As fantastic as it is, and I love the Flickr plugin (being new to Flickr this was what convinced me) but although they look the same, there are a couple of differences (that or I've not found them yet). One of the big issues I've found is that you can't filter the results by ranking, here are two screenshots, the first from Windows Photo Gallery:

And Windows Live Photo Gallery:

So where has the "Ratings" tab gone I wonder.

The other thing that I've not yet worked out is how to flag photos as "Private" and be able to hide them -perhaps that's not possible.

I've never really got into Flickr but now I'm using Windows Live Photo Gallery which can automatically upload images for you I thought I'd give it ago. While checking out what the restrictions were on my standard (free!) account I was pleasantly surprised to find out I've actually got a pro account courtesy of BT Yahoo! -Shame I'm leaving them this month ;)

I'm currently investigating a new Open Source ASP.Net CMS system called Umbraco. It looks very promising as it can be fully accessible and has full support for XHTML among many other interesting features. I met with a couple of the guys that are developing the system in Manchester a couple of weeks ago and they've got big plans so keep an eye on it.

Anyway yesterday while setting up the new The Site Doctor site on Umbraco I ran into an issue where by I had "broken" the menu. Basically I had deleted the template from the system which should have deleted all copies of the pages that use that template but instead a cache remained somewhere. I ran through a number of steps to re-create the cache but nothing worked.

If you run into the same issue as I did, follow these steps:

1. Find out the ID of the page in question (easiest way is just to add the ID to the output of the menu XSLT)
2. Search the database for the ID using the T-SQL I posted in "How to search every table and field in a SQL Server Database"
3. Download and install a Unicode and UTF-8 search program such as Text Workbench and search for the ID (I only found it in /data/Umbraco.config)
4. Reset the applications cache -the easiest way to do this is to simply re-upload the web.config file

That should sort it :)

I'm forever downloading application trials to see how other developers write applications, partly out of curiosity but moreover to improve applications we’re developing –seeing what we’ve left out, how we may be able to do it better etc.

I keep a fairly clear desktop but today I booted up and noticed a “setup.exe” file sitting there and I had no idea what it was, I knew it must be something I downloaded to test so I ran it which probably wasn’t the most logical thing to do but hey. Luckily it was something I’d downloaded but it got me thinking, what if it was a malicious script that a virus had placed there for me to click? I wonder how many people would be caught out by that…

On surfing around the net the other day looking for a replacement to Visual Studio 2003’s clipboard monitor I stumbled across this excellent Clipboard manager plug-in for Visual Studio 2005. As his blog was offline at the time I wasn’t sure exactly how to use it but now I’ve had a play I’m not sure I’ll be able to do without it!

Check out the Clipboard Manager plug-in at
http://www.csharper.net/blog/clipboard_manager_upgraded_to_package.aspx

For those of you interested, the plug-in monitors the clipboard activity allowing you to resurrect previous clipboards and make them current and even locking items so you can use them at a later date. I’ve found it incredibly useful when testing sites as it allows me to keep common messages on the clip. Downside is you have to have Visual Studio open at the time so I’ll have to look into a standalone version.

Here are a few shots of it in “action”:

The items that have been added to the clipboard in the past show up in the list at the top and there's a small preview window below (which I think you can select parts out of). You can also remove all items from the history by clicking the icon in the top left.

To re-select an old item double click it and it's instantly the main item! The currently selected item is the one in black text with a green arrow next to it.

The context menu offers a number of extra options including the ability to lock and unlock an item, this means when you restart your computer the item is still in the history -great if you have common items such as test credit card numbers! If you want to remove a single item from the history, you can do that using the context menu too. I've not yet used the "Save to File" or "Search Online" items.

Update: There does seem to be some sort of glitch with it, I think my history has got corrupt at somepoint so when I clear all the unlocked items new items weren’t getting caught anymore. I've found two solutions: The first is to restart Visual Studio, the other is to unlock all items and clear the history completely. This seemed to sort it. I did also note that I had one blank item at the top of the list so I guess that's what was causing it.

This is a post for anyone else having connectivity issues with their LAN while connected to a VPN of some sort. When setting up the Virtual Private Network (VPN) on our new server we encountered a number of issues of not being able to connect to the local network while the VPN was established. Initially it was merely an inconvenience and something that we could live with, but as time went on we needed to stay connected and access files from the local network, it grew more and more irritating.

After much searching on the internet for a solution with terms like “Cisco VPN Local Area Connection Issues”, “Cisco VPN LAN Issues”, “Cisco VPN LAN files” and various inflections of we didn’t find anything useful.

While trying to sort the issue, I noticed that the VPN was establishing itself on the subnet of 192.168.1.x, that in itself is not a problem but we were running our LAN under the same subnet. It was only then that we realised that we had a conflict as the VPN was overriding the local subnet so on trying to access 192.168.1.5 it would attempt to contact the remote server group (which didn’t exist).

If you’ve got the same issue, the fix is simple, all you need to do is change your local subnet to something else i.e. 3, this means when the VPN is connected it will connect over 1 and the LAN will remain unaffected –lovely!