Tiny drops of knowledge

2011-12-31T23:56:00.001Z

Third-World IT (on a shoe string)

2011-11-11T17:55:00.001Z

Our focus today was the visit to a half-way house run by Oasis. It is home to six girls that have been freed from prostitution, with the aim of helping them return to a normal, self-sufficient life style. Yet again, we were moved by both the scale of the suffering and the dedication and effectiveness of the Oasis staff. This visit doubled up with Dave running a training session on

English men cause balloon riot in Mumbai

2011-11-09T12:13:00.000Z

We returned to the Aruna Project Office today to help run a kids session. As the prostitutes work all night, their children are left unsupervised during the day, which can leave them vulnerable to abuse. Twenty children were there, aged approximately 5-15. Tim did a fantastic job of entertaining them on the guitar. Despite his warnings, we then cracked open the modelling balloons. Even with two

A battle of good and evil

2011-11-08T18:02:00.001Z

The initial post title was Four white men spotted in Mumbai's red light district. Whilst this seems funny at first, the reality of what happens here is far from it. Today was the hardest day of the trip so far. It was too physically dangerous to take photos, and the spiritual battle being waged was also tangibly fierce. Yet, despite this being the largest red-light area in the world, women, men

Lighting up Mumbai

2011-11-06T17:57:00.001Z

We made it to Mumbai in one piece, via an overnight flight through Dubai. An Oasis worker kindly drove us to our base for the week, the YMCA. His driving was excellent, especially when compared to the taxi rides we had later in the day. Driving in Mumbai requires lots of honking, no lights (especially after dark) and optional observance of traffic lights and any other suggestion to stop. As a

Mumbai, here I come

2011-10-30T08:58:00.001Z

In just under one week from now, I'll be starting a week long visit to Mumbai. The trip is inspired and being led by my good friend, Dave, who works for a charity with strong connections to the area. Mumbai has Asia's second largest slum. We'll be visiting various parts, including the red-light district. The aim for our team of four is to share, learn and enable growth. Although I've done this

Posting JSON to a Restful WCF service

2011-08-16T11:15:00.000Z

This should be simple, but WCF isn't very forthcoming when it comes to deserialization errors. To get this working with an out-of-the-box .Net 4 Rest WCF service: Start Fiddler. Go to Fiddler's Request Builder, and select the Raw tab. Establish the POST URI, and the format of the POST data (this will be shown on the service's help page). Copy, paste and edit the below sample request.

Julian Treasure: 5 ways to listen better | Video on TED.com

2011-08-13T10:15:00.001Z

Julian Treasure: 5 ways to listen better | Video on TED.com Just watched this great video on listening. Julian provides five steps, of which I found the following useful: 1. Practice 3 minutes a day of silence.2. Listen in a noisy environment - how many different channels of sound can you hear?5. RASA - receive, appreciate, summarise, ask.

Making a Restful WCF service vary its response

2011-08-02T16:49:00.000Z

A natural fit with the HTTP architecture is to have a WCF service vary the response contents according to the MIME type set in the Accept header by the client. Whilst this is easy to do using the WCF Web API, it is slightly more challenging in an application using regular WCF (even WCF 4). The specific scenario I needed to handle was: Given a request for a resource. When the Accept header is

Publishing a website to the filesystem with msbuild and config transforms

2011-07-28T09:56:00.000+01:00

Ever since I read Scott Hanselman's post Web Deployment Made Awesome: If You're Using XCopy, You're Doing It Wrong I've wanted to leverage Visual Studio's config transforms, but never had the opportunity until last week. I also took the opportunity to investigate Web Deploy. Here's a summary of my findings: On Web Deploy I followed Troy Hunt's excellent series on this topic, in order to learn

Get name, table and column of all indexes in a SQL Server database

2011-06-20T15:03:00.001+01:00

Inspired by a Stack Overflow post: select t.name as [Table Name], col.name as [Column Name], ind.name as [Index Name] from sys.indexes ind inner join sys.index_columns ic on ind.object_id = ic.object_id and ind.index_id = ic.index_id inner join sys.columns col on ic.object_id = col.object_id and ic.column_id = col.column_id inner join sys.tables t on

Hiding Skype in the Windows 7 task bar

2010-04-25T09:14:00.005Z

Windows 7 on the whole is great. It rocks. However, something that's bugged me since moving to it is that Skype's window always shows on the task bar, unlike it used to hide on Windows Vista and earlier OS's. Update Since writing this, Skype have added a UI setting for this: see Skype's Options->Advanced->Advanced settings. Old fixLocate the Skype folder under Start->All Programs. Move the

Calling one WCF service from another

2009-06-03T14:28:00.002+01:00

Over a year ago I hit this problem, and no amount of work would fix it. A year later, having found myself facing it again, I finally found the solution, thanks to this post.Whilst the solution was simple, I've written my services so they can be unit-tested. Hence references to instances that require the presence of an HttpRequest are not allowed.The picture below shows my eventual solution.

