Richard Slater

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) SSH Connection Timeout

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 21:12:00 +0000

Understanding and Resolving SSH Connection Failures on OCI ARM64 Instances

Creating a basic Development Environment for RISC-V

Wed, 19 Nov 2025 19:54:12 +0100

Implementing Rust, Go, NeoVim, Chezmoi and VSCodium for Native RISC-V Development

Using GPG keys stored on a YubiKey for SSH Authentication on Windows and Windows Subsystem for Linux

Thu, 08 Aug 2024 19:54:12 +0100

Implementing GPG Authentication and Signing for GitHub repositories using a YubiKey hardware token.

Copyright on Cryptocurrency Logos

Tue, 01 Nov 2022 16:50:08 +0000

Copyright in cryptocurrency is a complex topic, many crypto currencies are created by a corporate entity others by individuals. In some depending in some cases when the currency was created the associated logo was releasesd under a commercial licence requiring permission to use it, despite the fact the use of the logo may be “free marketing” for the copyright holder.

I’m going to collect together a list of logos and evidence of what licence they are released under in this post, hope it is of use to someone.

Sony α6600 Camera

Sat, 14 May 2022 20:47:12 +0100

The Sony α6600 has become my go-to photography camera. Well-rounded for photography, videography, and as a streaming camera or live broadcasts to Facebook Live and Youtube.

Long-Covid Recovery Routine

Thu, 12 May 2022 14:08:27 +0100

Since it became clear that I could not recover from Long-Covid on my own, I have been working with two Osteopaths to help support my recovery. There is quite a lot of experimentation involved in treatment. Unfortunately, there is limited evidence of treatments that work for all patients.

Creating AI Art? Has your Super-SloMo model stopped working?

Sat, 26 Mar 2022 20:34:52 +0000

Photo of a blue-green hummingbird drinking from an Orange Flower by James Wainscoat on Unsplash

If you are here because your Google Colab notebook that uses the Super-SloMo model is failing. Specifically, with a RuntimeError or you see the following in the output: ``_pickle.UnpicklingError: invalid load key, '<'.

Then this is because the code that is used in the vast majority of notebooks to fetch this file has stopped working. We discovered that instead of downloading a 150Mb PyTorch checkpoint, it downloads a small HTML error page.

Integral Crypto FIPS 197: “failed to initialize secure device”

Wed, 31 Mar 2021 19:23:55 +0000

I had an unusual experience when using an Integral Crypto FIPS 197 device on a new laptop. This particular device uses TotalLock.exe on a read-only CDFS partition to enter the decryption key (password) to mount a hidden partition.

When I went to access the device, i.e. run TotalLock.exe from the D: drive, the message:

Failed to initialize secure device

After investing the system event logs with minimal information, and checking the executable wasn’t blocked from explorer, I considered how Windows Defender might be affecting the device.

2020 Weekly Update 50: Retail, Healthcare, Vulnerabilities and Politics

Tue, 15 Dec 2020 08:26:44 +0000

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

Some creative individuals have found a way of hiding card skimming malware in the sharing buttons used on various websites. A timely reminder to know what 3rd parties you us and what they might be vulnerable to.

Novel Online Shopping Malware Hides in Social-Media Buttons

Google, Adobe, Valve and Microsoft Patches

Both Google and Microsoft emitted a slew of updates in the last week including fixes for undisclosed vulnerabilities in Chrome, Windows and Microsoft Teams.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Settings

Fri, 11 Dec 2020 20:01:26 +0000

Photo by Daniel Stub on Unsplash

Mouse

I bought a Razer Basilisk V2 when it was on Cyber Weekend deals on Amazon; pretty good for fairly decent mouse, I see plenty of people using Zowie Mice which either means they are sponsored by BenQ/Zowie or they are really the best mice for CS:GO — I’ll leave it to you to decide.

2020 Weekly Update 49: Threat Hunting, Vulnerabilities, COVID-19

Mon, 07 Dec 2020 19:11:04 +0000

Photo by seth schulte on Unsplash

Threat Hunting with JARM

SANS comes through with an article on using JARM to hunt threats; this is an area I have started getting interested in given the increased threat landscape we find ourselves in.

InfoSec Handlers Diary Blog

If you know code is vulnerable, would you ship it?

Dark Reading goes into some detail on the critical factors why vulnerable code is shipped in the first place.

2020 Weekly Update 48: Threat Models, Cyber Monday and Data Leaks

Mon, 30 Nov 2020 20:26:50 +0000

Photo by Marcin Kempa] on Unsplash

Proactive Security and Threat Modeling

Manifestos have become a mainstay of information technology with everyone publishing a manifesto articulating the what a group of people subscribe to; generally of the form “we prefer this, over that”. __ InfoSec is no different and this week we had a Threat Modeling Manifesto — this is key as threat modeling is the cornerstone of proactive information security management so well worth a read.

2020 Weekly Update 47: Inbox Shenanigans, Unpatched Vulns, Big Sur OCSP, Cyber Insurance and…

Mon, 23 Nov 2020 08:23:26 +0000

Photo by Efe Kurnaz on Unsplash

I’ll just sneak this into your in-tray

Crafty sellers on the dark web have found a way to sneak e-mails into your inbox without sending them across the internet. This renders tools like Mimecast ineffective against this kind of attack; all is not lost however as the user would need to be phished before this could work.

Tool sneakily implants malicious emails into inboxes, but it can be thwarted

Innovation has been rife this year within the cybercrime community, The Register called this out in their article on Monday Morning:

2020 Weekly Update 46:

Sun, 15 Nov 2020 16:00:47 +0000

Photo by Andrey Trusov on Unsplash

Victim Blaming in Information Security

Starting off this week on a low note, in my opinion, is the disturbing revelation that in 2020 we still think shaming people is an effective strategy to defend against phishing attacks. A paper published on the 29th October seems to suggest that after doing a study of 142 employees in New Zealand that a name and shame approach would work.

