Microblogging for September 29th 2008

Recently I said

@markusegger They will appreciate the banks when they are gone and there is no liquidity whatsoever (View)

@WinHEC We’ll be at the PDC, dunno about WinHEC though (View)

@craigber That being the case, they’ll pay the price at the polls (View)

@Ben_Hall I would imagine so, but as yet there’s no details (View)

DevExpress is gearing up for PDC, check out our trailer at http://tv.devexpress.com/pdcpromo.movie (View)

Heard a rumour that the US bail out has failed. Is that right? You guys have got to be kidding me; WFT are you doing over there?!!! (View)

@CAMURPHY you should have used dependency injection to inject BathingMonitor.Wife into the running code (View)

markusegger ah right, got you. Well hope it works out and that we can catch up at the PDC (View)

markusegger no worries, what did you want it for? (View)

@ColinMackay next Monday is the holiday here (View)

Why not come and join the conversation at http://www.twitter.com/garyshort

Oren Eini in the UK, Want to Hear Him Speak?

When: Monday 13th October 2008, doors open 6:00pm, meeting starts 6:30pm

Where: UWE (University of the West of England), Frenchay, Bristol (see FAQ for directions and a map) – Room 2q50 (in Q block)

What: "Producing Production Quality Software" and "Interaction based testing with Rhino Mocks"

Who: Oren Eini is the author of Rhino Mocks and a major contributor to Castle and NHibernate.

Why: Because Oren is in the UK for a couple of weeks and we’ve managed to nab him whilst he’s here. This is a rare opportunity to listen to someone who can make a real difference to the success of your project.

How do I sign up for this meeting: Send an email to meetings at dotnetdevnet.com and quote your user name and the October Extra meeting.

"Producing Production Quality Software" Abstract:

Working software is no longer the only thing that we need to produce. We need to create a software system that has a chance of surviving in the cruel world of production system, outside the clean room and sterile environment of development and QA. Understanding bottlenecks in the system, preventing cascading failures and recovery strategies have ceased being the problems of the very high end players. With the cost of system downtime being measures in $$$/second, this is an area we have to consider all the way. In this talk we will cover how we can map common weaknesses in the system design, preemptively protect ourselves from them, and produce software systems that can withstand the real world hostile environment.

"Interaction based testing with Rhino Mocks" Abstract:

Beyond the simplest scenarios, all objects had collaborators that they work with. This flies in the face of testing objects in isolation. This is the problem that mock objects were created to solve. In this talk you will learn what mock objects are, how to utilize them and best practices on when / how to utilize them. Rhino Mocks is a mock objects framework for .Net whose core goals are to let the developer rely on the compiler work well with refactoring tools.

Bio:

Oren Eini is an independent consultant based in Israel, focusing on architecture and best practices that lead to quality software and zero friction development processes. He is the author of Rhino Mocks, the most popular mocking framework on the .Net platform as well as a member of other well known open source projects, chief among them are the Castle project and NHibernate.
Oren is an internationally known speaker, and the author of the soon to be published book: Building Domain Specific Languages with Boo.

Technorati tags: Oren Eini, Community Talks

You See What I Say You See

The trouble with one search engine (whomever that may be) dominating the search scene, is that you only get to find, and therefore see, the information that they say you can. For example, I was reading an article on a patent application, made by Google, and I came across this quote (emphasis mine):

Google has sketched a plan for such a system in a patent application. Initially filed in March 2007, the application, which is not available on Google’s Patent Search site, was posted on the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office site on Thursday.

Now, I’m not suggesting that Google is doing anything wrong or underhand by not putting their own patent application on their patent search site, I’m just using it as an example to illustrate the fact that they dominate the search market and that means if they don’t want you to know about something, it’s pretty easy for them not to include it in their search results; not so easy for you and me to ensure our patent applications are not included for example. Market domination, by anyone, is seldom a good thing.