Hiding the WCF .svc extension on IIS 5 or 6

2009-04-29T12:06:00.004Z

If you're setting up a WCF web service, its nicer to present a URL that does not have the .svc extension in it, i.e. http://moviesite.com/movies/123Instead of http://moviesite.com/service.svc/movies/123A simple way of achieving this on IIS versions 5 or 6 is using the free ISAPI Rewrite tool, with the following configuration:# Don't rewrite url's that already contain .svc.RewriteRule .*\.svc.

Load testing a WCF web-service gives a 403 error on IIS 5.1 (XP Pro)

2009-04-28T09:49:00.002Z

If you're hosting a WCF web service using XP Pro's IIS and checking its thread-safety by hitting with > 20 threads, then its likely you'll be seeing some 403 errors.This is unfortunately by design. See Jeff Atwood's article on why and how to get around IIS 5.1's shackles.

Configuring the Identity of an IIS Application Pool

2009-04-23T09:11:00.003Z

If a web-site needs to run under a specific identity, IIS application pools provide a convenient means of achieving this. However, a reoccurring problem I come up against in setting these up is forgetting to ensure the identity is also a member of the local IIS_WPG group. TechNet has the full story.So if you get one of these red icons on your Application Pool, check the IIS_WPG group.

NUnit's EqualTo tolerance modifier

2009-04-21T09:31:00.004Z

Comparing generated DateTime values can always be a bit tricky, but today I discovered NUnit's Within modifier that makes life so much easier:[Test]public void CreatedOnDefaultsToNow(){ SomeClass someObject = new SomeClass(); Assert.That(someObject.CreatedOn, Is.EqualTo(DateTime.Now).Within(new TimeSpan(1000)));}

Dealing with snake bite

2008-11-17T07:51:00.002Z

Before you panic, no, this hasn't happened to me (yet).A kind colleague lent me a very old and rare book recently, that has a great story on the above title. The book, From Cape to Cairo, by Ewan Scott Grogan, tells of the first traverse of Africa from South to North.The next time you have a bite of some description, be glad the treatment isn't what follows:"During lunch a native rushed in,

Help - the Storm Troopers have got me

2008-10-29T21:23:00.003Z

Help - the Storm Troopers have got meOriginally uploaded by visited Visited the Alien Invasion at the Spinnaker Tower recently. The best bit was the Storm Troopers from the UK Garrison. Scarily realistic!

Basil and teddy

2008-10-29T21:20:00.002Z

Basil and teddyOriginally uploaded by lyndsaypFive years of nagging, and we finally do it!Yes, we've got a dog (the one on the right). The kids agreed to give up Christmas presents in exchange for having a dog. He's a Border Collie and is ten weeks old in this picture. Named Basil, after Basil the Brush (the one on the left).House training is going well so far!

Serialising, streams and strings

2008-10-14T11:01:00.012Z

A common operation is to serialise and object to a string. I'm still finding better and better ways of doing this. My current favourite makes use of .Net 3.0's DataContract. It uses a UTF8Encoding and a MemoryStream as this ensures that the output XML is UTF8.Enjoy! using (MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream()) { DataContractSerializer serializer = new DataContractSerializer(typeof(

Filtering log4net messages

2008-10-14T10:21:00.007Z

I can never remember how to do this: filter out logging message based on where they come from.The solution is to use a LoggerMatchFilter. The code below can be inserted into any appender definition:

Love is ... unconditional (really, truely)

2008-10-07T21:47:00.002Z

I've been a blown away by the book Velvet Elvis. It challenges many assumptions we make about faith, and strips it back to its bare essentials.A quote from the book that particularly struck me was this:"If the gospel isn't good news for everybody, then it isn't good news for anybody.And this is because the most powerful things happen when the church surrenders its desire to convert people and

Redundancy, L=V+E and being a great leader

2008-09-03T20:57:00.004Z

I pleased to read in Clusters words that I often say to others. When describing my aim at work, I often state that I strive to make myself redundant, so that:The team grow to be able to do all that I do, but without me.I can focus on higher-level goals.p.159 of Clusters states that "the intention of a good leader ought to be to do themselves out of a job and to do this they need to be aware of

Accountability in life

2008-09-03T20:32:00.003Z

Was given the book Clusters to read this Summer and thoroughly enjoyed it whilst on holiday. It was a great book to read following on from my trip to Karamoja and then reading Velvet Elvis.The following points stayed with me about being accountable to each other (in a small faith group, or equally at work). Several references were made to the John Wesley Class-meeting System, which would also be

Effective evangelism requires ...