2020 Weekly Update 44: Cyber Skills, Healthcare Attacks, North Korea, Machine Learning and Threat…

Sat, 07 Nov 2020 11:08:20 +0000

Photo by Mauro Sbicego on Unsplash

I was due to be going away this weekend so I had planned to delay publishing this until Monday; however due to a new national lockdown in the UK, I am no longer able to travel. The bright side is I have time to publish this at the weekend, small mercies.

Google’s Project Zero discloses a vulnerability in the Windows Kernel

October felt like a busy month for anyone dealing with Windows on their network; and was certainly a reminder of the value of a Defence in Depth strategy is key. To round off the month Google Disclosed a zero-day vulnerability in the kernel Cryptographic Driver that was being exploited in the wild.

The need for BeyondCorp-type organisations; Threat Models and Breaches (2020: Week 44)

Mon, 02 Nov 2020 20:09:56 +0000

Photo by marcos mayer on Unsplash

IT moves to a zero-trust, decentralised model (Saturday)

Looks like Google were on the right track with BeyondCorp as Coronavirus has very succinctly put the “impenetrable border” approach to IT Security on notice. With millions of knowledge workers able to be productive from home, but failing to get access to resources as VPNs and Identity and Access Managements solutions struggle.

Threat automation, decentralized architecture among emerging post-COVID cyber trends | SC Media

Checkpoint followed up a few days later with a series on videos on how their products could secure a remote workforce:

Office 365 and G-Suite Targeted, Tesla Autopilot confused, NSA points a finger (2020: Week 43)

Sat, 24 Oct 2020 17:26:59 +0000

Photo by David von Diemar on Unsplash

Cyber-villains Targeting Office 365 and G-Suite users (Monday)

Given the impacts of COVID-19 and Working from Home a necessity for many in the industry; cyber attacks this week have leveraged vulnerabilities in well known brands including the RAC. The article has good advice for Security and Operations teams to configure their mail-filters appropriately:

Breaking News: Massive Cyberattack Propagating via Redirector Domains and Subsidiary Domains |…

Tesla AutoPilot can be tricked with subliminal messages (Monday)

A couple of frames in a hacked video billboard video can trick a Tesla into taking inappropriate action:

Sooty the Security Operations Centre Client

Fri, 23 Oct 2020 17:55:54 +0000

Photo by Dmitry Ratushny on Unsplash

I spotted an article on the SANS InfoSec Handlers Diary Blog where the author described a tool for Security Operations Engineers named Sooty:

TheresAFewConors/Sooty

It’s a command line tool predominantly seeking to put the day to day tasks of analysing attacks and enterprise defence at the fingertips of the analyst.

As a tool it is very task oriented, when you run it you are presented with a list of options:

Privacy vs. the Government, Trickbot disrupted, and more (2020: Week 42)

Sat, 17 Oct 2020 11:17:13 +0000

Photo by Sergiu Nista on Unsplash

National Security vs. Privacy: Round 3 (Monday)

T he battle between national security and privacy continues as the “Five Eyes”, plus India and Japan, reach out to technology firms pleading for ways to protect public safety. In the face of end-to-end encryption and other technologies nation states increasingly hitting brick walls when criminals use these services putting public safety at risk. This is an ongoing debate, and personally I tend to sit on the side of privacy and the personal protections it affords; however I think everyone recognises the need for public safety to some degree — I doubt this will get resolved any time soon.

Managing and Mitigating CVE-2020–16898 (Bad Neighbour/Ping of Death)

Wed, 14 Oct 2020 12:25:19 +0000

Blue Screen of Death from Wikipedia

Many IT administrators, DevOps, TechOps and SecOps in the UK woke up this morning, to a particularly nasty looking Patch Tuesday. Top of the chat is CVE-2020–16898 which has been dubbed Bad Neighbour by McAfee and Ping of Death by Sophos.

Reality Check

It’s worth realising that this particular CVE has no known exploits, however best case scenario a threat actor could craft a ICMPv6 packet to exploit the RDNSS component of the IPv6 stack built in tcp.sys; the net result a threat actor could cause a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD). There is a worst case scenario of course in that a threat actor could craft a packet that didn’t cause a BSOD, but did allow the actor to execute code against the target system, known as Remote Code Execution (RCE). In reality the worst case scenario is unlikely to happen anytime soon, or even ever as it requires a failure of many lines of defence.

Configuring a SSH Client on Windows 10

Mon, 12 Oct 2020 19:48:53 +0000

Photo by Tadas Sar on Unsplash

The first step is identifying the versions of the OpenSSH components we want to install, for this guide we will only be installing the SSH Agent, not the server. All of the following will need to be executed from a Elevated PowerShell Prompt.

Get-WindowsCapability -Online | ? Name -like 'OpenSSH*'

This will spit out two capabilities, we want the client:

Name  : OpenSSH.Client~~~~0.0.1.0
State : NotPresent

Name  : OpenSSH.Server~~~~0.0.1.0
State : NotPresent

Which we can install with the following command:

There is no such thing as NoOps!

