Meriden

March 7th, 2010

Well I have managed to move successfully and seamlessly and now instead of living in the city centre of Birmingham I am now living in the centre of Meriden which is apparently also the centre of England! (The centre of the centre! was also tempted to throw in a HTTP 301 reference, but I’ll spare you that)

Anyway, Meriden is a wonderful and quiet little village roughly 6 km from Birmingham International and around 3 miles from where I work, which has cut my commute down to 5 minutes by bus which is awesome.

I find that I am a lot happier here with friendly people from the village who say hello and don’t mind if you talk to them. Also not having to pass through Birmingham New Street station is a plus as the entire place is just pure depression and to be honest, it is not what you need first thing on a Monday morning, especially when that is combined with the arrogance and ignorance of inner city dwellers/commuters.

Anyway, I have a bigger flat that is actually a one bedroom flat and not a tiny little studio. It has a kitchen, bathroom and separate living and bedroom. Combined with the lack of drunkards walking past the window at night and central heating (oh my god electric storage heaters are utterly rubbish at keeping you warm) my sudden departure from Birmingham doesn’t seem like a bad idea at all, however I am lacking in the freezer, computer desk and land line department, but those will be sorted out in due course I suppose.

Looking forward to trying out the Heart of England way and attempting to walk down towards Henley-In-Arden and perhaps see some remnants of the Arden forrest.

Sadly the internet is in the form of net book and E71 which sometimes can be fairly stable and other times wont stay connected for more than a minute, which suffices for day to day Facebook browsing. Another development concerns my Nokia E71 and how woefully unstable it is becoming. It no longer can produce sound out from the speaker, so that means no ring tones, no alarms and certainly no text message alerts which is rather infuriating and also indicates that I will need a new phone in the very near future. Another thing is that it seems to be getting more and more unstable as time goes on. The web browser takes an age to load and running a few programs usually causes a kernel panic and the phone reboots without warning at random intervals, which is both worrying and vexing.

Geeking wise, I haven’t been up to much at all recently. I’ve set up Subversion and Trac to play with when I have the free time and to also get all my code up in to a central location as I keep loosing things that are scattered over several hard disks and machines. I am also going to get accustomed with Nagios again so that I have a playground to fiddle and break so that I can finally get that monitoring server set up at work (Which has been on my TODO list for around a year now). Started coding for a project handed to me by a friend over a year ago and another that started in November. Very slow progress as the last thing I want to do is code when I get in from work during the week.

Anyway all is good in the land of Meriden, we had a drugs bust in the flats across the way which was talk of the village, so it’s all happening here, very glad I moved.

Hiatus

February 7th, 2010

I know this isn’t the most exciting and widely seen blogs, but for some reason I feel the need to put my ideas out on to the clouds of the internet. No idea why I feel like I should as it is highly unlikely you the reader will empathise or care, due to the fact that you stumbled here from google looking for HTC or Illegal Operations attempted on a registry key marked for deletion. (HINT: If you are using NHibernate, use static proxies, saves a lot of pain rebooting the server trying to get on the fly proxies to compile. If not, well it’s a compiler problem, eliminate as much JIT compilation as possible.)

Anyway I digress. I will probably be taking extended leave from the internet due to the fact that the flat I currently rent is being repossessed from under me. I wont bore you people who bounce off the site with the circumstances, but suffice to say I am angry. Anyway, go click on the stumble on plugin, find a more interesting site to read. XKCD is always good.

Spotify on HTC HD 2

January 20th, 2010

Recently I’ve decided to reconsider the HTC HD 2 given that I got rather frustrated with the touch keyboard and the lack of applications that actually use the landscape mode. I’ve developed patience for the keyboard and am managing to start liking the phone.

The next big hurdle is Spotify. I have a Spotify premium account for two reasons. First, I hate ads and in particular I hate being bombarded with the same ads over and over and over .. etc and second I like to listen to music on the way to work so Spotify on my Nokia E71 is a win.

I was horrified to notice that Spotify have overlooked the Windows Mobile platform and are seemingly reluctant to develop for it. There is however, a workaround called mySpot. So last night I decided to give it a try.

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Snow, Games, HTC HD2 and Explosions

January 5th, 2010

A Happy New Year to all!

Sadly my immune system decided to take two days off resulting in most of new year’s eve consisting of watching films in bed and getting up at midnight to watch the fireworks from the terrace. Which I might add were rather spectacular and I am left warm and fuzzy knowing that Birmingham City Council are spending my council tax well.

Anyway, this gave me time to play Assassins Creed 2, which to be honest I wasn’t expecting anything fantastic considering the first one was pretty, unique and fun to play.  Sadly it was killed by the repetitive side missions and mundane tasks which did not fit in to the assassin theme. I was however impressed, the storyline in the game continues right where you left off in the first game, so at least there is a little consistency. The game is far more pretty than the first one, running through Italian streets gazing at the architecture and finding new and amusing ways to kill the guards on the roofs.

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Merry Christmas from Grey Area

December 24th, 2009

Wish you all the best, enjoy the new year!

