I tend to listen to a lot of technical podcasts, I even installed a new car stereo to make this easier to do during my daily commute. I've blogged before about the podcasts that I listen to but when I was asked recently for a list I felt it was time for an update. Programming (.Net, Ruby...) Code Mongrel A very good show focusing on open source software development but not very frequently published. RSS ...
Sony Bluetooth car stereo from TECHNIKdirekt.de €204. VW Golf car stereo fascia and adapters from eBay.ie €44. Installing it yourself with only a swiss army knife 1 hour. Doing it all for €212 less than quoted by Halfords! ...priceless.
It took me a while to find these, so I thought I would post them here. In the end I had to search the source code to find them. :before_save, :after_save, :before_create, :after_create, :before_update, :after_update, :before_validation, :after_validation, :before_validation_on_create, :after_validation_on_create, :before_validation_on_update, :after_validation_on_update, :before_destroy, :after_destroy, :validate_on_create, :validate_on_update, :validate I was searching for these amongst MongoMapper doucmentation and blog posts when really they are an ActiveSupport concept as the following comment suggests: Almost all of this callback stuff is...
One of the reasons I like to play with other languages from time to time is to find new ways of solving problems. This is why, while learning Ruby on Rails, I am making a conscious effort to do things the Ruby way, as opposed to writing C# style code in Ruby. While working on my new blog page, I encountered a problem that was identical to one I had on a previous project but using ASP.Net MVC. In...
My blog has been a Word Press application for a while now but two things have been bothering me. I spent ages playing with the application settings and server settings to try and get the URLs the way I wanted, they are still not what I want. Nothing complex, I justed wanted a little more control. There are thousands of plugins that do almost what I want, but none that do exactly what I want. Most are customizable but sometimes...
As a way of learning a new framework I started to write my own blog application using Ruby on Rails. I've also taken the opportunity to try a bit of BDD using Cucumber, which I'm finding is a lot of fun. One feature that I have written recently and particularly like is: Feature: Main Title In order to improve SEO and help readers know what they are looking at The reader or search engine spider will need the name...
Update: I have a new updated list of my favourite podcasts. I listen to mostly programming podcasts, namely: Hanselminutes (RSS) Stackoverflow (RSS) Herding Code (RSS) - My favorite by far Software Engineering Radio (RSS) .Net Rocks (RSS) Polymorphic Podcast (RSS) Deep Fried Bytes (RSS) Selected items from from IT Conversations (RSS) Non programming related include: BrainStuff (RSS) - These are very short...
Switching between Visual Studio instances with different workspaces can be very frustrating as it is hard to tell which workspace solution is open. I was planning on writing a plug-in to display the workspace name in the title bar when I found this question on Stackoverflow by someone with a similar problem, Working with different versions/branches of the same Visual Studio 2005 solution. One of the comments there suggested the use of 'hard links' to the solution file. I have...
I was in a Maplin store yesterday returning a set of precision screw drivers that were of such poor quality that I asked to see the manager to complain. I showed the manager where it said "Quality Tools" on the box then I showed him how the tiny shafts just rotated in the handles and came off. I showed how the ones that didn't fall apart weren't even straight (so crooked that they couldn't be used). They were so bad...
Correctly managing your systems settings during both development and deployment can save you a lot of time. When ever you have to manually change settings there is the opportunity to mess up, so I try to automate any repetitive configuration tasks. It often happens that application settings or connection strings are needed by more than one component in your system. The solution I use is a variation of this method of sharing app.config files between applications, except that it allows each...
Everybody knows that you shouldn't put lots of business logic into stored procedures, right? Well maybe not, but whether or not you agree with this statement you'll always find some cases where it just makes things easier or more efficient to have your business rules close to the data. Often business rules mean dealing with record types, flags and other magic numbers. These numbers normally correspond to enumerations or constants in our favourite high level language (for me C#). So...
Was at a great talk by Scott Guthrie today in Dublin. One thing he talked about near the end was the new IIS SEO Toolkit, this I was able to try as soon as I came home. It was very easy to install and can be pointed at any website (not just your own). To install: If you haven't already, get the Web Platform Installer. Select and install the 'Search Engine Optimization Toolkit'. Then, to examine a site: Start 'Internet Information Services (IIS)...
Most developers I've worked with would have come to me at some point and asked questions like: What is the best way to implement this new feature? What do you think of this design, is it good enough? This to me indicates that software developers in general do take pride in their work and try to achieve the first part of the Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship: Not only working software, but also well-crafted software Given that most developers are competent...
I've had my HTC Hero for a few weeks now and I have to say it's fantastic. I've never owned an iPhone or other smart phone so I can't really give a proper review but I'll make a few points. The first thing that strikes me is that the user interface looks shiny and sleek but is also very practical. I know other phones already do this but putting widgets on the home screen is a great way to customize...
Today I ran into one of the limitations of shared hosting. I've been struggling for the last few weeks to handle large files in my application. I published to the server earlier this week but with no success. All my tests failed after 10 minutes with a 'Request timed out' error. I was testing with an 80mb file but with a slow broadband connection (thanks to Ice). I had increased the timeout and max request length for the upload handler...
I use different settings for my application when it is running on the live server and when it is running on my development machine. To manage this I name my config files using the target name like so: Web.Debug.config Web.Release.config Adding the following to the project file will cause MSBuild to automatically copy the correct file to 'Web.config' when you build the project in Visual Studio. In my case the 'BeforeBuild' target was already in the project file but commented...