Sun, 24 Nov 2019 08:59:50 +0000

Photo by Carl Cerstrand on Unsplash

Apologies for the click-bait title, I do stand by my statement though. There is no such thing a NoOps, or DevOps, Production Engineering or DevSecOps for that matter! They are all words that describe our aspirations, passions and desire to innovate and identify as part of a tribe. The problem with all these “words” is they mean different things to different people; it’s a sad truism that:

My Journey to Google Certified Professional Cloud Architect

Tue, 12 Nov 2019 16:44:05 +0000

I took and passed my Google Certified Professional Cloud Architect exam with five weeks of study, not the easiest, but certainly achievable

The fifteen-minute Blog with Netlify and Jekyll on Windows

Fri, 11 Mar 2016 18:22:37 +0000

Blogging has become a way of life for many, developers use blogs to record their learnings, journalists to cover news stories in a free form and personal style. However, my personal bug-bear with blogging has always been maintaining a hosting platform which is typically is cumbersome and awkward. Updates come thick and fast, and even when we keep up to date with all of the patches at some point, we get hacked and have to unravel the hack or start over.

Azure: No current subscription has been designated

Fri, 17 Apr 2015 12:40:42 +0000

Somethings a process doesn’t go to plan, this isn’t unusual by any stretch of the imagination. However we can all feel a little lost when the instructions set out before us just don’t seem to work. That was how I was feeling today when I got the following message while trying to use the Azure Resource Manager API through PowerShell:

Get-AzureLocation : No current subscription has been designated. Use Select-AzureSubscription -Current to set the current subscription.
At line:1 char:1
+ Get-AzureLocation
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    + CategoryInfo          : CloseError: (:) [Get-AzureLocation], ApplicationException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : Microsoft.Azure.Commands.Resources.GetAzureLocationCommand

As it turns out the error message is less than helpful as there were no subscriptions defined at all, tracking this all the way back through my process I noticed this warning message:

Iain M. Banks gave me more than Science Fiction books

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 19:51:59 +0000

Iain M. Banks died today, in my mind Iain is one of the few people who was capable of building a world so vast yet so detailed that it would take a life time to understand the ramifications and practicalities of living in this kind of pan-galactic near-post-physical civilization. Iain masterfully takes you through a single thread introducing ideas and concepts that underpin something much larger than the story itself. He does this again and again, winding threads together to build a book. Beyond my awe of Banks’ world building and book writing skills, there are some very specific things that he introduced to me that have contributed to me as a person:

Elevated Command Prompt on Windows 8

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 11:00:27 +0000

Two and a half years ago I posted about openening an elevated command prompt on Windows Vista and Windows 7. The process has changed slightly in Windows 8 as we have lost the traditional start menu. In Windows 8, applications don’t automatically get administrator privileges, they either need to request it or the user needs to explicitly start the application as an Administrator. The way to do this with the Command Prompt is as follows:

Public Virtual Auto-Properties and CodeRush

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 21:36:17 +0000

Since starting to make the move towards utilizing NHibernate in most of my projects I have been a little frustrated by the need to make properties virtual. This is by no means a criticism of NHibernate just the tooling, specifically Visual Studio 2010 and CodeRush. Whilst CodeRush has templates for everything the virtual keyword dosn’t seem to get a look in, fortunately it’s not hard to add support. Thanks to Rory Becker’s article on Creating Virtual Methods I had everything I needed to create the template. Auto-properties are actually significantly less complex than methods as they are composed of little more than the type, property name and the { get; set; } block. Templates are easy enough to create from the DevExpress Options Menu (DevExpress Menu -> Options) you jump to the templates page quickly with the search in the top left hand corner. I prefer to organize my custom templates into their own folder, then I can easily import and export these between machines via drop box. 1) Right click your preferred folder and select “New Template” inter “u?Type?” and press enter/OK. 2) Set the Context - I copied the context of my template from a?Type? and removed the InStruct directive, as virtual is not valid in structures, the Use: field should read something like this:

Connect to VPN with Windows 7

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 16:30:05 +0000

Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 has some great new ways of connecting your road warriors and teleworkers to your network. For most of us Systems Administration types Routing and Remote Access is still the most common way of achieving this connectivity without DirectAccess. Because I have written this documentation up twice now for two separate companies I thought it would be worth writing it a third time and placing it in the public domain for reference in the future. The documentation assumes that the VPN End Point is Windows Server Routing and Remote Access, however the instructions work for a number of other vendors VPN end points. What you will need:

Orchard Placement ID Strings Must Match

Tue, 31 May 2011 19:12:04 +0000

I spent far too long trying to fix a error while developing an Orchard Module. To explain further Orchard CMS derives a lot of its flexibility by representing content in highly abstracted terms called shapes, these shapes are dispatched by the module that wishes to output content then rendered at the end. In between these shapes can be manipulated by themes or modules to change how the information is displayed. It takes a while to get your head around it, but its a great system… until you make a mistake! Modules define where shapes are placed through a file called placement.info your module dispatches shapes through it’s Driver (a class inherited from ContentPartDriver)

Responsive Design for Programmers

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 15:23:09 +0000

Responsive Design is a term that seems to have risen up around me over the course of the last year. Up to this point I have been largely unaware of what it meant other than had a good deal to do with designing markup and CSS for the mobile platform. Today I thought I would spend a couple of hours researching the topic, I have included some of the best articles and post I could find.

2010 Blogging Year In Review

Fri, 31 Dec 2010 14:38:18 +0000

I try to do this post every year as it gives me an idea of where my readers come from and what they are looking at. My blog is consistently getting 100+ unique visitors per day, most of these are new visitors who have found a blog post via organic search results (Google, Yahoo!, etc), with a smaller number having found me through links from other sites or directly into the site. The most popular article by far has been Change your MTU in Vista and Windows 7, this is in no small part because I have written one of the few articles that explains the method to identify your ideal MTU, not just the command to change it. The next most popular article is another one from last year titled Card Reader on Acer Aspire 5100 Series under Windows 7 and my explanation of obtaining an Elevated Command Prompt in Windows 7 comes in at number 5. With the top two entries centred around fixing problems with Windows 7 this suggests more people are interested in getting their computer working than programming, ho hum. My review of OneNote and Evernote has been fairly popular, as has my review of Center Parcs from 2008. I shall try and review products and holidays as I go along, although I am reguarly stuck for inspiration in these terms.

