The Commuting Year in Review

I was listening to the TWIT year in review on the way into work this morning. I listened to every episode this year while commuting. If totaled in miles it would be a long way.

I started off the year traveling to Northampton by train from Rugby:
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I did that until February. I was working for a marketing company making enhancements to a legacy Delphi based system. It was without a doubt the worst job ever. The people who worked there were idiots, the work environment sucked and it was the most miserable 3 months I have ever spent. Not a great way to start the year.

From there I worked in Hammersmith in London and was taking the train from Rugby to London Euston:

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and then the underground from Euston to Hammersmith:


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I worked there for a local authority creating a portal site for customers. It was done using ASP.NET and C#, with a Biztalk layer connecting the different systems. I was pretty much responsible for the front end which was great. It was a hell commute, but the job was interesting and the people I worked with were great. It was a great step up from the previous job.

Commuting by train and tube was always interesting, sometimes frustrating, but glad I did it. It was a great "life" experience and took me way out of my comfort zone. Having to deal with 4 million other commuters was interesting for a boy from Temuka! I do feel sorry for the people that have to do it everyday for the rest of their working lives. We don't know how lucky we are here in New Zealand when it comes down to it.

From there I worked in Corby which was about an hours drive from Rugby up the A14. The A14 is the road trucks use to get to the M1 and the M6. It was jammed with trucks and the Cathorpe junction where the M6 and M1 merge was always fun! Again it was a great experience and gave me plenty of time to listen to Twit...

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I was the lead architect for a freight management system written in C#, with a Sql Server backend. I also did some training - upskilling some AS400 developers to .NET - which I enjoyed. Again the people were great, but needed a better processes in place, which they were aware of so good luck to them for the future.

I finished there in late August and we flew back to New Zealand and moved into our house in Timaru. (Sorry google doesn't do directions from Heathrow to NZ!)

I now do a daily commute from Timaru to Ashburton which is about an hour.

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I work for a Bank doing the teller systems (MFC/C++) and the Internet Banking Site (.NET). It is all interesting work and I look forward to being involved with the migration from MFC to C# which will be started sometime in 2009.

So all in all I did a lot of commuting this year and will have more next.

Remote desktop connection cannot verify the identity of the computer

If you get the following error: "Remote desktop connection cannot verify the identity of the computer that
you want to connect to. try reconnecting to the windows-based computer or
contatct your administrator."

when trying to connect OS X to a Windows Machine via RDP then do the following:

1) Delete all files in /user/{username}/Documents/RDC Connections
2) Don't fill in the domain text box

for some reason when using the Mac client if the domain text box is filled then the Windows machine at the other end can't authenticate the connection. Seems to be worse with Vista, but I have read of this happening with 2003 also.

Linking iPhone/iPod Touch with Xcode

I just spent the last hour or so trying to get my iPod touch working with Xcode so I could debug on the device

If you are having trouble after you have followed the instructions on Apples developer site, here's what to do:

In Xcode, right click the info.plist file and select open as text file. This will open the bundle as a plain text Xml file.

Find the Key:
CFBundleIdentifier
and below it will be a string element. Change the text between the element to your AppId minus the 10 digit number and the dot.

So for example if your appId is 1234567890.com.mycompany.myApp then change it to com.mycompany.myApp

Easy thing to do, but hard thing to solve.

Hope that saves someone the hours of frustration I had.

20 Second SQL tip

If you restore from a backup with NORECOVERY from the GUI it sometimes doesn't bring the database back online, even if the restore succeeds.

So if you are stuck with a database that no matter how long you give it, the status is restoring, or loading the following command should work:

RESTORE DATABASE databaseName WITH RECOVERY

StackOverflow: the good, the bad, the ugly

The eternal dilemma for developers is finding the answer to their specific question. There are a number of sites on the web that try to help, some free, some not.

Stackoverflow is the latest attempt to create an ultimate resource for answers to programmers questions. It is the brain child of notable (or notorious depending on your view) doyens of the development community, Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky (who has Kiwi heritage).

