BinaryJam

Now, lucky me, I have a license for Photoshop 6.  But being on W2k3server x64 I can’t use it anymore.  So rather than go to the expense of Photoshop for a couple of image edits a month, if that, I had been using Paint.NET.

It was quite good but not without its problems, my favourite was to select an area of an image then watch the processor usage jump up to 50% just to animate the selection box.  It inability to deal with multiple documents also.

Well the Alpha of Paint.NET 3.0 is out and those two items are fixed and believe me when I say the multiple document handling is one of the best I’ve seen so far.

This app is no replacement for Photoshop if your a professional user, but for infrequent use especially just for photo re-touching its more than adequate it will suit down to the ground. 

I think that version 3.0 has ironed out some of the bugs and shortcomings of the interface and I just hope that now they will focus on more effects and better algorithms for the ones they have.  Although the Tile reflection effect is a joy and so is glow.

It was my wife’s and I’s anniversary this weekend gone and we went away for the night to Wroxton House Hotel.  We had a great room and a fantastic dinner, but then my brother is the head chef (hence the Shameless plug element).  This place is in the middle of nowhere but near banbury and who wants to go there !

I can recommend room two if you like stairs and loft space, no really it was quaint and quite large which makes up for the apex.

My brothers quite a cook too, have the lamb, I don’t normally eat lamb but I make an exception when my brother cooks it, he seems to get it just right and the cuts are perfect.  The chocolate tart was way too rich, so rich I scoffed the lot.

IF you just want a meal the price was reasonable to £22.50 a head for 3 courses (obviously check this as menus change all the time usually the season).

The down side is if you want to walk round the village, there is not one, ok ok there is a church and 10 or so houses your done in 10 minutes, they are nice thatched cottages though.  Good job its close to Straford-upon-Avon.

Some more photos

Its here look.

Well with a name like that how could I resist. I mean a Herb centre but National ! Who could possibly imagine the delights that lay ahead in a National herb centre.

Well I could not believe my eyes as I walked through the magnificent front entrance. The scankiest excuse for garden centre on the face of the planet. Bucking current trends of great facilities, huge ranges of garden paraphenalia large stocks of plant, there was practically nothing. A poor excuse for a shop, plants that were dead and dying ravaged by insects, I know its close to winter but hey. A childs play area for those children with the attention span of a goldfish.

Its only saving grace was the coffee was really nice in the coffee house, even if it does take 15 minutes from point of order to arrive.

But despite this the car park was full (everyone was in the coffe house though).

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