When do you know when you spend too long in visual studio?
When you finish writing a document in Open Office and find yourself repeatedly ‘Ctrl+Shift+B’ ing. I chuckled out loud when I realised what I’d just done. I think it’s a default muscle reflex now, just ‘Ctrl+S’ is.
This week I set off with the goal of making one of our web applications alot easier to deploy. The tools I chose were –
I’d played with all three before but never really got past prototype stage. I’ve spent the last day learning wix and all the elements relevant to me. The Web Application Installer is collection of scripts and a template for different types of web applications. Firstly you use WAI to generate a list of files to install and the use WixEdit to edit that list and many other properties of the wix installation. Once happy with the configuration of the installation WixEdit will generate an msi for installation on your target machine. They truly are an excellent collection of tools. I now have an msi installer that sets up a web site in IIS, sets the ASP.NET version to 2, sets all the required permissions, creates a DB in SQL Server Express (specifying where to save the mdf and ldf files too) and changes the connection string in web.config accordingly. Todays quota of job satisfaction has now been achieved – saving about an hour per install (I’ve to install this app 28 times for different clients so the work was definitely worth while).
One huge pit fall which made me silly amounts of angry was that the SQL script you use to generate the tables and initial data for your database MUST be saved in Unicode (UTF-8). If it’s not then wix won’t be able to read it. I lost 3 hours yesterday with this!!!! as SQL server management studio express by default saves to UCS-2 Big Endian. Very little documentation on this fact so hopefully this post will help a little.
Yet again British Gas have been at it. Last December the electricity account for my old house was closed after hours on the phone and email trying to get the account set up first (after two years) so that I could close it. Last week I was on holiday and came back to two letters stating I owed £241 for electricity used form June to December. I then got another letter today threatening legal action. Why on earth did this take 8 months!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!.
They didn’t have any forwarding address and found me from my new account in my appartment here which I didn’t think was very fair.
What a crowd of shams. I’m livid here, I thought I was done with all that hassle.
I’m just back from my, what is turning out to be, annual trip to my Mum’s summer house on the Helgeland islands off the coast of Norway. It’s a long journey involving 2 planes, an overnight ferry and a short car ferry. Well worth it though. Myself and my brother were there on our own for a few days before the rest of the family arrived (9 adults and 3 kids at the end of the trip). I did plenty of fishing, running, cycling, swimming, walking, reading, baby sitting and eating. The summer house is not yet finished it’s renovation so we spent some time helping out getting things order – specifically the sewage system in the cellar which invloved digging up the concrete in the cellar and laying new pipes (a fun job 🙁 ). I took loads of photos which are all online @ http://halfviking.com/norwayjuly2008/ – below I’ve chosen a few of the best ones.
An arty photo attempt with my shades and one of the flies that pestered us for most of the mountain trip.
Base camp on the mountain with a lovely river to the left and lakes scattered throughout the peaks of the island’s mountain.
Cooking some of our catch
Very very tasty – especially after a days fishing and hiking.
Mid air pose. The water was freeeeeezing!!!
Some of the farm’s horses roamed along by the shore. Very friendly beasts.
My brother fishing on the shore
My white self up the mountains
In total we caught 94 trout in just over two days up the mountain.
Count them…. 94!!!!
One of the most amazing sunset’s I’ve ever seen.
Me and the sunset and Peter in the background supping down a well deserved brewski.
Ringnes… My Norwegian beer of choice. Only because it’s the cheapest mind you.
The time has come for another rant about the proper use of email.
I spend a lot of my time in my inbox and far too often I receive email that just infuriates me. There are a few rules I follow and live in hope that some day others will follow too.
It’s all about context. All the above suggestions will help in the searchability, readability, understandability, sorting and professionalism of an email.
Follow these suggestions and I guarantee that the recipients of your emails will appreciate it (unbeknownst to them or not).
Did I miss anything?
I rarely watch tennis apart from when I’m staying at my Mums who’s quite a fan of the sport. I do however always watch Winbledon. this year I thought was spectacular – especially the final last night. Raffa Nadal and Roger Federer are absolute machines. They played for well over four hours with two only two short breaks (due to rain) and the fourth and fifth sets were phenomenal – I’ve never seen anything like it.
I also saw wheelchair tennis for the first time – holy mosses those guys are fast on their chairs.
My former colleagues have done a great job with the v1.0 release of ammado. I was briefly involved at the beginning of the redesign before I wandered back over to Wales. They’ve got a blog that is updated frequently and a podcast too. It’s a great redesign with plenty of very nice aspects to it. They’ve also had a lot of feature updates such as videos. Good work guys.
We had a support ticket at Karova which resulted in me having to look at the http data being sent between two servers via Soap over http. I’d read about Wireshark before and had it downloaded already. I installed it – found a way to filter the captured data by IP address and logged all traffic between both servers. All in under three minutes. It’s a awesome piece of software, I’ve been meaning for so long to re-visit the workings of the http protocol but always let it slide down my list. With Wireshark you can at least see what you’re learning in practice.
I’ve been an ericsson/sony ericsson fanboy for as long as I can remember so it was a bit of a departure from the safe confines of my Sony when I got an n95 8GB for work (we needed a GPS phone to test on). I’m absolutely in love with it.
Pro’s
Cons
I’s great, I’ve got Gmail, Gmail For Google Apps, Opera Mini, Google maps, Nokia Sports Tracker, Fring, Youtube and Skype installed. It really is a joy to have. I’d easily recommend it. Apart from the touch screen of iPhone I think it would kick it’s ass.
Since coming back to Karova, I’ve been doing ALOT more management of projects than I did before. Usually what happens is I get the projects once they’ve been spec’d (and prototype’d if appropriate) and then I manage the completion of the project from dev->staging->live and then pass it back to billing.
We always have a good number of projects on the go and my stack is always packed full of project details. The problem I’m having though is being able to step away from the code. I love coding and I know of no other feeling (achievable in an office environment) better than being in the "zone". With so many projects on-going it’s imperative that I delegate rather than try and get stuck in too much even if I know I am most familiar with a piece of software or technology.
It’s a great opportunity for me to step back from code and focus more on managaing and looking at things from a technologist point of view rather than a coder. Under that role I have already been able to play with Linq, ASP.NET 3.5 and SubSonic. Has anybody been in the same situation and have some advice?. For now I just know I need to stay disciplined and step away from the urge to start ‘xslt’ing and coding my ass off.