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Displaying a tick mark in HTML
2006-12-18 22:24:00
This afternoon's challenge was to get a tick mark to appear in a HTML file. Not too taxing I thought. I'd already done it, using the HTML entity ✓. But this didn't work properly in all browsers. I initially thought the problem was some kind of encoding problem but it seems that unfortunately it's one of those HTML things that works in 'modern' browsers but doesn't seem to work in IE6 (this ✓ should be a tick mark, if you're one of the lucky ones). Given that most people are still using IE6, it's not really an ideal solution. So what to do? I thought I'd search for a fairly common font that had a tick mark available. WingDings does and although it's a Windows font, I thought it would be available on enough computers to suit my needs. Unfortunately, as this page shows, FireFox doesn't display WingDings fonts at all, even when they are installed on the computer. Most odd, although it seems that this is how browsers should work... You may be asking why I didn't...
More About: Play , Display , Mark , Html , Mark I

Build it and they will come
2006-11-02 15:01:00
After five years, the Random Pub Finder has finally become an overnight success. Google seems to have started re-indexing pages, although there's still a random nature to its indexing. We were up to 300 pages indexed, now we're back down to about 150. But the main reason for the sudden surge in traffic has been appearing at Programmable Web. Thanks to that, we've been covered on a couple of other sites. We've never had so many hits. Now I'm actually getting traffic here as well, thanks to this post. Seems I'm one of the top results on Google if you search for directmailchat. Clearly I'm not the only one suffering from this spam. 
More About: They , Will , Come , Build

iTunes and Windows Live Writer love-in
2006-10-27 18:15:00
For the past few months I've been using my Toshiba Gigabeat to listen to music in my office, but something has been bugging me about it for a while. The random play functionality is completely whacked out. It seems to be random based on the artist, so if you've got one track by an artist, that artist will get as much coverage as an artist with 100 tracks. So I decided to move my MP3 collection on to my new PC and use iTunes instead. That in itself was a bit of a pain. The Gigabeat converts MP3s into a file with a SAT extension so you can't just copy them back across, since nothing but the Gigabeat knows what a SAT file is. But if you plug it in right, Windows recognises it as a media player and knows what to do with the files and does the conversion on the fly. All seems a bit odd really, but I could now listen to my MP3s through iTunes. And now I've found a very nice plugin (well two actually) that lets you insert the track you're currently listening to into yo...
More About: Love , Itunes , Windows Live , Live

Disabling the Dell malware
2006-10-24 20:42:00
When I purchased my new PC it came with a whole host of crapware that I didn't want. Most of this could be removed but one piece of software remained, an extension for IE that brought up a Dell search page whenever a website failed to load. I've never tried to get rid of this because it's never caused too much harm but today it began interfering with my work so it was time to get rid of it. IE7 makes it pretty easy to disable pointless or dodgy add-ins. If you have the same problem as me, go to Tools/Manage Add-ons/Enable or Disable Add-ons and disable CBrowserHelperObject object. No more 'helpful' Dell search page, yippee!
More About: Malware , War , Ware , Bling

Exciting new website
2006-10-18 23:04:00
In their ongoing attempts at SEO, BetterDeal have got a new site (New Car Showroom) and they want some inbound links. Where better to get them than from here, with my huge number of visitors and massive PageRank?
More About: Website , Site , Webs , Citi

Hello World for ZX Spectrum lovers
2006-10-09 23:01:00
When I was a young lad, there was nothing I liked more than going down to my local Dixons after school and typing my very own Hello World application into the nearest ZX Spectrum. But the Hello World apps I see today just don't match up to the beauty and elegance of that original version, so I've written one for C# using System;namespace HelloWorld{ class App { [STAThread] static void Main(string[] args) { line10: Console.WriteLine("Doogal is cool!"); line20: goto line10; } }}Who says goto is evil? I think I might adopt this style for all my applications...
More About: Love , Lover , Lovers

Dell vs HP
2006-09-16 23:42:00
I've got a new computer from Dell and now my HP DeskJet 5550 doesn't work. Funnily enough the reason I've got the printer is because my de-facto mother-in-law bought a Dell computer and the printer wouldn't work for her either. Who's to blame for this I wonder? I've been fiddling around with it for most of the day and can't get it to work. I can print out the HP test page but any other page refuses to do very much except throw out a blank sheet of paper. Based on my experiences with the new computer that have been mostly positive (except for the shitload of rubbish software it came installed with) I'm going to blame Hewlett Packard.