The actual site is a work of genius. It is clean, clear and crisp and is, without a shadow of doubt, the best website engine of it's kind. Period.

I have been a member since the very early beta days. (User Tag is KiwiBastard BTW) In the early days there was a limited number of people on the site, but even so, questions where answered in quick time, and a question would stay on the front page a good amount of time, so that people had a chance to offer a reasoned answer.

Since then the private beta has gone public, the noise to signal ratio has increased. Post are only on the front page for a limited time. The questions are generally still answered but because there is more traffic, people rush an answer. It also appears that people won't bother answering a question once it has had a few answers. The reason for this is both the pro and the con of the site. The site is driven by a points and badge system.

Basically, you get points in a number of ways:

- Getting your answer upvoted
- Getting your question upvoted
- Getting your answer accepted

There are other subtle ways to get points, but it becomes addictive and like a game. So you find people don't bother answering a question that has been answered, because the chance of getting points is lower than answering a question that has no or few answers. While this is good because it means new questions get answered, it also means sometimes a question never gets a CORRECT answer. This is of course a problem.

The argument is, with more people, then there should be more eyeballs on each question so the net is the same as when it was a smaller audience. This argument seems to work in theory, I am finding in implementation it doesn't. The turnover of question is such that, a question just doesn't stay on the front page very long.

The other issue I am finding, is the tolerance for newbies is very low. People seem to get down voted if they ask a seemingly stupid question. Seemingly stupid to experienced developers, but we were all noobs once. I try to show tolerance to these people and answer their question the best I can, and maybe point them in the right direction. It's the fair thing to do, and I'm sure that Atwood and Spolsky would prefer this approach to down voting and alienating new developers.

Aside from the minor gripes, it is a great site. It will become the go to site for developers. Of that there is no doubt. I just hope that over time, newbies become better accepted, and people get use their upvoting ability a little more.

Nice Gmail Tip: plus-addressing

I was digging around the Gmail docs just to see what new stuff they've been throwing in there and came across something useful that I hadn't come across before.

A lot of people I know have multiple mail accounts some of which they use when signing up for stuff just in case for whatever reason that address gets "accidentally" sold to an organisation that will spam you silly. What Gmail does is provide a feature called "plus-addressing", which allows you to insert useful but ignored stuff into your Gmail address.

As an example:

If your mail address was myname@gmail.com (Apologies to Myna Me if you have an account) and you were signing up for something at "dodgysite.com" then you could supply the mail address in the subscription form as:

myname+dodgysite@gmail.com

The mails will still be routed to your account but if you start to get spammed and that address is being used then you have an idea of where they got your address from.

It's quite a nice feature and when used with filters can also be used to manage mail too so you could possibly give plus-addressed addresses to everyone and include some identifiable word in the address.

One thing to be aware of is that at some point if people start using this a lot then the spammers will start to circumvent it by striping out the +x part, but that doesn't seem to be the case at the moment.

EDIT: Nic points out quite rightly that this isn't strictly a Gmail feature but is part of the mail specs such as RFC5233 and yes, it is dependent on the site you're supplying the address to actually accepting a "+" (the latest version of Fring on iPhone doesn't even allow "."!!!!)

Useful Vista Tip: Open Command Window

Windows 2000 and XP had a bunch of power tools that had great, but little enhancements to Windows that made doing geeky things just a little easier. Unfortunately, there are no power tools for Vista. The most useful power toy I found was the ability to open a shell command window from an explorer window, by right clicking in the window and selecting the "Open Cmd Window" option.

Well, it turns out this feature is baked into Vista, but hidden away behind the scenes. To get it to work you simply hold down SHIFT, while right clicking in the Explorer Window.

iPhone 2.1 - Pointless!