2008-09-03T20:07:00.003Z

Went to a great talk at New Wine by David Parker on what evangelism requires. It is based on Mark 14. Here are the key points I took away:Effective evangelism requires:Self-denial - personal sacrifice for the good of others.A broken heart for the lost.Demonstrative love: "evangelism is an outward demonstration of all other gifts".Consistency in:Friendly contact.Meaningful connections.Significant

SQL errors don't cause exceptions if nocount is off

2008-08-14T11:25:00.006+01:00

We had a strange problem today: an end-user was getting unexpected results (no data), but no exceptions were occurring.The cause was traced to incorrect database permissions, i.e.Server: Msg 229, Level 14, State 5, Procedure xyz, Line 123SELECT permission denied on object 'abc', database 'pqr', owner 'dbo'.The question was, why did this not cause an exception? A possible cause is our use of

God sees you now as one day we could be

2008-08-12T22:30:00.002+01:00

These were the words of Brother Andrew, spoken at this year's New Wine Summer conference my family attended. These words are echoed by Paul and Rob Bell, in his book Velvet Elvis that I'm really enjoying at the moment.A truly inspirational speaker.

Deciding between ref and out

2008-07-17T12:51:00.007+01:00

C# defines two keywords for parameter passing modes: ref and out. For a full discussion of why this is, see this msdn article, from where the below examples are taken. This is a summary of which to choose and why.When to use neitherref and out are used for methods that pass back two or more values to the caller. This is often a code smell indicative of the need for a new encapsulating struct or

URL rewriting with multiple websites

2008-06-13T11:17:00.004+01:00

Less exciting than my previous posts I'm afraid (safely back in the UK now).I recently consolidated a number of websites onto a single Windows 2003 server. One such site (dokuwiki) used url-rewriting via ISAPI Rewrite to present user-friendly URLs. Unfortunately our original rewriting configuration broke the other websites as it tried to re-write their url's also!Although I'm happy to pay the $99

You know you're in Africa when ... (Kotido, Kachiri, Kaabong)

2008-05-18T13:35:00.005Z

We've been in Kachiri Monday - Friday, Kaabong this Saturday and Sunday and Kotido in-between.I hope the following gives a taste of what we've seen and done....You know you're in Africa when ...10:30 am actually means 12pm, or maybe 1 or 2 pm.It rains for less than an hour and everywhere is flooded. But the people are over-joyed.The local church is just a tin roof.You have four armed police men

Arriving in Kotido

2008-05-11T13:27:00.005Z

We left Kampala on the 7.30 am MAF flight to Karamoja.Flying from Kampala in the South to Karamoja in the North-East was uneventful, but mind-blowing. As we crossed the Nile, and got closer and closer to Karmoja, the land went from being lush and green to dry and brown. River beds were very visible, with not water to be seen. I asked Laurie, the pilot, how long they stayed wet for. His reply was

First impressions of Uganda

2008-05-08T18:42:00.007Z

We've done a fair bit of driving around Kampala today, what with needing to buy some wireless routers to take to Karamoja, plus visiting various sights and markets. When I say driving, I fortunately mean "being driven", as for a Westerner, the traffic is a nightmare! From what the others say though, Kampala is fairly typical of a large, 3rd-world city: busy, noisy, smelly and lots and lots of

Flickr photo stream of Uganda trip

2008-05-08T18:28:00.003Z

Modern technology rocks! Although I can't claim responsibility for any of these snaps, they were taken by various members of the team...Flickr slide showFlickr image list

First post from Kampala

2008-05-08T06:06:00.003Z

I'm writing this post from Namirembe Guest House, in the capital of Uganda, Kampala. It still feels a bit surreal to be here, and inside I'm feeling very wobbly, like my head is not connected to my body!I'm here with nine other Christians from Church of the Good Shepherd, Four Marks, as part of its Mission 2008 program. The basic idea is that we're celebrating the church's 100th anniversary by

Test run initialisation code

2008-02-20T12:10:00.003Z

The problem of enabling log4net under NUnit required some unit test code that ran once at the start of a test run. Note that this code requires once-per-run execution, not per test or test-fixture.After much puzzling and googling, I finally found the answer: SetupFixture. The NUnit documentation says it all.Hurrah!