Do you ever need to do a complete rewrite?
2006-09-13 21:45:00
Joel Spolsky's article about rewriting software has always struck me as a very well reasoned argument for never rewriting software from scratch. He mainly talks about Netscape's attempt to rewrite their browser from scratch. You might claim this was a reasonable success in some respects since it led to FireFox, which now has a pretty decent share of the browser market (about 10% I guess). But compared to the market share Navigator had before they started their rewrite it is still pretty minscule. Of course they may well have lost a lot of that market share anyway, since MS was installing their browser on every new machine that was sold. But MS stopped developing Internet Explorer after they achieved almost complete ownership of the browser market, which gave FireFox a chance to gain ground. So basically we'll never know what would have happened if Netscape had continued with their old codebase.    So I was somewhat disturbed to find out one of my previous employers...
More About: Write , Comp , Ever , Need , Complete

Programmable Web
2006-08-27 21:48:00
Just found this site, which looks like a useful resource for knocking together Web 2.0 (God I hate that term) mashups (God I hate that term)
More About: Prog , Program , Gram

More Windows Live Writer
2006-08-18 00:07:00
A comment to my previous post from Spike Washburn (of the Windows Live Writer team no less!) suggests image uploading won't be supported until Blogger improve their API, which is a shame. So Blogger, get your finger out! And apologies if it appeared that I was suggesting Windows Live Writer deliberately wasn't supporting image uploads to Blogger. A couple of other points about Writer. First, I'm very pleased to see it is a managed application. Great to see MS dogfooding the .NET Framework and proving it's possible to produce professional apps using WinForms.  Second, it's great to see developers from MS responding to blog posts from little old me. Fact is I'm a Z-list blogger that no-one reads but I've had two lots of feedback from MS people. That kind of communication will really help build a good feeling towards MS in the IT community. And yes, I'm using Writer to write this post.
More About: More

Windows Live Writer
2006-08-17 14:47:00
Just playing around with Windows Live Writer and it's mostly pretty cool. The first problem I've encountered is the lack of image support on Blogger, which is pretty much a showstopper. Odd really, because Blogger does support images, but I guess this is a beta...
More About: Windows Live , Indo

Richmond Park
2006-08-06 15:11:00
Truth be told I don't much like London. When hearing this, people will often trot out the usual Samuel Johnson line, but the fact is Johnson lived in an entirely different London to the one I live in now. But one of the great parts of London has to be Richmond Park (although some people will claim this isn't really part of London, because it's in zone 5). When cycling around its huge area, I can almost forget that I'm anywhere near the busy, unfriendly city I know.

Use the tool, tool part 6
2006-08-04 00:12:00
Documentation is a right pain the behind, or at least it used to be. C# simplifies it a great deal by providing in-built support for it. XML tags can be added to your source code as you go along, so that 2 week task at the end of the project can be avoided. So once you've tagged all your code, what next? Download NDoc and you can generate help files just like the ones in Visual Studio. If it hadn't been for this tool, I'd probably never have got round to releasing a little project of my own into the wild.Another useful tool for generating documentation is GhostDoc, which automatically generates a first attempt at the documentation based on parameter names and method names. It doesn't always get it right, but it's often good enough.
More About: Tool , Part

Use the tool, tool part 5
2006-08-04 00:10:00
I haven't covered the most useful .NET tool yet, the wonderful Reflector. If you haven't got this yet, download it now.One of the great things about Delphi development was the fact that Borland provides the source to the whole component library, which really helps tracking down weird bugs and work out how their stuff works. Microsoft don't provide the source to the .NET Framework, but with Reflector it doesn't matter. It can reverse-engineer any .NET assembly and you can see how it works. Yes, some class library developers obfuscate their libraries, but Microsoft don't and that's the most important library.Reflector also has several add-ins that do useful things like reverse-engineering a whole assembly which is useful for, er, more nefarious deeds. There are also plug-ins to generate Delphi code and other languages. So, as I said before, if you haven't got it, get it NOW!
More About: Tool , Part

Use the tool, tool part 3
2006-08-04 00:09:00
According to 'Working effectively with legacy code', any code without unit tests can be considered legacy code. That means pretty much every piece of software I've ever worked on is legacy code.Before .NET, writing unit tests was hard. In my Delphi days I tried to use DUnit but the language didn't lend itself to writing a tool that was simple to use. In .NET, attributes and reflection make it much easier. So we have NUnit, which has been the tipping point for me writing unit tests.As well as testing functionality, unit testing also helps validate the design of a system. If it's hard to write tests for your classes, chances are the design isn't too great. It suggests too much coupling and cohesion between the classes.Unit tests are always mentioned in the context of agile development, but there is no reason why they can't be used without adopting the whole philosophy. I have my doubts about some of the agile approach but I still believe unit tests are worthwhile. In the short ...
More About: Tool , Part , Part 3