Listing Table Sizes

Fri, 24 Dec 2010 10:20:09 +0000

Databases are a pain in the neck to look after, poorly designed models and processes that don’t remove temporary data can cause a database to grow in size. A database that is allowed to grow large beyond its requirements becomes a burden on the nightly backup, takes longer to restore in the event of a recovery scenario and slows down the development process by preventing developers from testing things out on “live” data. More often than not I have found that the problem lies with log or analytic tables sometimes this information is liberally logged (which it should be) and then totally ignored without a thought for trimming the data on a regular basis. SQL Server Management Studio provides a way of looking at the storage usage of tables individually from the properties context menu item of the table.

Ordinance Survey OpenData (Part 3 - Cleaning Up)

Fri, 17 Dec 2010 15:55:38 +0000

If you look through the schema of the table we imported in Part 2 there are a number of unused fields and some of the data appears to be missing.

Cleaning up the Schema

You can go right ahead and remove the fields that start with “Unused” as far as I can tell the full version of Code-Point uses these fields.
Remove the nullable attributes from all of the fields, this will prevent us from doing something silly at a later date, and will avoid Object Relational Mappers such as Entity Framework from creating nullable data types.
Many of the fields contain codes not data itself but codes that describe other data, so lets prepend code on the end of those fields for the time being.

Cleaning up the Data

The quality column in Code-Point Open describes the source and reliability of the data, it ranges from the most accurate 10 through to no data 90, when building a system around this data you need to decide at what data is important to your use case. The following query will give you an idea of the quality of the dataset as a whole, I have annotated it based upon the OS Code-Point documentation.

Ordinance Survey OpenData (Part 2 - Importing The Data)

Fri, 10 Dec 2010 14:26:53 +0000

All of the data is in different files; SSIS is capable of extracting data from multiple files however for the purposes of this article I am going to stick to the Import Export Wizard. To combine all of the files into one (big) file a quick switch to the command prompt is required:

type data\*.csv > .\CodePointOpenCombined.csv

Because none of the data files have headers this works fine, if they did have headers some work would be needed to strip those out. Create a new database in SQL Server then follow these steps:

Ordinance Survey OpenData (Part 1 - Schema Scanner)

Fri, 03 Dec 2010 15:49:32 +0000

In April 2010 the Ordinance Survey released certain parts of their data under special licence which allows for commercial use without cost. All the types of data made available are outside the scope of this post although I hope that the techniques described could be applied to any data set not limited to Ordinance Survey data. In this post I am going to look at Code-Point Open, a list of all UK postcodes with their corresponding spatial positions.

Things to listen to on the way to work

Fri, 19 Nov 2010 20:23:06 +0000

I spend about an hour and a half on the bus every day commuting to and from work. It was a huge boon for me when I got my HTC Desire as it opened up the world of Google Listen. I wanted to go through some of the Podcasts that I listen to in the hope that someone else in my position can enjoy them and hopefuly learn as much from them as I have.

SteamBirds

Fri, 19 Nov 2010 12:16:42 +0000

Danc gave those who read LostGarden a heads up that Spry Fox was releasing SteamBirds (No longer available) for the Android platform. I have been watching Spry Fox since Dan mentioned it on Lost Garden. Due to being plain busy (no pun intended) I never got a chance to try SteamBirds on the web. Now it is on my phone I get a chance to play it while on the bus!

Encapsulating Alpha Fade in Unity3d

Fri, 12 Nov 2010 20:09:31 +0000

Several days into my late Unity3d project I realised that the was a bulk of code designed solely to make an object invisible by fading it out of the scene. The code was not complex although because of the way it was all in one class it appeared complex. After doing some research into the best way to go about making this change, realised it was both convenient and logical to extract the code into a separate script and attaching that to the object that I wished to apply the effect to. This meant that instead of nested if-statements for state management in a script attached to the Main Camera I was able to make declarative statements:

Unity3d plus three weeks

Sat, 06 Nov 2010 01:07:33 +0000

It is about 3 weeks on since I started learning Unity3d, and today Makemedia delivered the product we were working on using it. I have thoroughly enjoyed the process and the experience, there is still much to learn however I am much more confident experimenting with Unity3d to see what I can come up with. As I am not going out to see the fireworks tonight, I put together a 3d scene to demonstrate some of Unity Basics particle effects in the form of a personal fireworks display. Move around in the scene using W, A, S, D or the Arrow Keys you can move your head by moving the mouse.

Unity 3D

Sat, 16 Oct 2010 20:18:22 +0000

I am starting a project next week using Unity3D, I have known about this for a while and have poked around a bit to try and figure out how to do various things. I have been really impressed as to how fast you can get something done with what is basically a free product.

There are some superb videos on Unity3d Student which have been invaluable. I think I have got my head around the controls, UI, paradigms and scripting, although not all in one scene. As evidence of my work I have made three balls bounce around the screen, something akin to a carpenter making a door stop perhaps, but I am sure I will learn.

