BinaryJam

Having recently attended a developer course in Wss3 development I intend to update many of the old 2003 web parts and techniques I had previously developed.  However I have a backlog of stuff to clear at work and no environment to build them on as yet.  When I get time and VPC sorted I will get round to it.

So anyone interested in sharepoint might want to subscribe to the sharepoint category of this blog (or not), rather than read the trite and silverlight and sap and other stuff.

Cat went under the knife again, more teeth out.  She’s fine and apparently has kidney and liver function far in excess of a cat of her advanced years (16) and will most likely live a lot longer.

The cats are part of the family so despite no pet insurance I keep paying for the treatments.  I can’t “youth” my cats.

Now she’s home and getting better, I’m glad and fuss her endlessly.  However it makes me think why the hell did I get cats  in the first place.

Read the rest of this entry »

Whilst there have been some excellent demos out there and Im thinking Hard Rock here, this is undoubtedly the best so far and demonstrates what Silverlight will be fantastic for

http://www.mscui.net/PatientJourneyDemonstrator/

This is RIA at its best.

Recently I had the joy of trying to work with some Web Services from a 3rd party system not written in .NET.  In this age of full understanding of XML and Interoperability and Basic Profile 1.1 compliance  this was of course completely easy.

NOT!!!!

This was a complete pain in the neck.  I had problems at every turn.  Our existing .NET web service that provides a similar service, soon to be retired though, was written in .NET 1.1. So I just wanted to modify it rather than do an upgrade.  The remote system used  Http1.1 Chunked mode.  .NET 1.1 does not handle this.  So .NET 2.0 here I come (I know I know that’s still legacy !).

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been running with Mozy now for quite a while.  I had big intentions of testing it logged in as various users and not logged in etc etc and seeing how it works in different scenarios.

Well I haven’t had time for any of that.  But then I have had no trouble with Mozy since installing it that would have made me make the effort.

It just sits there.  So long as I leave the machine on now and again it will back-up the changes.  I made some initial tests of downloading and comparing files and they were fine.

It works underneath Family Safety Software so no problems there. As I tend to stay logged in I can’t say I became worried about it working when logged off, and we tend to use the switch user capabilities, this can send it a bit funny but log every one out  and it sorts itself out again.  Which I tend to do as I don’t have enough memory in the lappy to leave lots of sessions running.

Whilst I have all the goodness of auto backups now it does effect how you do everything else.

Read the rest of this entry »

Well I finally got round to upgrading to the latest and greatest version of Wordpress. This is just a note to let those who know, know that Fantastico upgrade worked fantastico and I never had to mess with it at all, even with a custom theme.

Lovely.

Once again I like A Small Orange as hosters.  Bu then I am easily pleased lately.

A little story popped up on the BBC news site today entitled, “Excuse me sir“.

It’s about the number of people being pulled up by the police for taking photo’s in public places.

I’d like to take this time to point out to any UK reader, you are entitled to take photos in public of pretty much anything.  Including other people.  There are no privacy laws applicable for public places.  You may find schools and enclosed kids playgrounds have rules about taking photos, so if your kid’s in a gymnastics competition you need express permission, but this is because its not public property.  However a footy match on public ground you can take photo’s of your kid, his kid her kid the referee and the team captains dog.

Read the rest of this entry »

A while ago we got an ecoKettle.  It’s won awards for energy savings awards, but is it any good ?

It’s really simple to use.  You don’t need instructions to figure it out just plug it in fill it up and go.

It’s larger than a normal kettle, as it has to store more water than a normal kettle, you can fill both reservoirs if you want before starting a boil cycle.  The idea being that you fill one side and release what you need into the other as and when you want a cuppa, ideally only boiling one or two cups at a time. Of course when you have visitors you can fill it up once and get two cycles out of it.  When really full this makes the eco kettle quite heavy, but time saving.  Filled as intended and the kettle feels off balance in your hand, it’s like the top volume of water is pressing the lever of the kettle split and trying to force it down at the wrist joint.  So stronger wrists might be needed, not a pressie for your gran, unless she’s strong of course.

Read the rest of this entry »

Whilst I’m of the opinion that green things are generally good, like saving energy, there are some things that really don’t make much sense to me.

This is one of then http://www.earthhour.org/about.  A bunch of cities are going to turn off the lights for an hour including many businesses, here’s a quote

On 31 March 2007, 2.2 million people and 2100 Sydney businesses turned off their lights for one hour - Earth Hour. This massive collective effort reduced Sydney’s energy consumption by 10.2% for one hour, which is the equivalent effect of taking 48,000 cars off the road for a year.

The turn-off time was from 8pm-9pm.

So presumably all of these businesses and cities agreed to turn off the lights, because it would not effect public safety, in the case of city infrastructure,  and would not impact on a businesses income as their workers would not be working.

Read the rest of this entry »

Straight of the back of the deepzoom announcement capabilities of Silverlight to comes photozoom. 

PhotoZoom is a site created by mslivelabs and incorporates the DeepZoom technology.  Don’t expect a full blown flickr site here, this is a demo obviously, but it demos beautifully the possibilities  of DZ on a photo site.

So if you don’t know what DZ is or have seen PZ then pop along to my album I created here.  Use the Mouse Wheel to zoom and left mouse to grab and move the canvas.

http://photozoom.mslivelabs.com/Album.aspx?alias=BinaryJam&album=1&lc=2057

For those who really have no clue as to what DZ is here is a description nicked from MS. Note Seadragon is the original name.

Seadragon is an incubation project resulting from the acquisition of Seadragon Software in February. Its aim is nothing less than to change the way we use screens, from wall-sized displays to mobile devices, so that visual information can be smoothly browsed regardless of the amount of data involved or the bandwidth of the network.

Tells you loads that don’t it.  Essentially you stitch a whole bunch of photies together creating a huge photo I mean really really huge, then the processor rips it apart into tiles.  Those tiles are loaded dependant on viewpoint and zoom level.  So instead of downloading some 10 billion pixel image only the viewpoint tiles are loaded each zoom level being a image scale of the original until you get right down in it.  Apparently this only produces 1.33 times the original file size but massively reduces the download size.  And it looks really cool too.