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.
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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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Tags: E71, Fail, HTC HD 2, laziness, mySpot, Profanity, Silly Interfaces, Spotify, Windows Mobile, Windows Phone
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December 24th, 2009
Wish you all the best, enjoy the new year!
Tags: Christmas
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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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Tags: Castle Project, Development, E71, Eddie Izzard, IIS, NHibernate, Nokia Fail, Proxy Instances, Silly Naming, TwittTwoo!, Windows Phone
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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)
Tags: ASP.NET MVC, Christmas Spirit, Development, Eddie Izzard, Insane Motorists, jQuery, London Midland, Projects, Smelly First Years
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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.
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Snow, Games, HTC HD2 and Explosions
January 5th, 2010A 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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Tags: Assassins Creed 2, Childish Behaviour, Fireworks, Gas Explosion, Guitar Hero, HTC HD 2, New Year, Profanity, Shrewsbury, Silly Browsers, Snow, Windows Mobile
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