Changing code accessibility modifiers quickly

Tue, 12 Oct 2010 20:20:48 +0000

I have two hints today both of them involving changing accessibility modifiers. The first is a feature of CodeRush that I accidentally discovered while testing out the Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tools the second is a great new feature of Visual Studio 2010. For those who don’t know what I mean by accessibility modifiers, those are the keywords you put before blocks of code that define how that code can be accessed, this is all enforced by the compiler giving you nice compiler error messages if you violate these rules. To provide an example the following auto-properties are all have the accessibility modifier “public”:

Elevated Command Prompt on Vista and Windows 7

Thu, 07 Oct 2010 12:32:40 +0000

I explained how to get an elevated Command Prompt to perform system tasks in the comments of my post about setting the MTU in Windows 7, I am writing the up a bit clearer and linking it from that post. I have a blog post for Windows 8 if you have already made the move. In Vista and Windows 7 applications don’t automatically get administrator privilege, they either need to request it or the user needs to explicitly start the application as an Administrator. The way to do this with the Command Prompt is as follows:

Finding Code Issues

Fri, 01 Oct 2010 21:02:28 +0000

As programmers we are well known for writing bug free perfectly formed code first time round, as such I don’t really understand why DevExpress implemented the code issues feature… no wait… that should be the other way round.

CodeRush has several ways to access the Code Issues user interface, first off there is the thin file overview down the right hand side of the viewport. In the code itself there are handy contextual hints too. In this example, this. is redundant and has been greyed out, if you hover over it it will tell you more about the issue and how to resolve it.

Spot The Mistake 1

Sat, 21 Aug 2010 17:30:29 +0000

This one had me puzzled for about an hour, I shall endeavour to post the answer in the comments in short order.

foreach (var id in CharacterIdentities)
{
  QueryMethodAsync(
    APIMethods.CharacterSkillInTraining,
    m_userId,
    m_apiKey,
    id.CharacterID,
    (x) => OnSkillInTrainingUpdated(x, id));
}

Using EVEMon Data with LINQPad

Sat, 31 Jul 2010 21:52:17 +0000

LINQPad is an awesome aide to .NET Developers. Written by Joseph Albahari of LinqBridge and the C# In a Nutshell series fame. LINQPad allows the developer to write, compile and run C# or VB.NET Expressions, Statements of Programs outside of Visual Studio. Everything I am going to show you in this post can be done with Visual Studio simply by wrapping the text in a new console application, and adding references to the DLLs. However I strongly encourage you to download LINQPad and give it a go. In the event you are using 64-bit windows and are still using LINQPad 2 you will need to download the x86 version of LINQPad 2, as all of the EVEMon assemblies are compiled for x86. If you have LINQPad 4 you don’t need to worry about. Assuming you have EVEMon installed, the first step is to load the EVEMon.Common.dll assembly into LINQPad:

Tracing A Method Signature

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 21:03:52 +0000

Over the past three weeks I have discovered that many performance problems with Windows Forms applications are down to certain events being fired very rapidly, usually these are down to layout operations being triggered by updates to controls. Without the use of RedGate Software’s excellent performance profiler I have been forced back into the habit of temporarily peppering the code I suspect of being a problem with trace messages. For a while I was quite disorganised using trace messages such as “Entered SoAndSoMethod”, “OnSomeEvent Triggered”, etc. Over time I have settled into using the declaring class and method name to identify which method was being called. Thinking about it today I decided this was still too much work (yeah, I am that lazy), I wondered if System.Reflection could help me:

ASP.net 3.5 GridView RowCommand event fired twice

Thu, 01 Apr 2010 15:25:27 +0000

I am writing this up to hopefully save someone else time in the future, this particular problem took up six hours of my day yesterday causing quite a bit of frustration for me, as the developer, and the users of the application. If you are searching for the solution scroll down to the bottom of the page where I will outline the solution I used to resolve the problem. It is also worth pointing out that this does appear to be fixed in .NET 4. Certainly I was able to consistently reproduce the problem with VS2008/.NET 3.5 on multiple different computers. However after converting the project to VS2010/.NET 5 I haven’t seen the issue.

Lack of AutoEllipsis support in ToolStripSystemRenderer

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:03:04 +0000

AutoEllipsis is a property introduced to System.Windows.Forms.Label with .NET 3.0, which in the event of the text overflowing the rendering rectangle of the Label will trim the end and add a Ellipsis ("…"), if this does occur the ToolTip for the label will also be set to the full (untrimmed text). Unfortunately this functionality is not available for ToolStripStatusLabel. To make things worse in the event the text overflows it disappears completely. This bug, oversight, feature or whatever you want to call it cause some confusion after the release of EVEMon 1.3.0.1912. Several people assumed the new more verbose status bar was broken, being empty and all. We put together a kludge fix, which would set the text and if it overflowed try to guess the length with Graphics.MeasureString. This worked fairly well, it cause some flickering when resizing the window and would leave a small gap on the right hand side of the StatusStrip. I knew there must be a better way, and seeing an article about the StringFormat class reminded me of the need to find it. Searching about a bit found me a post on Joel on Software, I refined the code a little and came up with this (which is basically identical to Tom’s solution):

LINQPad Crash

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 21:48:18 +0000

Update: I never did “fix” this problem, installing .NET 4 then using LINQPad 4 seems to work well.

I found myself using LINQPad more often than creating console applications, so much so I dicided to make the small but worth while investment in the optional “Autocompletion” (Intelisense-like) component. The licence is great because I can have it installed on all three of my PCs without having to buy extra licences. I was figuring out the limits of the Math.Pow function a few days ago on the laptop when the LINQPad upgrade message appeared, not sure what happened next because LINQPad crashed with the following exception.