Technorati tags: Google, Market Dominance

All Your Search Are Belong To Us

Just downloaded the new beta of my favourite blogging tool (Window Live Writer) and noticed this nice little dialog that came with it

It was the “…and prevent programs from interfering with this choice” I particularly liked

Technorati tags: Windows Live Writer Beta

Microblogging for September 17th 2008

Recently I said

Getting ready to leave to present on excel hacks for Scottish developers dundee (View)

@ARGibson good question, I’ll find out and let you know (View)

@betsyweber Cool, let me know once you are confirmed, I’d love to introduce you to some of the other DevExpress guys (View)

@akselsoft we have docs and videos to help you with general questions, but if you have specific issues mail me at garysATdevexpressDOTcom (View)

@ColinMackay Brave words from someone who’s coming to my talk tonight LOL (View)

@akselsoft Hey Andrew, sorry to hear you are having such problems with our ASP.Net controls, anything I can do to help you out? (View)

It turns out that @olivers and I are just too "butt ugly" to be doing DevExpress videos these days, so meet Erica http://tinyurl.com/56lrpt (View)

Why not come and join the conversation at http://www.twitter.com/garyshort

Microblogging for September 16th 2008

Recently I said

@Karenyo should know better, if she "England" when she means "UK" one more time, I swear I’ll… tut and roll my eyes (More)

dear ALT.Net community, go to your rooms ’til you can speak to one another in a civil manner. KThnxBye (More)

@Stooshie yes Leuchars was fab, would have been better if the Vulcan had flown but can’t have everything – or so they tell me (More)

@Stooshie very cool, good for you (More)

@Stooshie Cool, congrats. What will you be doing, anything exciting? (More)

blog: CERN Hack Attack – http://tinyurl.com/5nbls9 (More)

Why not come and join the conversation at http://www.twitter.com/garyshort

Microblogging Twitter Script

This evening I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be cool to include my microblogging post (posts on Twitter) in my full blog? So I set about writing a script to fetch all of the previous day’s tweets (well all that are within the 20 pervious that the Twitter API supports of course) and copy them to the clipboard so that I can paste the HTML into my favourite blogging tool. I could have posted them straight onto my blog I suppose, but I’m not that confident in the Twitter API ; so for now, I’m happy to paste the HTML. Anyway, just in case the script is any use to you, I’ve posted it below. As always the code is optimised for a blog post not for production, so feel free to refactor to your hearts content

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Net;
using System.IO;
using System.Xml;
using System.Xml.Linq;
using System.Globalization;
using System.Windows.Forms;

namespace Microblogging {
    /// <summary>
    /// I am a class that represents a Twitter Status
    /// </summary>
    public class Status {
        private string _Text;
        public string Text {
            get { return _Text; }
            set {
                _Text = value;
            }
        }

        private string _Id;
        public string Id {
            get { return _Id; }
            set {
                _Id = value;
            }
        }

        private DateTime _CreatedDate;
        public DateTime CreatedDate {
            get { return _CreatedDate; }
            set {
                _CreatedDate = value;
            }
        }

        private string _Href;
        public string Href {
            get { return _Href; }
            set {
                _Href = value;
            }
        }
    }

    /// <summary>
    /// I am a class that represents the Twitter API
    /// </summary>
    public class Twitter {

        private NetworkCredential credential;
        public Twitter(string uid, string pwd) {
            credential = new NetworkCredential(uid, pwd);
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// I answer an IEnumerable of the latest 20 tweets
        /// </summary>
        /// <returns>IEnumerable<Status></returns>
        public IEnumerable<Status> GetRecentTwits() {
            using (
                //GS - Fetch the statuses
                WebClient client = new WebClient()) {
                client.Credentials = credential;
                try {
                    using (Stream stream =
                        client.OpenRead(
                            "http://twitter.com/statuses/"
                                + "user_timeline.xml")) {

                        //GS - Instantiate a XDocument from the return
                        XmlReader reader = XmlReader.Create(stream);
                        XDocument document = XDocument.Load(reader);

                        //GS - Query the XDocument and return the statuses
                        return from status in document.Descendants("status")
                               select new Status() {
                                   Text = status.Element("text").Value,
                                   Id = status.Element("id").Value,
                                   CreatedDate = DateTime.ParseExact(
                                    status.Element("created_at").Value,
                                    "ddd MMM dd HH:mm:ss zzzzz yyyy",
                                    CultureInfo.InvariantCulture,
                                    DateTimeStyles.AdjustToUniversal),
                                   Href = String.Format(
                                   "http://twitter.com/garyshort/statuses/{0}",
                                   status.Element("id").Value)
                               };
                    }

