 Apr 2008 Code Comments (1) Permalink

Does More Than One Monitor Improve Productivity?

Coding Horror: Does More Than One Monitor Improve Productivity?

A difficult one this one - I’ve never actually been able to work with 2 same sized monitors, but I have tried to use a laptop and an external monitor at the same time, and personally I found the ’second’ monitor (the external one is bigger so that would be my primary monitor) to be a distraction - especially if I had a web browser or email application running on it.

25 Mar 2008 Code Comments (2) Permalink

garfield minus garfield

garfield minus garfield

Surreal, and poignant.

07 Mar 2008 General Comments (0) Permalink

Flickr .Net Screensaver - Release 4.2

Flickr .Net Screensaver - Release: Release 4.2

Finally released a new version of the screensaver. This is a beta release, but hopefully should fix the problems that people have been having with memory and threading issues.

31 Jan 2008 Code
Flickr
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20 things I’m longing to do in 2008 (Part One)

Tagged by Brenda, so…

I shall start at 1 and see how far I get - so in no particular order:

1. Convert my Flickr Screensaver to WPF.

I thought I’d start off with this as this is a mostly code related blog. I’ve written some small prototypes and it looks like it could be quite good. I’ll also try and write a couple of blog posts about the process/what I learnt.

2. Take more photos.

I had a slow end to the year photo-wise, but I got a new wide angle lens for Christmas which it would be rude not to use, plus strange people keep giving me rolls of film, so they need experimenting with.

3. Lose weight and strengthen ‘core’.

I’ve been hovering at around the 13stone mark for quite a while now. I want to get down to 12.5-ish, all in an aid to…

4. Improve my climbing.

Climbing is now definitely my main none-work related focus at the moment, and my main inspiration for getting the weight down. We have three trips abroad planned for this year, all climbing trips (Fontainebleau in France is the first one). Its a strange game, climbing - while there is a certain joy in ‘just climbing’ there is also a large part of you that always wants to be a little bit better.

Working on your ‘core stability’ (which is more than just your abs, but your back and other areas too) is very good for climbing. Good exercises include doing crunches on a swiss ball, planks (or benches as they are sometimes called) and super man exercises.

5. Visit more places in the north-east.

This one should go nicely with the No 2. Places I want to go this year include Dunstanburgh Castle and Cragside, but there are plenty of other places out there (like the Farne Islans for example).

6. Visit more places in the UK.

This one will go nicely with the climbing one as well. So far I’ve only really ever climbed a little in the Peak District, quite a bit in the Lake District, and lots in Northumberland. Possible places to go include definitely North Wales, other bits of Yorkshire, and ideally (though less likely) somewhere on the south coast, like Cornwall (there is an area called ‘Chair Ladder’ which has some amazing climbing on it).

7. Spell better

Get it into my head that the middle vowel of ‘definitely’ is an ‘i’, not an ‘e’ or an ‘a’. Whenever my hands spell that damn word I always get it wrong. Oh, and win more games of Scrabulous in the process.

8. Improve as a husband…

Hey, no-one said I’m perfect, so there’s always room for improvement. Luckily I have a wife who loves me (and who likes climbing too).

9. Think of something else to put on this list to make 10.

Because 9 just seems to few :)

24 Jan 2008 Climbing
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Kenya II

A new update:

With Kofi Annan and his team working with the two leaders , there is optimism in the air. Yesterday Kofi Annan met with the opposition leader and team . Today Thursday he will meet with the government . The opposition have cancelled nation wide demonstrations for today, because Kofi Annan’s team had asked him to. So MAF and many other missions are working with full staff today, whereas many people would have stayed at home for fear of the violence that has accompanied rallies .

Unfortunately some youths caused trouble outside a memorial service yesterday.

Across Kenya Friday is a Day of prayer for peace and justice and for the many, many families that have been affected by the violence. MAF Kenya will be praying along with many thousands of Christians and people of other faiths will be praying as well.

24 Jan 2008 General Comments (0) Permalink

Kenya Update

I’ve got a friend, Paul Waugh, who works in IT for MAF in Kenya. He’s been sending out email updates, and I’ve decided to repost them here (partially prompted by this post).

Dear all,

The opposition have announced that there will be no more street protests after Friday (yesterday). They say “These last three days have been very painful and we have seen a lot of needless deaths and suffering … but today is the last day of the protests and we are now going to move on” .

We give praise to God that at last, the normal person in the street can get on with building his life up again. We look forward to the two leaders meeting face to face with Kofi Annan and his team.

We have just heard by text message that things are very bad in one area of Kibera, and a pastor’s family there are requesting prayer.

Pray for law and order -there are many stories of criminals using the political situation as an excuse to loot and burn. They burn one section, and when neighbours rush to help they loot the empty houses.