Preventing the PictureBox control from locking files

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 20:18:58 +0000

One of our more regular contributors to EVEMon posted on our forums showing that the application was incapable of updating cached files (specifically images), after a bit testing I discovered the following Exception was being thrown when trying to overwrite the file in question:

System.IO.IOException: The process cannot access the file 'path\filename' because it is being used by another process.
   at System.IO.__Error.WinIOError(Int32 errorCode, String maybeFullPath)
   at System.IO.File.InternalCopy(String sourceFileName, String destFileName, Boolean overwrite)
   at System.IO.File.Copy(String sourceFileName, String destFileName, Boolean overwrite)
   at EVEMon.Common.FileHelper.OverwriteOrWarnTheUser(String srcFileName, String destFileName) in EVEMon.Common\FileHelper.cs:line 108
   at EVEMon.Common.FileHelper.OverwriteOrWarnTheUser(String destFileName, Func\`2 writeContentFunc) in EVEMon.Common\FileHelper.cs:line 82
   at EVEMon.Common.Controls.CharacterPortrait.SavePortraitToCache(Image newImage) in EVEMon.Common\Controls\CharacterPortrait.cs:line 248

After a bit of searching around I discovered a post on StackOverflow identifying that System.Drawing.Bitmap(string filename) would lock the filename until the Bitmap was disposed of. The post presented a solution but no code, A bit of further searching confirmed my expectation that Image.FromFile(string filename) was subject to the same locking behaviour:

OneNote vs Evernote

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 20:11:33 +0000

Somewhere in the middle of 2007 I was encouraged to use OneNote to clear my desk and move to a “paperless” system, initially this was a little painful as it seemed a gargantuan task to scan in all of the bits of paper on and around my desk that appeared to contain useful information. As it turned out I realised that if a bit of paper was covered by another (or in fact covered by anything) it wasn’t that important to the execution of my role and could probably be thrown in the bin. At the time I was not using Microsoft Office at home, opting to use OpenOffice for the limited needs I had for productivity software. I did however want a better way of organising my paperwork at home, OneNote 2007 came in at about £70 which isn’t unreasonable for what you got. Then I discovered Evernote. Seemed perfect, I don’t generate so much paperwork that I would bust the 40mb/month limit on the free account. In the end I decided to adopt Evernote at home and continue to use OneNote at work, it proved quite a handy separation of work and life. Recently I have run into two problems that are pushing me towards using Evernote for everything, and ditching OneNote entirely:

Login failed for user ''

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 13:51:41 +0000

There is an excellent post on the SQL Protocols blog about diagnosing the:

Login failed for user ''. The user is not associated with a trusted SQL Server connection.

message displayed by SQL Management Studio and other applications which use the same API; Notice the blank username ‘’. I believe there is one possibility missing from the above post: that is the Group Policy setting “Deny access to this computer from the network”. Which can be found in both Domain Group Policy and Local Security Policy in the following path:

Christmas Cake

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 10:11:49 +0000

We often get a bit of my mum’s Christmas cake each year, this year we got given a whole (albeit mini) cake. Whole lot of other treats in a gift bag. Got to be one of my favourite Christmas Presents this year.

Debugging "Just My Code"

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 15:59:19 +0000

Within EVEMon we have started making heavy use of LINQBridge which uses Visual Studio 2008’s Multi-Targeting capabilities to allow a .NET 2.0 applications to use the compiler functionality of C# 3.0.

This reduces our need to push EVEMon towards .NET 3.5, and simplifies our dependency stack for the end user (.NET 2.0 is pre-installed on Vista and above, .NET 3.5 is pre-installed in Windows 7 and above). One of the annoyances I have run into is every time there is a problem with a LINQ statement the debugger will stop in the LINQBridge project rather than EVEMon’s code; this usually tells you nothing useful forcing you to dig into the exception to find the stack trace to find out which line caused the exception.

Controling Code Outlining with the Keyboard

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 19:13:35 +0000

Code outlining is a feature of supported by Visual Studio and many other editors, MSDN has some good documentation for VS2005, VS2008 and VS2010. If I were asked to explain this as briefly as possible, I would probably say:

Code Outlining is the logical partitioning of code in such a way that the user interface, or editor, is able to selectively hide the body of the content (such as a class, struct, enum or method) whilst leaving the signature or some identifying comment visible.

Card Reader on Acer Aspire 5100 Series Under Windows 7

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 20:24:56 +0000

Update (15/11/2010): the drivers listed in this post are out of date and may cause a BSOD, several alternatives are listed in the comments; however Microsoft appear to have approved 64-bit drivers on Windows Update.

I am typing this on my Acer Aspire 5102WLMi which is one of the popular (if flawed) Acer Aspire 5100 series; I rescued this one from the Balconi Test by putting a bit of rubber (it was a cut down rubber foot) on top of the South Bridge chip set, that however is not the story I am telling today. I never bothered to install the Card Reader driver on this laptop while I was running the Windows 7 Beta, mainly because I am lazy, but also I didn’t have a need for it so it never came up. With the release of Windows 7 I wanted to get the system perfect, seeing as hopefully it will last a good year in it’s present state, and I wanted to be able to re-arrange the SD card from my Acer PDA. Windows 7 x64 was unable to identify a driver for this particular card reader, this left me with three unknown devices in Device Manager: The Acer website was a bust, as far as Acer are concerned this laptop won’t even run Vista x64, so I had to dig deeper. From past experience of looking for drivers without using Windows Update I knew that I could probably identify the manufacturer from the Hardware and Device ID’s available through Device Manager. If you want to follow along here are the steps:

Change your MTU under Vista, Windows 7 or Windows 8

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 20:11:31 +0000

I have been updating this blog post over the years since I first discovered the issue with my computer in Windows Vista, now I am on Windows 8 and also on |FTTC broadband; |Path MTU Discovery seems to just work. I have tested the process so the approach and the commands still work in Windows 8, I however no longer need to use this process personally. For some reason that has escaped me |Path MTU Discovery (PMTUD) in Windows just doesn’t seem to figure out the MTU for a given path (something to do with routers being poorly configured to not respond to ICMP requests). So Windows uses the default. For the most part this doesn’t affect anyone, however if it does affect you, it really annoys you. Failure of PMTUD will result in some websites not loading correctly, having trouble connecting to normally reliable online services and general Internet weirdness. The resolution is to set your default MTU to one lower than the Ethernet default of 1500. Here is how:

Music to Install Windows By

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 20:12:06 +0000

Windows 7 turned up in the post today. The red box is Visual Studio 2008 which is there to show that the boxes have a similar profile to the old style hard cases. I have been running the Beta since it was first available to the general public, and I have had Windows 7 Business at work for a couple of weeks now. Bought Windows 7 Home Premium for about £45 from Tesco. One copy for the main PC which I will probably re-build at Christmas and one copy for the laptop which is re-built now.

