BinaryJam

So those in the UK did you watch HFW program last night on Channel 4 ?

Its part of the channels Big Food Fight season, which is not what it sounds or pitched as in the paper ads or early transmissions.  The season is about teaching people where there food comes from and some cooking with Gordon.

Hugh’s Chicken run details just why a chicken can be sold at £5 a pair, once a meat that was expensive and could only be afforded as a once a week treat (in recent times) is now cheaper than a pint of beer.  When you consider that this is a living breathing animal that requires care and feeding its amazing that it can be produced for this amount, considering that the price to farmer can be as low as 3p a bird (source http://www.brandrepublic.com/News/775006//).  Well actually it’s not amazing at all it’s despicable.

Long have I been aware of just how chickens are kept and for as long as I can remember I have bought free-range chicken and eggs.  I have never really felt comfortable with that either.  I am well aware that free-range on a large scale is slightly better than intensive.

Reading the C4 site on Logos details the amount of chickens per sq metre and even the Soil association chicken is at 10 per sq m.  That’s still a lot of chickens, but I can only assume that it refers to the space in the shed (max 1000 birds per shed) and more space is available.

So UK people if you’ve not seen the program, watch out for the next installment its where things really start to heat up.  We’ve already witnessed a small intro of “culling” the small and failing birds on the program.  Seeing a little fluffy easter chick having its neck broken because it may not reach optimum performance.  Nice Industry.  I bet it happens in free range and organic too.

So watch this series and Jamie’s program on friday night (11/Jan/08) C4 (9.00pm I think) and start to learn the reality of where your food comes from.

If you then care about putting a stop to full-on intensive farming them sign up by clicking the campaign logo below.

For readers in other countries (and UK) I’m sure there are ways for you to find out about where your meat comes from, ask questions in the butchers, if they don’t know then go somewhere that does.  Take some interest in what you are putting in your body.  Do you really want to stuff factory produced meat pumped with biotics into yourself making those bacteria in your lungs immune to a dose of penicillin ?

Technorati tags: chicken out, river cottage, food fight

So it looks like things are really starting to swing towards blu-ray in the war of the HD formats on disc.

In this announcement (taken from the register) Warner Studios have decided to drop HD-DVD from the supported formats and plumb for blu-ray only.

It’s a real shame that this format war is being fought with content providers instead of what is the best technology for the consumer, I’m not advocating either technology here, just that with studios now dropping HD-DVD and blockbuster only carrying blu-ray, for some of us the only movie rental store available nowadays, that the technology of choice is obviously blu-ray and is being made for us.

Saying this I’m still not ready to put my hand in my pocket and buy a HD player, only when one of the formats stamps the other into the muddy ground will I do it.  I have been burnt by a format war before, I went with the +RW option, spent quite a lot on a burner to find that -RW media was cheaper (at the time) by a lot and then dual format players were released at a fraction of the cost some months later. 

I have a love hate relationship with sony for many reasons, I got burnt in some way or another on my cd burner, Mini DV cam, Laptop, mp3 player in fact the only sony device that truly worked for me from the time I bought it was my PS2 and I sold that to get an xbox (v1) (doh!).  Not to forget the PSP, it works perfectly, except it’s too precious to take anywhere I’m scared of damaging it.

I’d like blu-ray to win, it give me an excuse to buy a PS3 !

Now I’m not much of a VBA person, in fact I hate doing, I avoid it like the plague.

Recently I was asked to knock something up that showed a report of our open calls. 

No problem I though just connect to the existing Web Service I will just knock up a simple asp.net 2 page with a grid and away I go.  This was easy enough until I wanted it deployed to IIS, and not having played with Studio 2005 that much I just gave up and thought I’ll do it in 2003.  Well long story short my machine really could do with a rebuild.

Damn, I’ll just do it in Office 2007 Excel, That’s all XML based now isn’t it !

HA!

For all MS’s talk of web services and connectivity excel can’t natively consume a web service.  If I’m wrong show me, please, but I could not find add web reference in the VBA or create a web service data connection.

Well the XP/2003 Office Toolkit came in handy it allows you to connect to a web service, tick the box and it generates a load of VBA code in a handy Class.  It doesn’t matter that it’s for 2003 it works in 2007 (did for me).

This worked great, once I figured out how to actually reference a cell in VBA, I had it ripping through a node list and putting the data into cells (its not a big report if it was then this is quite slow).

But there is just something really nasty about having Buttons “IN” the spreadsheet, its shoddy.

So I wondered how I could create a custom menu with buttons on it.

Well in 2007 with the Ribbon bar it could not be simpler.

Take a look at this series of posts by Ken Puls

http://www.excelguru.ca/blog/category/the-ribbon/  

This allowed me to quickly figure out how to create my own custom interface to execute the evil VBA macros making calls to web services.

Handy Tools :

CustomUIEditor – http://openxmldeveloper.org/archive/2006/05/26/CustomUIeditor.aspx

Web Service Toolkit – http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/info.aspx?na=22&p=1&SrcDisplayLang=en&SrcCategoryId=&SrcFamilyId=&u=%2fdownloads%2fdetails.aspx%3fFamilyID%3dfa36018a-e1cf-48a3-9b35-169d819ecf18%26DisplayLang%3den

Well I finally got through to xbox support and the process is no better than before, with one exception the person I spoke to was a joy to speak to, very apologetic and sympathetic, still could do nothing more than run through the checks and send me a returns label.

It’s all about attitude. The support person gave me no more than the last time but did not have the “take it or shove your xbox where the sun don’t shine” demeanor from my other calls.

So whilst I’m still absolutely fuming at being on my fourth xbox 360, I don’t feel as angry as I did last time I phoned them.  Then there is the fact I’m resigned to poor service and I’m convinced due to the high numbers of failures I’ll just get what I’m given and should think myself lucky.

Although we shall see when the replacement comes DOA like last time !