                }
                catch (WebException ex) {
                    //GS - Display the error as returned by Twitter
                    using (Stream errorStream =
                        ex.Response.GetResponseStream()) {
                        using (StreamReader reader =
                            new StreamReader(errorStream)) {
                            string errorMessage = reader.ReadToEnd();
                            Console.WriteLine(errorMessage);
                        }
                    }
                    return new Status[0];
                }
            }
        }
    }

    class Program {
        /// <summary>
        /// Program entry point
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="args">Commandline arguments</param>
        [STAThread]
        static void Main(string[] args) {
            //GS - Instantiate our Twitter API class
            Twitter twitter = new Twitter("uid", "pwd");

            //GS - Retrieve the latest 20 tweets as per the API
            var statuses = twitter.GetRecentTwits();

            //GS - Create a string to paste into our blogging tool
            StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder();
            builder.AppendLine("<p>Recently I said</p>");
            foreach (Status status in statuses) {
                //GS - For blogging on a daily basis we only
                //want yesterday's tweets
                DateTime startDate =
                    DateTime.Now.Date.Subtract(
                        new TimeSpan(1, 0, 0, 0));

                DateTime stopDate = DateTime.Now.Date;
                if (status.CreatedDate >= startDate &&
                    status.CreatedDate <= stopDate) {
                        builder.AppendLine(
                            String.Format("{0} "
                                + "(<a href='{1}'>More</a>)<p />",
                                    status.Text,
                                        status.Href));
                }
            }
            builder.AppendLine("<p>Why not come and join the "
                + "conversation at <a href='http://www.twitter."
                    + "com/garyshort'>http://www.twitter.com/"
                        + "garyshort</a>");

            //GS - Copy the text to the clipboard to be pasted
            //into our blogging tool
            Clipboard.SetDataObject(builder.ToString(), true);
        }
    }
}

Technorati tags: Twitter Microblogging Script

Gurkhas Have no Right to Stay in the UK? Are you Kidding me?!!!

Sometimes this country drives me mad.

Almost 50,000 Gurkhas have died fighting for Britain since 1815 and 150,000 have been seriously injured while serving.

Gurkhas are received at Downing Street before handing in their petition

Yet thousands of veterans who retired after July 1, 1997 have been refused visas and have been forced to live in poverty in their homeland of Nepal.

Hundreds of badly injured soldiers have also been barred from travelling here for treatment.

More

After serving for four years or more (like servicemen and women from other Commonwealth countries) Gurkhas should  be allowed to stay in this country. It’s a no brainer. It’s not something these guys should have to take to the High Court. Shame on you Gordon Brown!

Technorati tags: Gurkhas, High Court

AutoCollage Rocks my Socks!

Well not quite, that would be what we call hype; but, truthfully, AutoCollage 2008 is a great product. Here’s a collage I made after my trip to the Leuchars Airshow last weekend.

Technorati tags: AutoCollage 2008

CERN Hack Attack

After a hack attack CERN said:

"Scientists working at Cern, the organisation that runs the vast smasher, were worried about what the hackers could do because they were "one step away" from the computer control system of one of the huge detectors of the machine, a vast magnet that weighs 12,500 tons, measuring around 21 metres in length and 15 metres wide/high.
If they had hacked into a second computer network, they could have turned off parts of the vast detector and, said the insider, "it is hard enough to make these things work if no one is messing with it."

More here.

Uh huh, so let me get this straight, you guys have a machine that creates black holes and destroys universes (okay, slight exaggeration) and the chain of command for this “Evil Empire Style mega weapon” goes: Command and Control computer –> Web Server –> The General Public. WTF?!

Your membership of the “Really Smart Club” is hereby revoked with immediate effect. An application form for membership of the “Galactically Stupid Collective” is in the post. Jeez!

Technorati tags: CERN, Hacked, Morons