Police Christmas party fund raising scheme
Friday, December 01, 2006 10:29:11 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
I know it's an oldie but it still makes me smile and I haven't seen it for a while (all the more suitable now I drive a car that can go faster than the speed limit)...
Discount codes galore!
Wednesday, November 29, 2006 4:27:10 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Ok seeing as I didn’t get my arse in gear with the 40% discount voucher for the Threshers Group and just about everyone had already seen it, I thought I should post these quickly –hope they’re of use for someone:
And don’t forget to get your naughty adult/sex toys from Miss Mays, I’m still waiting for them to get a code over to me but I’ll update you when I’ve got one…
Update: It's finally here, check out Miss Mays Adult Store finally releases discount voucher
A song about Lovely Birmingham
Wednesday, November 29, 2006 12:18:43 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
I'm not a fan of YouTube but I was sent this video this morning and it made me smile, I must find out when the choir's next in town...
Father Christmas of the future?
Wednesday, November 29, 2006 10:45:37 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
I saw the new Debenhams Christmas advert this morning which
featured a young father Christmas dancing around what I can only assume was a
modern Santa’s grotto and I couldn’t help wondering whether this will be the
way forward for Santa in the future –no more fat old bearded man…
I hope not anyhow, why should he have to go on a diet and
trim his beard neatly!
40% discount voucher for the Threshers Group
Tuesday, November 28, 2006 10:40:21 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
For those of you who like to dabble in a little festive cheer, I thought I’d share this 40% discount voucher for the Threshers Group. The main catch is you’re only allowed to spend £500 at a time –best get that printer started…
Download the 40% discount voucher for the Threshers Group.
The voucher is valid until 10th December 2006
Update: If you're looking for some naughty fun this Christmas, check out the Miss Mays Adult Store discount voucher
Deleting "Ghost" extensions from FireFox
Friday, November 24, 2006 4:18:23 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Since updating Firefox to v1.5 I had a number of extensions that I couldn’t remove from the list because they were greyed out, this was somewhat irritating as I had the later versions installed too and so I was getting duplicates (see below)
Today I decided to see if I could resolve this, it turns out removing these ghost/incompatible extensions is fairly simple:
- Close any instances of Firefox you have open
- Navigate to %Documents and Settings%\Username\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\*.default\
- Backup the file: “extensions.rdf”
- Open “extensions.rdf” in a text editor i.e. Notepad or TextPad
- Find the line that starts with: <RDF:Seq RDF:about="urn:mozilla:item:root">
Below is a list of the extensions you have installed, I can only talk about my case but the ones that were greyed out extensions in Firefox were the ones that had a resource value of a URL rather than “urn:mozilla:item:{Guid}”. My file looked like this:
Simply delete these lines from the file, save it and restart Firefox. All should be back as it should be now…
A simple tale
Tuesday, November 21, 2006 9:29:34 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
A man was crossing a road one day when a frog called out to him and said, "If you kiss me, I'll turn into a beautiful princess." He bent over, picked up the frog, and put it in his pocket.
The frog spoke up again and said, "If you kiss me and turn me back into a beautiful princess, I will tell everyone how smart and brave you are and how you are my hero" The man took the frog out of his pocket, smiled at it, and returned it to his pocket.
The frog spoke up again and said, "If you kiss me and turn me back into a beautiful princess, I will be your loving companion for an entire week." The man took the frog out of his pocket, smiled at it, and returned it to his pocket.
The frog then cried out, "If you kiss me and turn me back into a princess, I'll stay with you for a year and do ANYTHING you want." Again the man took the frog out, smiled at it, and put it back into his pocket.
Finally, the frog asked, "What is the matter? I've told you I'm a beautiful princess, that I'll stay with you for a year and do anything you want. Why won't you kiss me?"
The man said, "Look, I'm a computer programmer. I don't have time for a girlfriend, but a talking frog is cool."
Prank Caller
Monday, November 20, 2006 2:08:05 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
I was sent this comedy prank call this morning so thought I'd share it...
Demolition Girl prank caller (DemolitionGirl.mp3)
Vista headaches already –and it’s not even released yet!
Monday, November 20, 2006 10:10:17 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
I installed a copy of Vista onto a Virtual PC for testing purposes and due to the way this PC is configured Virtual PC always catches me out and sets the default network adaptor as my VPN which means I can’t get any internet connectivity on the Virtual PC, once switched over I also need to change the DNS settings of the PC to work with our router.
The issue I came across this morning though was Microsoft Vista’s activation grace period had expired and there was no way to update the DNS settings to allow the Virtual PC access to the internet to activate my copy which meant I was locked out with no way of updating the network settings to allow validation!
Note: this is just an evaluation copy that you can download from Microsoft so the key won't validate on the release version!
Calling the helpline sorts the issue but it was a 20minute phone call of entering in digits I could have done without!
Atlas – AJAX Update issues (Could not load file or assembly Microsoft.Web.Extensions.Design)
Saturday, November 18, 2006 9:52:00 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Being a fair way into an application that relies heavily on Atlas I wasn’t best pleased to hear that Microsoft had done the usual comedy act of renaming the framework which would mean we’d have to update a plethora of controls.