Someone asked me a question recently about mocking, and I had to say I didn't have much experience with it. I found this answer a bit odd myself as I've been doing a lot of TDD with an ASP.Net MVC application. I'd seen lots of people talking about mocking the HttpContext and wondered "Why haven't I had to do this?". The first time I started TDD, I was working on converting an existing ASP.Net application to ASP.Net MVC....
It's just the nerdiest geekiest phone ever. The operating is open source plus check out the cool logo. I just have to get one. Sadly it's not available in Ireland. People who have imported the phones and unlocked them have reported some problems when trying to get the full use from the network. So I don't think I will chance doing this. I read today however, that there is an "Android Dev Phone 1" available "outside of T-Mobile geographies". It's...
If you've been following the Tadmap blog then you might be wondering why there haven't been any updates since November. Well here's why. Before Christmas I decided to try out the new ASP.Net MVC framework, for no other reason than wanting to learn more about it. My initial impression was that it would be ideal for Tadmap, so I decided to go for it. The change over meant refactoring all the pages I already had into controller and views, and...
It's a new year, a time to start those good habits again. One thing I want to start doing this year is to write more blog posts. Four blog posts in November, that's pretty good going for me but then nothing in December. The reason I hesitate when it comes to publishing stuff is that I'm not very good at writing. But that's not going to change with out some practice. The other reason not to publish something is the feeling...
Update: SP1 is now installed for ASP.Net 3.5. So now the only DLL you need to upload is 'System.Web.Mvc.dll'. I was reading a little bit about the new ASP.Net MVC stuff. I think it would be ideal for my Tadmap (image hosting) project. Before I started any major development re-work I needed to check that my hosting provider, Blacknight, could host it. So I uploaded the sample MVC application. Of course it didn't work at first but I don't give up...
One of my interests is in early maps. I don't have a big collection or anything but I would like to be able to browse them on my computer or show them to other people. One of my hobby projects is to provide a website that does just that. The technical aspects of developing Tadmap I will probably write about on this blog, but I am also writing on the Tadmap blog if you are interested in learning more about...
I have never really thought about it before, but I hardly ever type 'WWW' into an address bar. Out of habit I skip this part of any URL. It has never caused me any problems till this week, for one of my own websites. As I've said in an earlier post, I have added OpenID support to one of my websites. I used the DotNetOpenId library. This library made the development very easy and was up and running in no...
I use Visual Studio full time in work so it is an obvious choice as an IDE at home as well. As none of my hobby projects are revenue generating and are quite small, the Express (free) editions of Visual Studio are another obvious choice. I have been using the Web Developer, C#, SQL versions of Visual Studio Express and find them sufficient for my small to medium projects. The express editions are very limiting when it comes to plugins and...
No, you can't log into your Rabo Bank account using an OpenID, it is feasable but I suspect it is a few years away. I am currently implementing OpenID support (as a relying party) to a website I am working on and have become a big fan of the protocol. I was thinking about the different ways that OpenID providers could use to authenticate you such as password, phone-call etc... It then struck me, when logging into Rabo they use a very secure...
The links on this post are no longer valid. I hope to post on this topic again in the future. I'm trying to overlay Google Earth with a pair old maps. The latest Google Earth has a very simple overlay tool. You just select an image and drag/stretch it over the correct area. The hard part is making sure the image is of the correct projection, Plate Carrée, otherwise stuff gets squished together at the poles. The maps I've started...
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I don't want my blog to become somewhere that I complain about everything but I have to get this of my chest. Here is a currently ongoing story of me trying to get vouchers for a replacement camera that I am owed from Currys in Limerick. Remember it's a blog, so read form the bottom to get the full story.
I was on holiday last week, in the north of the country. I was a way from internet access for most of the week but I decided to send some MMS pictures of the places I was at to this blog. I had sent about 6 or 7 photos, which is not free, and towards the end of the week I was looking forward to seen how my travels looked. I found an internet cafe but when I checked my...
I have just discovered a scam used by amazon.co.uk to trick Euro shoppers into buying products from them. I am an Irish user of the amazon website and as such I pay attention to the 'approx' Euro price of products when shopping around for the best price. This Euro price I thought was an 'approx' because of the varying exchange rates, but I always assumed it was close enough to use. This is not the case! The sterling price given...
When I first found out about using the google search as a calculator I was very impressed. I experimented with different units such as "one and a half parallax seconds a year in angstroms per second". I was, however, immediately disappointed when I tried to use currencies in my calculations and they wouldn't work. But now Google have added a currency converter to their search so you can do things like "50 pounds a mile in €/km". Now you can...
I've started using AuctionSniper.com to do my ebay bidding. It didn't work the first time I've tried it but I have since won auctions at bargain prices. A nice feature is bidding groups. Here you can bid on a group of items until you have won enough. For example if you want a hard-drive, you would look on ebay for any hard-drives you would like, give a max bid for each and auctionsniper will keep last-minute bidding on each of...
From time to time I would be browsing stuff on Wikipedia and come across an interesting article that I would like to read, but at a later time. Specifically I would like to be able to read it while away from the computer. I used to print off pages, but this proved to be a waste of paper (particularly when I end up not reading many printouts) and very messy (with lots of sheets of paper lying around). I was...