Adjusting Selections in CodeRush Xpress

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 19:30:24 +0000

I found this function totally accidentally when I knocked my mouse into a key when something interesting popped up on Twitter. I happened to have a variable selected like so: The key that I knocked was the Number Pad “+” key, and it expanded the selection like this: As any self respecting Systems Administrator would do I wondered if doing exactly the same thing repeatedly would have equal or compound effects. Strangely enough it worked, the selection will continue to expand selecting increasingly larger sections of code. The reverse works as well if you press the Number Pad “-” key the selection will be reduced.

Find Files in CodeRush Xpress

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 12:27:41 +0000

As I mentioned in my previous entry I have started using DevExpress’s CodeRush Xpress. It is a free cut down version of CodeRush that I heard about in an episode of .NET Rocks. I have wanted add something to my Visual Studio development experience and I can’t justify the cost of either Resharper or CodeRush at the moment. There has been quite a bit of discussion about Resharper vs. CodeRush and in my experience most people I have spoken to love one and hate the other. I hope to be able to write a series of posts about some of the features found in CodeRush Xpress which I hope will clarify their purpose and use in my mind and maybe help someone find the function they are looking for. First off “Quick File Navigation”, this is a search function for locating a file by file name, I am finding it increasingly useful when looking through patches as it allows me to very quickly jump to a file name. Particularly as I am trying to move my projects to a one class per file so if I can remember the class name I can find the code file very quickly. The “Quick File Navigation” dialog is accessible through the keyboard short cut Ctrl+Alt+F. Typing will filter the list box by the name of the file matching anywhere in the filename including the extension. An additional feature for those who like me use CamelCase in their file names; if you enter your filter terms in capital letters it will search for capitalized words, in order within file names. Thus entering “AW” into the search box will also bring up the AboutWindow.cs in the above solution. Combining the above with the Ctrl-G keyboard shortcut in Visual Studio 2008 to go to a specific line we can do the following to go to line 162 in ShipLoadoutSelectWindow.cs:

Long time no blog

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 12:21:02 +0000

I had been intending to post up all sorts of bits of news about life, driving, programming and cats but it didn’t happen. I have been busy which is good, however it doesn’t leave very much room for blogging.

This post is going to be one really quick catch up entry to try and get me back into the swing of it. I finally passed my driving test at the beginning of the summer, it was my fourth try and I passed with three minors which was a great feeling… since then I have driven once, as part of PassPlus, which didn’t really feel vastly different, although it was more enjoyable knowing that I didn’t have a test coming up.

Running through the rain

Tue, 05 May 2009 19:04:21 +0000

I don’t send on these Internet “chain letters”, as in general I don’t think people want to get generic forwarded and forwarded e-mails from me, they would probably prefer me just to e-mail them to ask them a question, favor or just to say hello. I do like this one though, it has a fair point and it makes it well. I have removed what I suppose would be described as the postamble from the bottom, as it doesn’t work for blog posts.

New Webhost

Sun, 03 May 2009 16:13:30 +0000

I have transfered to a new web-host, if you are seeing this message it has worked. That is all I have to say about it.

Fixing EVEMon's Crashy C++ DLLs

Sat, 18 Apr 2009 19:22:06 +0000

I have been working on EVEMon for about two months now, taking on the responsibility of committing changes to the trunk, fixing bugs and adding new features. As a project I have been involved for several years submitting bug fixes and little features, it was down to my experiences with EVEMon that I decided to implement Subversion and Trac at work. Unfortunately the first time it came to me to be responsible for a release, it seemed to go terribly wrong. The updated installer worked fine, and it seemed initially there were no problems with the updated code base. However BattleClinic shortly went a little mad with bug reports similar to this one:

Zoe

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 20:28:57 +0000

We got Zoe and her sister Kerry in the summer of 2000 before I left for University, it had been a few years since our last cat, Emma, had died and my parents decided it was time to have a cat (or cats as it turned out) in the house again. I love cats, despite being allergic to them, so I gladly sat in the back of the car with the two kittens in their travel box, the as yet unnamed kitten Zoe looked a bit pitiful and couldn’t stay standing up I was worried about her, although as it turns out she made the journey just fine. As they had just been separated from their mother they were nervous little things, Zoe hid in the corner of the conservatory, Kerry explored a little.

Driving Test #2

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 16:42:05 +0000

Well another day, another driving test and another fail. I had hoped to say that this was a pass day today but it was not to be. I think the nerves got the better of me, I was okay for most of it although my throat kept drying up.

This test actually came out much worse than last time, again I had two serious faults, however more than twice as many minor faults with 14. It was a bit of a shock to me as I had realized I had made some minor mistakes here and there but had not spotted the major faults.

Nerves

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 08:24:50 +0000

The nervousness is really manifesting itself this time round despite taking my hay fever medication last night I am sneezing this morning, I think it is just the nerves. I woke up with a headache, the Paracetamol hasn’t really helped that much I am hoping it is going to clear as I head into town to sit in a coffee shop to relax a bit.

I feel nervous about taking the test, although neither outcome has any real consequences other than spending a bit more money and having it hanging over me for a few more weeks.