I had really high expectations for the 2.1 update. Sadly it was always going to be a disappointment. Again I have been with a friend who owns a different phone on O2 and while his phone is showing 3 or 4 bars mine is showing No Service. Damn! Equally annoying is the fact that the phone apologists seem to fall back on the "number of bars does not mean the same thing across different phones" argument, but No Service is No fucking Service on any phone.

Anyway, another thing (other than Genius, aka please buy music you don't want) the only real difference I've noticed is a new little circle icon at the top where the connection type is shown, as you can see in the following pic. I have no idea what it represents and have not seen it before.


What it isn't is:

• 3G
• Edge
• GPRS (I don't think, that's a square with hollow circle)
• Wireless

Be interested if anyone has any idea what it might be.

EDIT:

Looks like this post is as useless as the update. It appears that all of the icons for the various data modes have been changed. 3G is now just white text rather than black on a white square so I'm assuming that the circle above is the GPRS equivalent to that. Surely the change isn't intended to save some battery power by lighting up 5 fewer pixels!!!!

Since 24 hours now I've been running 2.1 and none of my original gripes are fixed.

Exclude CSS from Authentication in ASP.NET

This little thing has bugged me for a while. The CSS for authenticated sites where only showing once the user had logged in. This means that the Log On and Log Off pages are unstyled - although usually for me anyway, on my dev machine - seems to be ok live.

Well, if this is the case, you need to exclude the CSS folder (or files) from Authentication. This is achieved by added the following code to the web.config file somewhere in the configuration section

<location path="css">
<system.web>
<authorization>
<allow users="*"></allow>
</authorization>
</system.web>
</location>

Do the hundred?

Can you do 100 press-ups? If not then follow this program one hundred push ups and you will be able to after 6 weeks.

I start tomorrow and managed a feeble 17 on my initial test...

Is there a more diverse field than software development?

I've been on the Stack Overflow for a couple of weeks. If you've been under a rock and don't know, Stack Overflow is a Q+A website for programmers, developed as a joint venture between industry luminaries Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky.

From the questions that fellow developers have asked, it highlights that a lot of people are doing a lot of vastly different things. Everything from tracing the inner exception of a soap message in ASP.NET through to rendering a tree structure in Django through to wondering the performance implications of case insensitivity in Regular Expressions.

This is why I love software development. There are so many fields to get into, and so many languages to learn and so many ways to do the same thing. If you get stale, you can just learn a new language or technology in your current language.

So my question is - is there any other industry that is as diverse?

Sorting a List using delegates

I have to sort Lists of Custom classes relatively frequently. Everytime I am about to write the Sort code, I always forget how to do it for a brief second. So as a reminder, I thought I would put a post on how to do it.

Say you have a List of `Customer` classes. 

```csharp
List customerList = new List();
customerList.PopulateList();
```

Now if you want to sort by a property in the list (for example BusinessName) you can do the following:

```csharp
customerList.Sort( delegate( Customer x, Customer y)
{
   return x.BusinessName.CompareTo(y.BusinessName);
}
```

Done.

Jingoistic reporting of the truth?

Olympic medal table from the BBC:

Rank	Country	Gold	Silver	Bronze	TOTAL
1	China	46	15	22	83
2	USA	30	35	34	99
3	Great Britain	18	12	11	41
4	Russia	16	16	20	52
5	Germany	13	8	12	33
6	Australia	11	14	16	41

As reported by NBC.com

Rank	Country	Gold	Silver	Bronze	TOTAL
1	China	46	15	22	83
2	USA	30	35	34	99
4	Russia	16	16	20	52
3	Great Britain	18	12	11	41
6	Australia	11	14	16	41
5	Germany	13	8	12	33

Which one is correct?

Well to me it is a MEDAL table, not a gold medal table. Either rename the table or repot the truth people!

Just a bit of tongue in cheek fun, but it has been hard work being a Kiwi in the UK over the Olympics. The Brits are worse winners than the Australians. For what it's worth, the per capita table is the real indication of success...

iPhone 2.0.2 Update - admitting a problem?