Pray for Kenya for Peace and reconciliation

Pray for the Families that have been devastated by the last few weeks , many of them so poor that they were already barely making ends meet.

Pray that God move in the hearts of the two leaders as they meet , and that they will have good advisers.

Thank God for the good stories of neighbours harbouring and helping their neighbours, sometimes of different tribes. Many have donated food to complete strangers, churches in Nairobi have taken collections to help the displaced people.

19 Jan 2008 General Comments (0) Permalink

Firefox users more likely to rock climb!

rock-climbing.pngExclusive: Mozilla Secretly Launches A Viral Campaign For Firefox

Techcrunch is reporting on an interesting video released by Mozilla about Firefox. Apparently Firefox users are 139% more likely to be rock climbers.

Well I’m a rock climber and I use Firefox. Mmm, must be true as its on the internet!

View the video direct on YouTube.

Also, in a similar vein, Firefox users are apparently 13% more likely to have purchased Classic Rock in the last 3 months.

07 Jan 2008 Climbing
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Jing Project uses Flickr.Net

11/29/2007 11:33 AMI’m please to say that the new version of the Jing Project, a tool for capturing video and screenshots of your desktop uses the Flickr.Net library to upload the files to Flickr (I’m assuming on the Windows only version).

As you can see from the screenshot on the right it works a dream :)

29 Nov 2007 Code
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Helping out on the Wrox forums

Wrox ProfileSince I started working as the technical editor for the XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0 reference book I thought I’d try my hand at helping out on the Wrox Programmer to Programmer (P2P for short) forums.

When I first started out I was a ‘Starting Member’ but soon progressed to ‘New Member’.

Not long after that I noticed I’d gone up in status to ‘Junior Member’, which I actually found to be slightly condescending! I’m 33, I’m hardly a junior anything anymore.

Now however I’ve just passed the 200 post mark and I’m now a plain ‘Member’, although I do get 3 funky red stars to my name.

My Wrox Forums profile

I help out mostly on the XSLT forum, but I’ve been straying onto the C# and C# 2005 forums of late too. I find the post volume is about right for me to not get overloaded - compared to the Microsoft Forums where I can barely keep up. Luckily the Microsoft forums has a helpful ‘answered’ feature, so you can easily see which posts still need help.

However for some reason sometimes when I click on the ‘Reply’ button it logs me out - very annoying.

Overall though I find helping out others useful as makes me think about the way I work, plus I try to write my proposed solutions in a way that they should hopefully learn a little without just writing out the answer for them. Its the way I would want to be answered.

Still, the most annoying thing is those questions where the answer is on the first page of the results I find when I search google. Is it just laziness do you think? My typical response to these is now just “Google is your friend”.


09 Nov 2007 Code Comments (2) Permalink

Official ASP.NET MVC framework - CTP release in ‘next few weeks’

News about the recently previewed Model-View-Controller framework for ASP.Net is that a first look Community Technology Preview is due out in a few weeks.

It will form part of the ASP.Net Futures release, which is a product I had a quick look at recently, and includes some wonderful stuff on Dynamic Forms.

For an overview of what the ASP.Net MVC will do there is a recording of a presentation Scott Hanselman did recently here, as well as an overview of the framework by Scott Guthrie here (if you’re not subscribed to Scott’s blog yet then why not - he provides some of the most concise yet informationful (is that a word?) blog posts imaginable about ASP.Net and associated technologies).

It seems likely that the next release of the ASP.Net Futures will be released soon after Visual Studio 2008 and .Net Framework 3.5, which are both due out before the end of November, so we shouldn’t have long to wait.

Official ASP.NET MVC framework will have first CTP release in ‘next few weeks’ « codeville

Other MVC frameworks do exist for .Net, such as MonoRail from the Castle Project. I haven’t had a chance to look at this, but it appears to be an attempt at a port of Ruby on Rails like functionality into the .Net environment.

09 Nov 2007 Code Comments (0) Permalink

Top 10 things to know about Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5

Top 10 things to know about Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5

Daniel Moth (’The Moth’) lists 10 very good reasons why I’m looking forward to Visual Studio 2008.

The killer feature for me is still the fact that I can target .Net 2.0, which means I can upgrade straight away from Visual Studio 2005, play with the new features, but still get my day job done.

02 Nov 2007 Photos Comments (0) Permalink

Implementing extension methods to XSLT in .Net

Most XSLT processors contain methods to call custom methods (known as extension methods) written in your favourite programming language. Java XSLT processors allow you to write them in Java, and the old MSXML processor allowed you to write the in VBScript or Javascript.

The new .Net Framework classes XslTransform (or more recently XslCompiledTransform) allows you to write them in any .Net language.

But how do you implement these? Well there are two methods you can choose from, read more below the break:

Continue reading ›

25 Oct 2007 Code Comments (0) Permalink