Today we bit the bullet and along with a few other changes we already had planned made the switch. It wasn’t as bad as I was expecting tbh but it wasn’t without issues. The first issue we ran into was with Visual Studio’s Intellisense which has gone haywire, the recommended solution is to switch quickly between Design Time and HTML View –something that we can’t do as we’re using nested MasterPages which Visual Studio doesn’t support.
The next issue we ran into was the fact that our onKeyPress TextBox has now stopped working as planned but we’re looking into that.
The main issue that we ran into this morning however was on putting the site onto the server as we were faced with the following:
Configuration Error
Description: An error occurred during the processing of a configuration file required to service this request. Please review the specific error details below and modify your configuration file appropriately.
Parser Error Message: Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.Web.Extensions.Design, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.
Source Error:
Line 97: <assemblies>
Line 98: <add assembly="Microsoft.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35"/>
Line 99: <add assembly="Microsoft.Web.Extensions.Design, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35"/>
Line 100: <add assembly="System.Design, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=B03F5F7F11D50A3A"/>
Line 101: <add assembly="System.Windows.Forms, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=B77A5C561934E089"/>
|
Source File: **********************************************\web.config Line: 99
Assembly Load Trace: The following information can be helpful to determine why the assembly 'Microsoft.Web.Extensions.Design, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35' could not be loaded.
WRN: Assembly binding logging is turned OFF.
To enable assembly bind failure logging, set the registry value [HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Fusion!EnableLog] (DWORD) to 1.
Note: There is some performance penalty associated with assembly bind failure logging.
To turn this feature off, remove the registry value [HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Fusion!EnableLog].
|
Version Information: Microsoft .NET Framework Version:2.0.50727.42; ASP.NET Version:2.0.50727.42
The official take on this from the Microsoft guys is somewhat comical (http://forums.asp.net/thread/1455060.aspx):
Hi guys - yeah the problem you're having is because you installed on a machine w/o VS. All of our machines have VS, so we didn't catch this problem. On a machine w/ VS, Microsoft.Web.Extensions.Design.dll gets dropped.
Probably the best workaround for this is to go get that file from a machine with VS and either install it (gacutil -f Microsoft.Web.Extensions.Design.dll) or try dropping it into the bin directory, which I believe should also work but I haven't tried it.
I've been talking with the AJAX team about this, so we're on top of it. Sorry for the confusion.
Not an ideal fix but at least it works! For those of you wondering where you can find the DLL, look in: %Program Files%\Microsoft ASP.NET\ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions\v1.0.61025
Making sense of database responses
Monday, November 13, 2006 8:48:41 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
We're nearing the end of a large system for the lovely people over at Consolidated Communications Management Ltd and we've just come across a nice idea to make sense of database responses. Typically in the past we've simply returned -1/0 for failure and a positive integer (usually an id) of it was successful. The new method should add a little more conformity to our code. We already use a common Database Access Layer which handles the opening/closing of our connection, adding parameters etc but I’ve just added an enum with the common database responses, thought it may be of use to others:
public enum DatabaseResponse
{...}
{
Success =
0,
Init = -
1,
Found = -
2,
NotFound = -
3,
Duplicate = -
4
}
This should cover the common responses from our database however to make it a little more futureproof we'll keep -1 through to -10 reserved for this data level and then start more specific responses from -11 (i.e. BadPassword).
Using it is simple (this is not real code before you ask!):
public bool Save()
{...} {
DatabaseLayer DBLayer =
new DatabaseLayer();
//Check whether we should be saving or inserting this record
if (
this.Id == (
int)DatabaseLayer.DatabaseResponse.Init)
{...} {...} 
{
//When updating the record don't use the Id to store the response, instead
//throw it into a temp object and use that so the Id's still stored in the object
int response = DBLayer.Update(
this);
if (response == (
int)DatabaseLayer.DatabaseResponse.Success)
return true;
//All's ok
else
return false;
//Something went wrong -it could be the item wasn't found etc
}
}
The 300 mile club -I'm finally in!
Monday, November 13, 2006 8:54:01 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
I’ve been a member of the RX-8 Owners Club since I bought the 8 –a little sad but there’s great discounts and help on the forums so I thought it was worth the £30pa, anyhow, they’ve had the converted 300mile club on the forum for a while which I’ve wanted to get into however as most of my trips are 200miles it means the last bit of fuel is wasted on city driving (not the most efficient) so any attempt was lost.
Stacey and I had our 5 year anniversary this weekend so I suggested a trip to Scotland to celebrate –fancy that, just over 300miles to the hotel (303 according to the sat nav) and some super A roads, not sure what influenced that!
Anyway, on the way up we took a slight detour and got stuck in hours of traffic on the M6, not to mention torrential downpours so I took it nice and easy and I’m pleased to announce I made it into the 300mile club! WOOHOO!! I’m sure I was running on fumes in the end as I went about 35miles on the light.
What I loved the most though was on the way home we took a slight detour through the highlands to have a bit of a play (testing out what I’d learnt on the track day a few weekends ago) so I wasn't easy on the throttle and by the time I filled up there was only 16miles difference in the fuel economy... What a car!
I know it’s a little concerning being pleased about getting 300miles out of a 50L tank (around 24mpg) but most 8’s can’t make it over 250 let alone 300!
Here are some shots of the car on the trip home (very artsy :P) I'll post some on the Falkirk Wheel and Edinburgh later.