I've had my iPhone now for a few weeks and as far as the device itself is concerned I'm really impressed. I've got another post queued up to add to the noise bascially discussing how I've found it and "good bits", "bad bits" etc. but the main issue I've had since it arrived is the really, really crappy reception.

In the UK we are on O2, a company not renowned for having the best coverage (although I think they would dissagree.) On their website, they have a tool which lets you put in a postcode or town, and it shows a (crappy) map coloured to show what sort of service you should expect in that area. For my local area, the entire map is coloured to indicate full HSDPA. This means I should be getting a reasonably good 3G signal in most places. The sad reality has been that even in the MAIN street of the villiage of Bishop's Cleeve, where I should get max sig, all I see is "No Service".

It's a bit lame, but I haven't bothered (read: summoned the patience) to talk to O2 about it yet, although that call is imminent. But what surprised me the other day was a friend of mine has an LG on O2 and both phones sat next to each other on a table, one was showing strong signal and 3G while my iPhone was a single bar with no data but more often "No Service" this leads me to suspect that it is more a problem with the phone itself.

When the update came out the other day to 2.0.2 I dutifully upgraded and since then the behaviour of the phone has been... odd! Some stuff I can't really put my finger on, but the main one is that whereas in the past, when the phone was in range of a wireless network, it would be constantly connected (or rather would show itself to be.) But now, the wireless connection symbol only ever appears when the phone is actually trying to fetch data. This would be fine but on some occasions the connection isn't coming up quickly enough for Safari or Twinkle and I'm getting error messages about connection problems. This even happened in the mail app once which is quite worrying.

So what's going on? I know Apple are shitty when it comes to revealing what is being fixed by an update, but I am wondering if this is some kind of attempt at a quick fix for what seems to be an emerging flaw in either the software or hardware on the phone. If it is, is this an admission however subtle that there is a real issue? And if it is, it's failed, and it has also damaged the useability of the phone.

Maybe the Aussies aren't stupid after all

It appears that Australians are switching to Mac faster than anyone else in the world.

Article here

Macs are still a little pricey in New Zealand I think personally. It doesn't help having a distributor in between Apple and the consumer. When I was an ISV a few years ago, I looked at selling a few Macs to some customers. The distributor would only talk to you if you signed a guarantee saying you would sell at least $50k worth of Apple products per year.

Which I guess is why only the major retailers sell Apple stuff, although Harvey Norman for example, make no money from the sales of Apple computer equipment - the distributor buys shelf space. That is why in most stores, the Apple stuff is tucked away in a corner - and a commision based sales person is going to show you a PC first, because they don't get a bean from the Apple sale.

That needs to change, and the sooner the better. A low to mid range price point would help too - say a mac mini bundled with Screen and keyboard etc for around $1500.

Final thoughts on the UK

We have a couple of hectic weeks left in the UK. I finish on 29th Aug and we fly out 31st and I start in my new job on the 8th. Nothing like a fast turn around.

We have enjoyed our time in the UK. We have had the opportunity to meet a lot of nice people, some officious prats and at least one Xenophobe!

We have seen some awesome, awesome things and had plenty of great experiences.

I would have to say my favourite place in England is Stonehenge without a doubt, and really enjoyed Easter in York. Paris is by far and away our favourite place to visit, but had good times in Slovenia, Holland, Ireland and Italy as well.

Our daughter speaks with a (posh) Uk accent now, and has spent more time in the UK than NZ. It will be a regret to us and her in the future, that she probably won't remember too much if anything from her 19 months in the Northern Hemisphere, except the 6000+ pics we have taken!

I thought I would list some pros and cons of life in the UK, as much as a future reference for myself as anything else.