Use the tool, tool part 1
2006-08-04 00:07:00
OK, the title is pinched from an article by Malcolm Groves, but I like it.After a week of having to work on an XLA written in the worst development language of all time, VBA, I suddenly realised the importance of using the right tools. You can be the best programmer in the world, but if you're using crap tools, your solution will still be crap.So here is the first in an occasional series of articles highlighting what I reckon are the best development tools. I spend most of my time doing .NET development, so I'm going to concentrate on that side of things.The first and probably most important tool is your IDE. And the clear choice is VS.NET 2003. OK, it falls over occasionally but I've very rarely lost any work. The choice is also easy just by a process of elimination.VS.NET 2002 was essentially a 1.0 product, so best avoided.VS.NET 2005 is a beta, so best avoided. And is just me, or is it one of the most butt ugly pieces of software ever?Delphi 2005 is, by all accounts, flaky as ...
More About: Tool , Part

How to choose colours for a website
2006-07-07 14:10:00
With my grade E in GCSE Art, my art skills have never been up to much. So my website colour choices have always been pretty ugly. I was therefore very pleased to find Colour Blender, which makes the choices for you.
More About: Website , How To , Colours , Site , Webs

The construction of a disco shed
2006-06-18 21:00:00
Here are some photos of the construction of my disco shed. I'm very pleased with the final outcome and I learnt a few things on the way. First I discovered that air-raid shelters are very difficult to pull down, especially when the bolts are all rusted in. Cutting through them with a hacksaw takes a flipping long time. Then I learnt that laying a concrete slab is a pretty big job. When I calculated I needed 68 bags of ballast (which is sand mixed with gravel) I thought I'd made a mistake. In fact it turned out I actually needed more. A cement mixer was pretty much essential as well. Also, getting the base level is quite important. Mine is a little bit out so my chair rolls down the slope when I'm sat at my desk. Not so bad that I fly out the door, but if I'd made more of an effort to get the base exactly level I wouldn't have the problem. Finally, a disco ball is absolutely essential for the modern disco shed...
More About: Construction , Disco , Const , Cons , Disc

Skype rocks
2006-06-02 17:24:00
OK, so I'm about 12 months late but I've only just got round to using Skype on a regular basis and it's great. Most importantly it just works. I've had long conversations with people in the US and Australia and it drops out very rarely. Compared to my experiences with Yahoo Messenger (where conversations tended to consist of 'what was that?', 'you still there?', 'I'll call you again, see if it's any better', 'can you type out whatever you're trying to say', 'I give up, I'll call you on the landline') this is very pleasing.Any negatives? Sending files can sometimes be very slow (but this is still better than MSN which sometimes just refuses to accept files) and I can't seem to find a way to search through past chats.And it's written in Delphi, so perhaps there is life in the old dog yet.
More About: Rocks

Weather Bonk
2006-05-17 17:13:00
Bonk probably has a different meaning in the US, but other than the strange name, this website is pretty good. I think it's pushing AJAX and Google Maps to its limits, as moving around can get pretty slow, but it has all the weather info you could ever need along with links to webcams. And even better, you can plug it into your own website in about two minutes.
More About: Weather

Diabolical dialogs
2006-04-25 15:59:00
Apparently Windows Vista will have a whole slew of new dialog boxes for us to contend with. This is all in the name of security so perhaps there is some reason behind the apparent insanity, but us programmers have a bit of a soft spot for dialog boxes and our users don't.For a programmer, a dialog box is often the easy way out. What's the alternative? It depends on the scenario, but the typical situation where we would consider popping up a dialog is when the user is about to do something that could lead to some kind of data loss, so we throw up a dialog saying 'Are you sure?'. The alternative here is to have some kind of undo functionality and that can be pretty tricky to implement.So why don't users like dialogs? Because they interrupt workflow. The user is merrily going about their business when up pops a dialog and they have to think about the answer. After a while of course they learn to ignore the dialog and just hit the Enter key, which is another problem with dialogs th...
More About: Dialog , Logs , Dial

Virgin Wines are spammers
2006-04-08 22:05:00
I can't remember how it all started. I think I entered some competition that offered the chance to win some free wine (how could I refuse?) and Virgin Wine s got hold of my email address. Soon I was getting an email every week or so exhorting me to purchase a case of wine. I've no idea whether Virgin Wines provide decent wine or not, but the fact I've got a Majestic Wines about five minutes away means I wasn't tempted to purchase anything from them, so I sent an email to unsubscribe@virginwines.com (after all they are reputable company, right?). Then, nothing. the emails kept coming. So I sent another. And the emails still didn't stop.Then I got an email from the founder of Virgin Wines, not apologizing but offering me more wine to buy. So I replied directly to him telling him his unsubscribe functionality didn't work. I then got an email from Customer Services saying "Thank you for contacting Virgin Wines and we have arranged for the email address you have provided to be remov...
More About: Spam , Spammer