Browser shortcuts

2008-01-16T09:41:00.000Z

Condensed version of Coding Horror's excellent article:Alt+D - address barCtrl+E - search boxAlt+Enter (with cursor in address bar or search box) - open item in new tabMiddle mouse click - open/close a tab

message.IsEmpty fixed by .Net 3.0 SP1

2008-01-10T16:06:00.000Z

I've been enjoying writing some WCF services lately, including a Windows Service for consuming a WCF data feed.Tests on the pre-production environment showed up a defect that seems to be present in .Net 3.0 but fixed in .Net 3.0 SP1. I've not located the release notes for the Service Pack so can not confirm this for sure.The DefectThe provider web service returns an empty message in certain

Logging with log4net and NUnit

2007-12-20T10:06:00.002Z

This is a reoccurring problem that I forget how to solve:The problemA class under test contains useful logging.Your class configures logging using an assembly attribute:[assembly: log4net.Config.XmlConfigurator(Watch = true)]It is being tested via the nunit-console or gui and you want to see the output of the log messages.What's going onWhen using assembly attributes to configure log4net, logging

XCopy install of ReportViewer assemblies

2007-09-28T11:21:00.000Z

A recent project at work was a Console C# application that used .Net 2.0's LocalReport class to generate letters. To ease deployment, I prefer to distribute an application via copying instead of using an installer. A frequent problem for users of the LocalReport class is that it requires three assemblies that are not part of the .Net 2.0 Framework (but confusingly, are part of VS 2005). Whilst

How long to change a culture?

2007-09-12T19:54:00.001Z

A current project I have on the go is writing a C# console app to replace an ageing VB5 application.For many on the project, this is the first time writing production C# instead of VB. In addition we're aiming at a SOLID design, aided by NUnit, Spring.Net and of course Cruise Control.Net.A reoccurring challenge we've faced on this project is re-learning how to write software. Its more than just

Leadership advice from Bear Grylls - Facing the Frozen Ocean

2007-08-31T12:02:00.000Z

For more on the book visit Amazon. Picked up a copy from my local library as it was the only title by Bear Grylls they had. Having heard a bit about this chap I wanted to learn more and was blown away by this book.As well as being a gripping read, it contains sound advice on building and leading a team. The problem Bear set out to solve was the crossing of the North Atlantic in an open boat (a

External images in a local report

2007-06-18T14:12:00.006Z

We've been playing with Reporting Services at work lately, in particular the use of Local Reports.Adding external images to these reports is a bit fiddly. The "handling images" section of this devx article sheds some useful light on what the path must look like, and how to handle relative paths.As local reports require an absolute path, one means of doing this to use an embedded VB.NET function:

I'm a DHTC programmer

2007-06-12T11:56:00.000Z

Interesting programmer personality test. My programming personality breakdown is below. Do you agree with this? What kind of a programmer are you?DHTCYou're a Doer. You are very quick at getting tasks done. You believe the outcome is the most important part of a task and the faster you can reach that outcome the better. After all, time is money.You like coding at a

A user story story

2007-06-06T19:58:00.000Z

Although I've known about user stories for about five years, I've only now been in the position to practise what I preach.Having promoted them within my team (particularly following QCon 2007), I'm trying to use them on every project I work on and have to say I am blown away by their effectiveness! Although we captured them onto a wiki, their power immediately became apparent when we started

Keeping CruiseControl DRY

2007-05-09T09:14:00.000Z

I recently set up CruiseControl.Net to build a number of VB applications. This post describes how I kept the CC configuration DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself), whilst allowing more applications to be easily added and reported on.My initial set up consisted of a single project that built a set of applications defined by a text file. Whilst this made adding a new application easy, it had a number of

QCon 2007 - What I learnt about process - Part 2

2007-04-30T15:38:00.000Z

Going through my notes I discovered this useful map of an agile life-cycle. I think it came from Rachel Davies's session on user stories.As text it reads:Bird's eye view of life cycleExplorationExplorebusiness domaintechnologyprocessscopeKeep as short as possible (< 2 weeks)Release planning - create roadmap of releasesMay not happen until some initial iterationsFlesh out plan as you

QCon 2007 - What I learnt about process

2007-04-30T14:35:00.000Z

A post in a series that summarises what I learnt at QCon 2007.This post focuses on development processes.For a mind map version, click here Inspiration came from the following excellent sessions:Agile Leadership Tutorial - Diana LarsenUsage-Centered Design Tutorial - Larry ConstantineModifiability - Martin FowlerOperational Manageability - Dan Prichett, ebay Technical FellowUser stories and