Mobiles, Development and Tethering

November 17th, 2009

Well, I have decided to do some development with Windows Mobile (or Windows Phone as Microsoft seem to be wanting to call it now) as it seems to need some love in the applications arena. Also it will be nice to see what Microsoft offer up against the competition with Apple, Google and Symbian. The application I will be building will be nothing ground breaking/earth shattering/world dominating, just a little Twitter application called TwittTwoo! Probably not an original name, but that can change and I am terrible at naming things (the server is called ZeroGravitas). So there should be a good amount of swearing and pleading in the near future, which is good :)

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November … wait, what?!

November 16th, 2009

October seems to have run away and already I’m half way through November! Time flies when you are having no fun at all. Much fun is indeed guaranteed in the run up to Christmas, with the Brummies in full Christmas spirit and trying to run over as many cyclists as possible. The German Christmas market is also here and the city centre is full of wide eyed first year students and everyone who owns a pram/buggy seems to think it’s a wonderful idea to take it up and down New Street.

London Midland have also kept up their consistently terrible service, cancelling trains at random with the rather lame excuse of ’staff shortages’. It’s going to be fun getting to Shrewsbury for Christmas, I might just cycle there instead!

Looking around to see if there are any interesting groups in Birmingham or at least some sort of hobby/development/project I can work on as the usual day in day out handwriting recognition development gets rather dull after a while, plus it’s been a long time since I have done something that is rather nifty.  Any suggestions are welcome. On that note, I am loving jQuery which is bundled with ASP.NET MVC. It makes writing javascript painless/bearable and the bonus is, it’s clean! Web Forms is so 2002 and I for one will be glad to see the death of it, it’s post-backs and its ridiculously hideous html and JavaScript outputs. (along with other things.)

Ah well the weekend will again grace us with a break from the week and slip away just as quickly as it arrived. On the plus side, I will be seeing Eddie Izzard on Wednesday and I am looking forward to it.

Now off to find me something to do that isn’t work related that will keep me out of trouble for now!

P.S. VB.NET must die! (along with IE 6 and FTP)

The Weekend & MySQL fail

October 16th, 2009

This has been a long week, with MySQL fails left right and centre.

The actual MySQL server ships with a bomb ready to go off as we found out at work. For every connection to the server it does DNS lookups for the user to verify where the connection is coming from and for a production server all connections will be from a limited amount of known hosts. So when the hosting provider’s DNS blows up in your face, you are left with a MySQL server which is not allowing any connections what so ever, the web servers go nuts with requests failing and retrying and a lot of clients on the phone giving you a good ear bashing. (Plus the boss gets a headache)

You can switch the DNS lookups off, the solution was found here:

http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2008/05/31/dns-achilles-heel-mysql-installation/

Another fail comes in the form of the Administrator GUI tool which started today. When connecting to a remote database through an SSH tunnel, (which might I add has worked for the past 2 years.) I get the wonderful 2013 MySQL error, sadly Google has yet to provide me with a solution, however Navicat Lite has provided a clue which is the also unhelpful: Lost connection to MySQL Server at ‘reading initial communication packet’, system error: 0.

If I find a solution, I’ll post it here.

Ah well, at least the weekend is now here, I can go get drunk off my face and make a tit of myself in front of the general public. Also I’ve just realised that Grey Area is now 2 years old! A rather quiet celebration as there is no user base here.

NHibernate and IIS

October 14th, 2009

Recently it was found that IIS throws a wobbler from time to time. More often than usual. What we are left with is the following wonderful exception message: Illegal operation attempted on a registry key that has been marked for deletion and IIS stops serving from that application untill a full server reboot occurs.

For Microsoft’s production server software this is completely unacceptable! Plus if this was on a server cluster IIS across all of your machines would slowly stop serving that application, and it would be hit or miss for any request to be directed at the problem servers!

Anyway so far the stack trace has pointed to NHibernate creating a proxy instance of an object on the fly and attempting to compile it and failing spectacularly. Sadly Google has yet to provide an answer to it and full server reboots must take place if it is caught in time. The problem is a complete nightmare, however one must wonder if other administrators out there running demanding applications on IIS have the same problem.

What would be really interesting to see is if MVC with Mono and Apache server can pick up the severe deficit IIS suffers from.

Squash, Screen and Irssi

October 13th, 2009

First off,seeing as I am testing out this new VPS to see if it is more suited to my needs. (despite being a complete turncoat and using Windows instead of Linux). I mean to be honest as long as the web server works and I can serve ASP.NET either through IIS or Mod_Mono I am happy. Well I say happy, I don’t enjoy spending endless tweaking of config files to see if changing settings will finally allow the web server to start serving files properly. Platform ambivalent, you could say.

Anyway, I’m currently hunting for a nice replacement to screen on Linux for Windows, as that is one of the main things that I use my VPS for, logging on to the server, bring up the stored screen and use irssi to spread more white noise on to the internet. Anyway, been looking at Cygwin which doesn’t appear to have changed much since I last tried it about 2-3 years ago. So far I have been running a separate SSH Server called freeSSHd and starting a bash shell from there, however putty doesn’t seem to handle this well and the command execution seems particularly slow.

Going to try using just Cygwin for the SSH Daemon and see how the command execution time goes, it might actually work! Anyway, anyone have any suggestions for screen and irssi replacements?

On another note, Played squash with my Boss and co-worker last night, make a complete arse of myself and my left arm has fallen out with me. Still good fun though and now off to be shamed at work. :D