PROS:
- ability to see and do things in UK and Europe is fantastic and relatively cheap
- much maligned but generally good public transport system
- excellent roading system
- high quality of living - things like free healthcare, competition in utilities and cheap broadband and access to multimedia
- excellent employment opportunities

CONS:
- Weather
- Weather
- Weather
- cramming 60+ million people into a little island means things get crammed - sick of people everywhere
- stupid little houses because of above
- stupid narrow roads
- red tape everywhere - "but we've always done it this way"
- did I mention the weather?
- tax - taxation in the UK is out of control - I feel for people trying to get ahead and the Govt cutting them down at every opportunity
- oh yeah, the weather is rubbish

There are a lot of things we will miss I suspect, and only realise once we are home. There are equally many things we won't miss. I can't wait to get back to the clean, crisp, open, friendly and spacious atmosphere of New Zealand.

I will miss not getting Top Gear and Dr Who before everyone else and the good people we have met.

Kia Ora UK, we wish you well, but it's time to go home...

Newsgator RSS reader

I had previously been using Google Reader for web-based RSS reading. I don't run a desktop client because I am on far too many different computers to keep a desktop client in sync. I am also a contractor (for about another month) so don't want to have to install applications to keep track of the blogs I read.

Google reader is ok. It's pretty fast, but there was one thing that really, REALLY, annoyed me about it. It kept loosing posts, or more correctly, marking old posts as read, even if I hadn't.

Also, I have recently purchased an iPod Touch, and wasn't a fan of the GReader touch application. So looking for something better reader, Simone put me on to Newsgator. I've been using it a week and have become a bit of a fan. The web reader is a little slower than GReader, but has nicer features, such as the ability to tag posts, more powerful "Mark As" features and nicer rendering of blogs being read.

The major winning point is that is seemlessly syncs to the desktop client and the free iPhone application, which is very good too.

So, if you are looking for a replacement to GReader, then give Newsgator a try.

Server ' ' is not configured for RPC

Just a quicky I came across this morning:

If you get the above message when trying to do a Remote Procedure Call across linked servers in SQL Server, your server is not configured to do so.

To fix this execute the following commands:

exec sp_serveroption @server='myserver', @optname='rpc', @optvalue='true'
exec sp_serveroption @server='myserver', @optname='rpc out', @optvalue='true'

Adding more noise to the "Code Comments" debate

For the record, before I get started I have to state that despite where Jeff Atwood has gone lately in editorial terms, I have a great amount of respect for his blog and the work he's put into it over the years. As a contractor, I move around different companies quite a bit, but one of the constants has always been the frequent, thought provoking team discussions which have arisen as a result of one of Jeff's posts. But ever since Jeff typed the now immortal phrase "strong opinions, weakly held" the majority of people I have spoken to think he is ever-so-slowly losing the plot. It does seem that a lot of his posts lately have been triggered by some experience he's encountered during his work on StackOverflow.com, and while there is obviously nothing necessarily wrong with that, I do wonder if the bubble he has found himself working in is skewing his perspective a little.

The post which finally drove this blog to state its own position is this:

Coding Without Comments

Unlike some of his other posts, specifically the one about #regions, this one I've read all the way through several times, and made sure I read it through again before I writing this post. And basically the whole thing leaves me with such a bad taste in the mouth that I can barely believe what I've been reading.

Like it or not, Jeff is read by many developers across the spectrum of ability and experience. Young and new devs are sent links to Jeff's posts and are over time gradually eased into the Atwood Cult. I feel as though in this one post Jeff has potentially done some significant damage to the hard work that all of those people, like myself, who as part of my job try to encourage others to write clear code and write good comments. It has handed on a plate an excuse for those devs who are too lazy, or disenfranchised in their jobs (the job security excuse), to bother putting any comments in the code that they churn out.

To try to keep the rest of this concise, I'll list my views on this as bullet points:

• I won't go too far into any of the examples in Jeff's posts as clearly they are carefully chosen to prove the point. What I will say though is that his refactoring of the SquareRootApproximation by extracting the method did not, as he says, make the code "perfectly understandable". He's made the use of the code understandable, but not adding comments, or breaking up the string of operations, is creating code that is probably difficult to maintain.