QCon 2007 - References to follow up on

2007-04-30T13:45:00.000Z

Various resources that I haven't got round to looking at yet, but are worth doing sooner...Behind closed doors - people managementDon't make me think - user interface designMaverick - business managementHow buildings learn - architecturethinktecture.com - resouces for WCFfitnesse.org - web based acceptance test framework

Adding tagging to dokuwiki

2007-04-30T08:18:00.000Z

This wasn't as straight forward as I'd hoped, but we achieved it in < 1 hour.We used the tag plugin for dokuwiki. Installing this (and its pre-requisite plugins, feed and pagelist) was easy.Initially I couldn't get the topic feature (that shows pages with a tag) to work - it resulted in a blank page. This was traced to curl not being installed. Doh!The easy fix was (detailed at the curl site):Get

QCon 2007 - What I learnt about architecture

2007-04-27T13:54:00.000Z

This is the first post in a series that summarises what I learnt at QCon 2007.This post focuses on solution architectures.For a mind map version, click here Inspiration came from the following excellent sessions:Amazon Technology Platform - Werner Vogels (CTO)Putting qualities into architecture - Kevlin HenneyModifiability - Martin FowlerOperational Manageability - Dan Prichett, ebay Technical

Setting up dokuwiki on IIS with integrated authentication

2007-04-24T19:25:00.000Z

Having enjoyed the benefits of MediaWiki, at my previous employer, I've been keen for some time to set one up a my new place. A friend of my recommended dokuwiki, which stacks up well against others.Setting up was fairly easy, but as there were a few gotcha's, here's what worked for me.The mixIIS on XP Pro SP1PHP (latest version at time of writing)dokuwiki (latest version at time of writing)

Diffing .Net assemblies

2007-04-16T07:07:00.000Z

As we're about to commence a major .Net phase at work, I know that this is something I'll be needing to do.Scott Hanselman has provided a great post (as ever) on the subject, which I'm posting here so I don't loose track of it: Managing Change with .NET Assembly Diff Tools

MDAC 2.7 broken by another installer

2007-03-12T21:41:00.000Z

Encountered this knarly problem recently and its solution took some arriving at, so worth publishing.A system with MDAC 2.7 received the install of an application that uses MDAC 2.1. In theory both versions of MDAC can live happily side-by-side, but for some reason the install replaced sqloledb.dll with an incompatible version.Re-installing MDAC 2.7 didn't detect the change, so didn't fix this

Software development is like ... telling a story

2007-02-26T12:33:00.000Z

Went North last weekend for a fantastic baptism in Glossop. Whilst waiting to join the M6 from the M6 Toll road, had an interesting conversation with my sons (aged seven and nine). They had been listening in on some work calls regarding some NAnt scripts that were playing up, and that combined with Vista's $10 billion development cost, led them to ask (for the nth time) what, exactly, I did at

Principles of software development

2007-02-23T08:13:00.000Z

My blog reading (Jeff Atwood, Scott hanselman) the past few weeks has turned up some excellent articles on principles of software development. For ease of reference, I've grouped them together here:The DRY principle (Don't Repeat Yourself). Published originally in The Pragmatic Programmer, an abbreviated version is available in this pdf.Robert Martin's SOLID principles:Single Responsibility

NTLM authentication and Firefox

2007-01-11T08:42:00.000Z

Firefox is great, but using it with sites that use NTLM (e.g. SharePoint) can be a right pain. Unless you have Firefox set right, you'll always be prompted for your Windows credentials.The solution to this can be found by googling, but I've repeatedly struggled to track it down, so here it is for future reference:At the Firefox address bar, enter about:config and filter for

Converting a file's encoding

2007-01-08T17:23:00.000Z

Handling files that are in the wrong encoding (e.g. Unicode, little-endian) can be a major pain, especially on Windows systems.Unix comes to the rescue here with the iconv tool, which ships with Ruby.e.g.iconv.exe -c -s -f UCS-2LE -t UTF-8 wrong-enc.txt > correct-enc.txt

NAnt is a domain specific language

2006-12-31T16:49:00.000Z

Last week (don't get the full Christmas break till next year ) I was introducing NAnt to a colleague, and described it for the first time as a domain-specific language (DSL). Although I've been using NAnt heavily for almost three years now, for building everything from VB5 (yes 5!) to C#, its true power only fully struck me when I used this term. Up till then I always described NAnt as a

The flow begins...

2006-12-15T22:03:00.000Z

I've been umming and ahhhing for a year now and I've finally done it. This is my blog. Hopefully it'll be quality not quantity, but you can be the judge of that!Big thanks go to the people and things that inspired me to pull the finger out the dyke:AggieWebDevRob StylesEcclesiastes (particularly 10:10 and 12:2)