24 December 2004 in General | Comments (0)

It must be that time of year again – I can’t stop myself from playing Phil Collins songs as loud as my computer can blast it. I don’t know what is wrong with me! I just abolsutely love listening to Phil at Christmas! I think it might have been the Christmas before last when I dragged Rowena around just to play part of some song that I thought was great – she didn’t seem too impressed!

I wonder if anyone else does weird things around this time of year that they don’t normally do?

– JD

22 December 2004 in General | Comments (0)

It’s that time of year again. It’s my first Christmas as a proper adult and it’s quite a lot different to when you’re a kid.

Take for example that I feel like I’ve been tipsy all week for the number of client drinks, drinks with friends, general get togethers etc.

There really is a lot more things for adults – all sorts of random little gifts, social outings and many other benefits.

Rowena and I exchanged gifts early as we celebrated our 3rd Anniversary on the 16th of December and tie that and Christmas together (I can’t help it, I wanted to open them early!).

Rowena was extremely thoughtful and got me a mini fridge that holds about a dozen coke cans which I promptly stocked with Red Bull when I got home. It works perfectly and I’ve been enjoying chilled drinks since then. I also received a remote for my computer – which I had made comment about a few weeks earlier to Rowena. Now I can turn my PC off from bed, fast forward my TV programs (I often jump into bed at the end of the day with a couple of simpsons eps, maybe Family Guy, maybe a tech ed session – but just about every day I watch something before going to sleep) and much more. It’s all good.

I’m off up to Palmerston North to have Christmas with my family then I’m thinking of coming back to Wellington for new years. I’m off work until the 10th so I plan to make the most of that time with a few projects as well.

I hope my VAST collection of blog readers have a great Christmas

– JD

19 December 2004 in General | Comments (0)

Last night I had quite possibly the worst dream of my life. I dreamt I had a huge table of data and I was having to multiply and add the different fields up and write the answer in the final field. I woke up just before 7 and felt so tired from doing all the maths. Then I went back to sleep until 10 as I was so tired and had the same damn dream! I feel like I didn’t sleep at all.

I said to Rowena when we went for brunch that I didn’t know what annoyed me more – the fact that I dreamt that or that in my dream I wasn’t smart enough to just write a sql query to do it all for me.

– JD

12 December 2004 in Google | Comments (0)

Very cool new feature to Google (currently in beta) is Google Suggest.

• Click Here to view

Start typing in a query. It may take a second or so, but just type in the first few letters (say “goo”). A drop down appears like type ahead in windows that displays possible search queries and the results that are found for that query.

Very cool.

- JD

P.S Apparently it crashes Konqueror in KDE.

12 December 2004 in .Net & Tools | Comments (0)

One thing that has bugged me for a while (and I have been giving some answers but wasn’t overly satisfied) is that there doesn’t appear to be any good small standalone database engines that you can integrate into a .net application.

Today I was browsing a website and came across and advert that lead me here (http://sourceforge.net/cloudscape_download.php). It’s a 2MB database system that includes OLAP support, is open source and integrates directly into Java applications (I didn’t find too much information above what was on that page, so if I’m wrong, let me know).

Where is the .net alternative? I’m pretty sick of hearing that our choice is MSDE (or the future Express edition of SQL) as that’s considerably larger than the 2MB touted here.

What is even more sad is that not only does Java have this CloudScape product but they have an array of others including the likes of the Berkeley database (which in the last few years was ported to Java).

If anyone knows more than I do in this area (which should be just about any .net developer!) feel free to chuck a comment.

- JD

8 December 2004 in General | Comments (0)

I’ve just been reading a blog entry that covered “You know you’re addicted to coding when…”.

• Click here to read it.

What is scary is that I can relate to ~50% of the items listed.

Take for example –

“Instead of using MS Word, you type your essay for school in HTML using NotePad.”

In form 6 I did an assignment that involved dissecting magazines for different things. It was pretty big – a six week assignment. Everyone else just wrote their assignment but I decided that I would do mine as an interactive windows application. Written in VB6 (I know, drug peddling monkeys can get stuff working in VB6) it included integrated sound, video (made also by me) and even a small help file. Thankfully the teacher was quite into computers himself and I’m sure I only got the highest mark because of the originality of the presentation.

I’m not sure quite what that says about me since it makes writing HTML using NotePad seem like childs play.

– JD

5 December 2004 in General | Comments (0)

I’ve just installed a plugin that should help in reducing the amount of spam comments I’ve been getting lately.

Thanks to geekpulp for pointing out this plugin (and another, if this one doesn’t help I’ll combine the two).

– JD

3 December 2004 in .Net | Comments (0)

So this evening I tried installing and playing with EpiServer on my home pc. What a nightmare.

Everything went fine except I ran into some issues – the sample site was crawling. Then after a short amount of investigation I found that it wasn’t just episerver – it was all sites, even static html sites running through IIS were crapping out on me.

A bit of poking around the event logs I find that it’s MCMS ISAPI filters that are causing all my issues. A tad confusing since you initially don’t think a new site would have them but since they’re installed at the root (wrong terminology?) of IIS you don’t tend to notice they’re there (well at least I didn’t).

So I decided to just uninstall MCMS – I don’t use it that much at home really, just when I occassionally work on something from home when I’m not feeling to flash.

You would imagine that an uninstall process would uninstall things now wouldn’t you. Welcome to MCMS. Not only did it do a half arse job of that but it left my IIS install in tatters with missing files, no sites running etc.

Again, a little bit of poking around and it’s the damn ISAPI filters again!! Finally, after removing them again, we have lift off and my other sites begin working again. All up around 2 hours worth of work to get a site working because of MCMS and it’s filters.

Thank goodness that EpiServer is just an ASP.Net application!

- JD

P.S. It’s late, I’m tired, this probably seems like a simple issue – I don’t care, it’s my blog and I’ll bitch if I want to!