BinaryJam

I don’t know how they do it.  They have a great knack of determining which of my orders I desperately want delivered on time and working and lousing it up. 

All my small orders that I don’t care about arrive super fast or at least fast enough so I couldn’t worry about where it was, but important orders ballsed up every time. 

Again I waited in all friday for an eBuyer delivery “next day”, no sign of the item one completely wasted day and now the trouble of getting the delivery sorted as I wont be available for collection now hence the urgency of the next day delivery.

Now I find its tomorrow its coming a whole five days “late”.

I wouldn’t mind normally, stuff happens and Im not losing a leg or anything, but its always to me and its always when timely delivery would have really helped.

To add assemblies into the list of assemblies for references in Visual Studio 2003 you can edit the registry and add them there

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\7.1\AssemblyFolders\MyLibrary]
@=”D:\\Development\\BinaryJam\\MyLibrary”

Well in 64bit land this is changed to

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\VisualStudio\7.1\AssemblyFolders\MyLibrary]
@=”D:\\Development\\BinaryJam\\MyLibrary”

Hey presto there they are in the References Dialog

This is a test of Windows live write and flickr plugin.  So I thought I would put a picture of Walsall Illuminations from last friday.  Considering the amount of people it was hard not to have a man with something coming out of his head, in this case lasers.

tags: walsall+illuminations

This time in a different way.  I normally go out on Tuesdays with my mate here’s the mail I got from him.  Some Hints, Mandy = Wife, Lee=Oldest Son.

If (!Cream Crackered)
    If (Lee goin out)
            If (Mark Sitting)
                        Mandy = Wendys
                        If (You want)
                                    Poker = my house
                        Else
                                    Telly = On
            Else
                        Mandy = Home
                        Poker = Your House
    Else
            Mandy = Wendys
            Poker = Your house
Else
            Beer++
            Telly++
            Slob++

It just amused me.  I thought Slob++ was particularly funny.

DSC00350

Originally uploaded by SimonTocker.

Its an odd picture to blog about but this is a blog from flickr test. Feel free to steal as a texture if you want.

If you are daft enough to remove your HttpHandler from the GAC don’t be surprised if sharepoint goes bang.

I did just that and hit Site Settings and got a plain file not found message, not very helpful.

I narrowed it down to the last scarey thing I did which was HttpHandlers, deleted the entries and all was working I then figured I removed it from the GAC and sps bin folder so Sharepoint was not finding the dll.  Pretty poor message though.

I’ve been doing this programming lark for quite a while, like many programmers its starts young, then after long long years you’ve trained practically every neuron and synapse in your brain in a certain fashion optimised for logic and code,  Well it sometimes feels like that.

Take today, I’m listening to Bill Bryson’s “Short History of Nearly Everything”** and near the beginning he describes the point where the universe started, what cosmologists like to call “Tee equals zero”.  Now I’m sure that a lot of people on hearing this phrase will visualise this as an equation, the human mind visualises things for example “don’t think about elephants” is a usual trigger test.  Thing is when I visualised this it looked like this

{
    T=0;
}

I put braces in there, but then think a bit deeper, I never declared T, is this just an oversight from a few years in VB* or deep down did I not want to put a limit on Time.

* I always used option explicit.
** Yes I know its the layman’s guide and I’ve read other more complex books on cosmology, but I like Bryson and its interesting to see what he has done with a subject way out of his usual safety zone.  And I’m a layman and never really understood the hard bits of those books.

*** Look at my definition for 0, it is implied that in the code piece above that T is an integer.  I’m pretty sure that in universal design there are no integers, except in death of course, that’s pretty definite.

tags: bryson, programming+life, cosmology, is+time+an+integer

Nearby where I live is Pooley Fields/Alvecote Pools a site of special scientific interest.

After the intial quarter of a mile of this its a great spot, and I say this because unfortunately its a great place to walk your dog. I hate dog walkers. I hate a specific type of Dog walker, the type that would happily leave their dogs mess all over the public streets for people to step in rather than use their back gardens or clean it up. Whilst this is a wild open space, wild animals dont leave huge droppings in the path.

Any way, the place is really great, some good woodland growing around what I think is an old slag heap. The SSSI part comes from the lichens and mosses and sheer diversity in the area. But what I love about the place is the Mushrooms. Being a bit damp as fenland normally is there are loads of mushrooms. The most dramatic the area being Fly Agaric.

I think I went a little late in the season as a lot of them had been under attack from, well who knows what. Last year there was an abundance of these things forming in rings, no I don’t believe in fairies, stop clapping.

I found some others too I think are edible, but not being able to fully identify them there was no way I was going to fry em up with some sausages.

I think this is a common puffball a little worse for wear this one, but it is brown with the spikey spots, I did find one fresh one just emerging in much better condition, but only half emerged I let it be.

Here is the location from local.live

I have been playing about with ajax recently,  actually I’ve been doing ajax and dynamic web applications since IE4 was released, I was lucky enough to spend 9 months programming a client side dynamic application back then using RDS MTS and dhtml classes, its just this .NET postback model dragged me away from it.  But anyway I’ve been playnig with it again.

What I wanted to do was use ajax in a webpart however its the same old story, having to have a seperate web site to host the data side of the relationship then configure sharepoint to allow that site as an exclusion url…….

Well no need I can do it with HttpHandlers in the same web part that is making the request, this should overcome the security issue of cross website posting, instead of having to resort to Dynanic Script calling using JSON (see links below)

http://tagneto.org/how/reference/js/DynamicScriptRequest.html

http://ajaxpatterns.org/On-Demand_Javascript

Now I haven’t tried it yet, bit busy at the minute, but I have no reason to believe it won’t work, after all the images thing did and this is very similar.

*Update* : It worked just fine, however I used Json output instead of trying to parse XML the end product seemed faster.  Also I still used the dynamic calling method, so this is not a full test of security bypassing but it keeps all code together, except for the remote data web service, as the json object is a web service proxy also.
Again you need to check that sharepoint is not being overloaded by your webpart being a httphandler

*Update Again* : I have more posts on this site and some working source code.  See
Ajax and Sharepoint
Ajax and Sharepoint 2
Yet another Ajax Sharepoint Part

tags: webpart+development, sharepoint, ajax, json

As this is the time of the climate change conference there is a lot of news about climate change. Over the past few weeks I’ve heard more and more about climate change.

Listening to the Today programme each morning on BBC Radio 4 I get to hear politicians spouting their latest green message. But there are some that particularly stick out.

The most notable was this morning an American representative was being quizzed about the current administrations attitude and actions relating to climate change. When asked about the continuing increasing carbon emissions from the United States and how poor their performance at reducing this has been, the response was that whilst they agreed there was an increasing rise in carbon emissions their own scale of measurement they used to measure improvement showed that they were doing really well.

Did you catch that their own scale of measurement showed that they were doing well. Well this blog doesn’t get many hits really; I don’t expect it to, but on my scale of how well its doing it’s the best most successful god damn blog in the world.

I’m feeling quite disappointed about progress on environmental issues so expect a few more posts like this, on what I did start as a sharepointy blog.