May 2007 Entries
Next Tuesday I will be giving my "Introducing CardSpace" presentation to NIMTUG (the Northern Ireland Microsoft Technologies User Group) at the Wellington Park Hotel. There's even a reception afterwards; I wonder if this means beer :) The event is free to NIMTUG members, and membership of NIMTUG is free. Details and registration can be found on the event page. Technorati tags: CardSpace, nimtug
Oh dear. I remember the First Tuesday events; copious amounts of beer, copious amounts of VC cash, copious amounts of bad business ideas and copious amounts of egos; which soured due as the attendees became less technical and business orientated and more recruitment pimps, lawyers, PR bunnies and the organisers trying to take a slice of every deal. And it appears it's coming back, an email received which pleads "please don't tell anyone about this email...." and is signed by a new "chief executive" with yet a suitably unusual name; "Christer" (you can't help but giggle really). "First Tuesday...
The booking site for DDD#5 is now live (amusingly someone discovered the URI and its spreading virally; there's there wasn't even a public agenda at the time; it appeared about an hour later). I had booked a space just in case but was delighted to discover that I will be speaking again, on CardSpace. So my collection of DDD speaker shirts grows again, one for every DDD (excluding the first one where we didn't have any); now I need to start planning for DDD#6 .... Technorati tags: DDD, DDD5 DDD#5, Developer Day, Cardspace
For the last few months I've been having a tingling in my hands, and not the good type. When I ended up dropping things a couple of weeks back I went to the doctor (well, being male you ignore any sign of illness until it becomes a real problem). "Ah, RSI" she said, "Do you have private health insurance?" Finally a reason to use the BUPA coverage I have been paying for through work. The private appointment date arrived (it's a couple of weeks away, nice to see even going private doesn't give you any great speed when getting...
Should I be worried about my performance review in 2 weeks time? Andrew says (16:11): certainly explains why I feel I don't NEED to know the detail of how XML is serialised... barry says (16:11): Well there is the MagicSerialisationPixie class .... Andrew says (16:12): Hm... maybe I can derive a Kylie : MagicSexPixie... barry says (16:12): "MagicSexPixie does not implement Penis property" Andrew says (16:13): I don't care if it implements, as long as it consumes. Technorati tags: geek humour
As any developer knows the platform they develop on has its problems. However when a representative of that platform promotes a narrow minded, badly focused viewpoint it doesn't help matters. "If you look at what you regard as the traditional professions — doctors, teachers, lawyers — their professional bodies can fire people, can investigate complaints, can impose penalties, and the ultimate sanction is to remove them from the profession, so you can't practice any more," Fishenden said. "It would be good, if we want to be respected as a profession, for there to be some method of ensuring the...
It was the NxtGen Fest07 event yesterday; but client work meant I couldn't attend, which also meant I couldn't pick up my award for Best Presentation, Oxford. Chris Seary picked it up on my behalf and (I am told) attempted to give my acceptance speech in an Irish accent (below). Someone please tell me you videoed it. Obviously would have loved to be there today; but unfortunately I’m filming the next Bond movie in the Bahamas right now, as you can see from the back drop on this video link. Actually I don’t know what the award...
If you've never seen Rich, John or Dave in action, or you wonder what the fuss about NxtGenUG is all about then you can see the terrible threesome in action; channel9 visited our Coventry NxtGenUG meeting at the start of this year, which we held inside the Argosy Cargo Plane at the Midland Air Museum in Coventry. There are three videos: In the first John Price gives Charles the low down on the group and the museum. In the second, Richard Costall interviews NxtGenUG members: Ray Starkey, Stuart Wells, Geff Lombardi, Andrew Jacks and James Coulter. Finally we get to...
This is getting rather silly; if you insert tags using Windows Live Writer it creates divs with a guid ID; which is invalid, as id and name attributes cannot start with a number. If you insert images it adds a contenteditable attribute which it appears to have up on its very own. *sigh* Lack of attention to detail Microsoft. [edit: 22-May 2007] After posting my whinge on the Writer forums I got a response from one of the team; the ID issue will be fixed in the release after next (the next release is in code freeze right now) and...
Oh dear; gnu is at it again. This is the perfect example of how not to be an open source advocate; promoting a free audio format by suggesting to users that they .... download an entirely new media player. iTunes users won't give up iTunes just for a codec. WMP users won't give up WMP just for a codec. And in fact there are ways to get Ogg into those players (xiph, the keeps of Ogg have official iTunes support and link from their Windows page to a WMP plugin); but what do GNU do? Push their agenda further, ignoring...
The OU has released some course materials under a Creative Commons license. They've included 24 technology units (units are sections of a course); including some I've taken as part of my ongoing quest to get letters after my name. You don't even have to register to get access to the materials. The courses range from technology, through science, health, maths, education to arts and history (which includes a creative writing course, handy for all those tech specs you want to write.) Technorati tags: OU, Education, Free, Creative Commons
A while back the call went out for a .NET speakers who would come to Ireland; and now the Irish Microsoft Technology Conference has been finally announced by Claire Dillon. Yes, I am speaking, giving my "Hacking Web Sites for Fun & Profit" talk (which doesn't appear to be as trendy as all the other topics, but Dominick Baier beat me to a CardSpace presentation!). I'm not sure this counts as an international engagement for me as I was born north of the border, but it does give me a a birthday cake, as my birthday is the day after and...
Phil just announced the release of Subtext 1.9.5; New Features Content Tagging and Tag Cloud - for more details, refere to this post. Identicon Support - Uses the Identicon Handler project on CodePlex. MyBrand Feedburner Support - Updated our FeedBurner implementation to support custom feedburner URLs Upgrade to LightBox 2.0 - If you referenced the default lightbox skin in your custom skin, please reference this post by Simone to understand how to update the skin. Author CSS Class - The CSS class of "author" is added to comments left by the owner of a blog (must...
I was a bit of a selfish bunny at the London Girl Geek Dinner last week, and cornered Eileen Brown to see if she had a SQL minion that could help me try to get the client tools installed again; unfortunately the SQL Evangelist position is still open, but after refilling her wine glass and joking she owed me a support call for being her booze monkey she reached into her handbag and produced a quick assist card. If you've ever found yourself at a party and someone says "Can you fix my computer?", well Microsoft have the answer...