• We don't all work with our friends or with people we've worked with for years and so understand how they tick.

• Encouraging people to use better naming for variables and methods etc is an exceptionally good thing, and I think this is probably where the emphasis in Jeff's post should have been. The policy of this blog is that code reviews are king, and code that is written with a bias towards readability, and therefore more suited to review, should be encouraged even if this results occasionally in less than optimal implementation, and maybe produces slightly larger source files.

• There is such a thing as too many comments. I have a running joke with a particular developer I have worked with a couple of times that he over-comments his code. Taken to an extreme, comments which mindlessly state in verbose English the simple to understand operations that follow, do harm the ability to read and review code, as they add unwanted noise.

• In terms of the argument for better naming of constructs and members rather than comments, I strongly believe that it should not be a case of either/or it should and must be BOTH.

• Maybe Jeff can be forgiven for being US-centric but the overriding notion you get from his recent posts kind of implies that every team can and must be occupied by top tier, highly experienced and capable coders. If a team member isn't up to the task then it's in the team's interests to drop them and find another. This is a fine and noble sentiment but for a few flaws: Not every developer can be the best of breed. In general, especially in the UK, we have a skills shortage and in particular a shortage of high quality, experienced software developers. (The reasons for this are largely political and mainly due to the current government's attempt to destroy our IT industry, in favour of promoting the agendas of the large consulting firms, but that is a post for another day.) The net result is that the industry is filled with developers wholly unsuited to software development and have moved to careers in IT as an easy route. They are everywhere, both contractors and permies, and are writing ream after ream of code, with barely a consideration about how that code will be maintained or supported. These are the people who will use Jeff's posts to argue that comments in code are pointless.

• One of the big anti-comments arguments is that they can become out of date in relation to the code they comment. My response to this is that COMMENTS ARE AS IMPORTANT AS THE CODE and deserve the same level of attention during modification of code as the compilable stuff itself. The argument that comments quickly go out of date should not hold water.

I could go on, but won't. I'll end by saying that in the real world, real software is over-complex, over-engineered, written under time pressures, often by people who's skill in the art is below average. They are expected to hammer out the code, those with the inclination to refactor are often not working in an environment where such things are encouraged. After all this, other people will have to fix and maintain the code and without comments, of any kind, this type of software which is being created ALL OVER THE WORLD RIGHT NOW is made all the more substandard because of it.

We can't all code in utopia.

Apple v Windows - get over it

I like Apple products. They are well designed and engineered, and the user experience is second to none.

Do I like them blindly. No. Apple make mistakes, just look at Mobile Me and the issues with iPhone activations, supply and crashing. The continuation of the iPhone SDK NDA reeks of typical Apple arrogance. It's a, "You'll do what we tell you, and if you don't like it we don't care" attitude.

But in the fan bois eyes, Apple can do no wrong. It's starting to get annoying to me to be honest. Sure, enjoy Apple products, but don't turn a blind eye to their faults. Or worse, attack people who rightly point out the flaws.

I'm sick of reading in places like Mac Daily News, pieces about how crap Windows is, how stupid Balmer is, how Vista is crap and driving customers to Apple, because Apple is the chosen platform and all who use it are the chosen ones. I mean read the drivel in here.

OSX is a great platform - it's fast, responsive and a pleasure to use. But fan bois constantly running down Windows, feels a little like poor cousin syndrome to me.
I can guarantee that if Apple had to write an OS to perform, with the user base and different hardware base that Windows has, it would be just as prone to bugs and crashes as Windows supposedly is.
Just look at the iPhone. Great device, awesome hardware, but the new 2.0 software is buggy as hell. It crashes a lot. You could argue that it is the third party apps that are the problem - but surely if they are supposed to run in a sandbox mode, why would an app crash bring the system down? It's not 1995 after all.

So guys, get over it. Windows isn't for you, we get it. It's not for me either, but constantly bagging it is making you look like a cock, and by association, the rest of us too.