Nobody has ever needed to do this before
2006-04-06 17:39:00
So I'm still trawling through this ASP.NET app and keep finding great WTFs. I spotted this method in one of the classesprivate ArrayList SplitString(string str, string separator)So presumably the writer of this piece of code assumed nobody had ever faced a similar problem before and might have provided a solution in the framework???? Anyway, that's some more redundancy I can get rid of.
More About: Body , This , Ever , Need , Fore

The copy and paste anti-pattern
2006-04-03 17:10:00
I've just picked up somebody else's ASP.NET 1.1 application and like probably every developer who's picked up somebody else's code, I think it's crap.The thing that worries me most is how hard it is to create a new page. I create a new web form and then I have to copy and paste the markup form another page. Then I need to go through and add a bit of code to the code behind file.ASP.NET provides lots of mechanisms to avoid having to do this (as does pretty much every other web development platform). We have page inheritance, so common code can be put in a parent class. We have user controls, so bits of repeated HTML can be put in them.OK, a bit of setting up of a new page may well be necessary but copying and pasting, whether markup or code, is a very bad sign. When the change request comes through (as it always does) to redesign the whole site, if every single file needs to be modified, life will be very painful.
More About: Past , Pattern , Anti , Copy , Paste

The Road To Guantanamo
2006-03-11 00:16:00
I've always followed the career of film director Michael Winterbottom since he went to the same school as me. He directed the great '24 Hour Party People', chronicling the coolest record label of my teeenage years. He also did '9 Songs', the most sexually explicit film to get a certificate in this country, a record that I'm sure will be highlighted in the school's old boys' magazine...Anyway, I saw his latest, 'The Road To Guantanamo ', last night and it was great, in a horrendously depressing kind of way. Yes, the 11th of September attacks were horrific but can that excuse the kind of treatment that was handed out to these people (and is still being handed out to the 500 people still there). We protect our democracy by ignoring all the rights that democracy confers on people?Of course it can be said that the film isn't entirely objective, based as it is on the accounts of the inmates. But since the US doesn't seem too keen on letting anybody else in there to see what's ...
More About: The Road , Namo

There's a reason they are called exceptions
2006-03-10 22:10:00
Whenever you read about exceptions, one of the key points is that exceptions should only be thrown in exceptional circumstances. An example might be when a file the application can't survive without doesn't exist. However I've seen on several occassions now exceptions being used where the particular problem could be expected to happen on a fairly regular basis, if not every time the application runs.A common example can be found when trying to convert a string to an int. In .NET 1.1, int doesn't have a TryParse method so a quick and dirty approach to implementing similar functionality might be as shown hereint val = 0;try{ val = int.Parse(stringVal);}catch (FormatException ){}This solution can be fine when stringVal will generally be a valid int, but if it's used when stringVal is often not a valid int (when reading the value from a config file that by default doesn't contain any value for instance), it can become annoying. Why's that then I hear you cry? Just turn off break...
More About: They , Reason , Here , Call

The IT Crowd
2006-03-03 23:15:00
Written by the same bloke who wrote 'Father Ted', starring Chris Morris and being about IT people, how could 'The IT Crowd ' fail to deliver? Well it was reasonably amusing but was never quite the sum of its parts. I think the basic problem was that to hit the mark it would need to make techy jokes that would be lost on the general population. So the fact it is about IT people is kind of irrelevant, it's just another bunch of misfits in an on office sitcom. Saying that, I watched every episode, which is unusual since I don't really watch the telly anymore (unless you count CBeebies).The ending suggested there'll be another series, so perhaps that will allow the characters to grow somewhat.

Make your own radio station on the net
2006-02-20 21:49:00
There are a couple of great sites that can help to find new music. First up there's Pandora that creates a radio station based on an artist or song name you choose. It works out songs based on the characteristics of that first choice, and can then be trained by giving the thumbs-up or down for particular tracks.The other site is last.fm. This seems to use various methods to choose similar songs, like accepting cash from record companies (just like a proper radio station then). It also plugs into your media player of choice which is probably pretty handy, although I've not checked this out yet. It's also a bit more of a community since you can tag songs and join groups and all that kind of stuff.
More About: Radio , The Net , The N , Your , Station