Driving Lesson #41, #42 and #43

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 18:40:41 +0000

Like last time in the run up to my test I have not blogged every single lesson, however after a week of Holiday and the last three lessons I am going to be taking my test again tomorrow at 14:32.

I think I am ready to take the test, I felt that way last time - don’t know if I was or not, I am not the person to judge that. However tomorrow we will find out what happens. I have come to the conclusion that the test is pretty much a sequence of events that you either deal with as the DSA deems to be correctly, or not. It’s quite hard for me to get my mind around this method of testing, but that is they way it is to be.

Driving Lesson #40

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 19:17:09 +0000

This post is four days late, and I have nothing to Report. Couple of weeks until my test - I have kind of lost interest in driving, I would like to get it over and done with but I am not overly worried about the test itself. Drive Safe!

Driving Lesson #39

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 19:47:24 +0000

Had quite an enjoyable drive today, did four manovures first time round (reverse round a corner, reverse park, bay parking and turn in the road), that’s not to say they were without error but they were passable.

Almost didn’t see a car driving round the Sainsbury’s car park, Kev put his foot on the break at the same time I put the break down, he was faster though so I felt the pedal go out from underneath my foot.

Driving Lesson #38

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 20:39:58 +0000

It might be that I am tired, and hungry but I got a little fed up with driving. It takes quite a lot of concentration and it gets me home more tired than if I had sat on a bus for a hour and a half.

It sound silly but sitting on that bus for two hours is the only time I get to relax and pray. Two things you can’t really do when you are driving, the other thing that a bus lets you do when you are on it and if you are feeling up to it is give your full concentration to the book or podcast you are trying to extract information from which is really nice. I think the bus is the only place in the whole world where I know I will not be interrupted.

Driving Lesson #37

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 20:15:48 +0000

I am getting slack updating the blog, I had my first lesson after my driving test yesterday, in an odd kind of way I actually felt more confident. I know I failed the test however having someone else in the car and not having it all go totally wrong gave me some confidence.

The lesson yesterday basically involved driving round finding places to do manoeuves, I make a point of saying “finding” as it was strangely difficult – at one point a van driver decided to park on the corner I was in the process of reversing round, amusingly enough he even nodded and smiled at us.

Driving Test #1

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 16:16:29 +0000

Well as I have let the entire internet know via Twitter that I failed my driving test lets go through some analysis. But first a little bit of information about the Burges Hill driving test center two important things:

The test center does have a toilet
Don’t be tempted to touch the tap in the toilet it fell off when I used it

As for the test itself the results were as follows:

Driving Lesson #34, #35 and #36

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 11:46:48 +0000

Sorry to anyone who was expecting posts on Thursday and Friday time kind of caught up with me, my lessons since last Wednesday have been much better, I still made a few mistakes here and there. Drove under some pressure after one of the Pastors at my church decided to follow us along Church Street and finally left us going up The Upper Drive apparently I handled it well.

So tomorrow is my test thank you to everyone who has wished me luck and said they were praying for me. It is much appreciated, I will probably tweet as soon as it is reasonable as to my result, if I pass it will probably be sooner.

Driving Lesson #33

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 18:42:14 +0000

6 Days and counting That was bad, wrong side of the road and indicating far to long. Could do better.

Driving Lesson #32

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 18:23:14 +0000

7 Days to Go Funny old day today, made one sill mistake that if in a test would have been a fail. Spent a fair bit of time today parking in bays, started off at ASDA, who despite being in the empty part of the car park told Kev he could not teach learners in Car Parks. Went down to Marine Drive and had people driving behind us while trying to park in the bays. Anyway seem to have got he parking in bays quite well, did one perfectly by accident, still need to remember to keep checking behind me.

Driving Lesson #31

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 18:36:27 +0000

8 Days till the test Got a lesson every day this week, so I am just going to do short summaries rather than write anything at length. Aced turning round in the road again, missed a check on my reverse park and went too close, then too wide then got it right on reverse round the corner. Also had a tendency to drive a little to far right on faster roads, must remember the two points on the windscreen the markings should pass through. Tomorrow is bay parking more reverse parking and reverse round a corner.

Strange SPQuery Behaviour

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 12:31:43 +0000

I have been working on a very simple web part for a long time, the actual code for the web part takes less than an hour to write and merely displays a colour coded letter based on a query from a SharePoint list taking the date as a parameter.

It has taken a long time because of some strange behaviour with the SPQuery object, initially there was a problem with every row in the table being returned irrespective of the query, the odd thing was that if you ran the query in U2U CAML Query Builder it worked and the SPListItemCollection.count method would return 1 suggesting the query was working.

Driving Lesson #30

Mon, 09 Feb 2009 20:48:56 +0000

Passed the 60 hours of driving lessons milestone today, which probably equates to about 58 hours of actual driving. What with the first couple of lessons being driven to somewhere to practice, and the end of lessons going over Drivers Records from time to time.

Turning round in the road was pretty much spot on, Kev wanted me to make a mistake so that he could ask me to do it again so we would be pointing the right way again.

Adding VSeWSS 1.3 Solutions to Source Control

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 10:35:12 +0000

Having done a little experimenting with Visual Studio Extensions for WSS (VSeWSS), I wanted to start actually developing features for our intranet site. I try and add everything that is even slightly important into source control (Subversion). VSeWSS creates normal looking solutions, however when you deploy your project to a SharePoint site it created an additional directory alongside “bin” and “obj” called “pkg”.

This “pkg” folder contains the manifest.xml, soloution.xml and feature.xml files that are used to create the feature to be deployed into SharePoint. Initially I was including this folder in my commits however, I noticed that any tweaks made to feature.xml were overwritten when you deployed the package again. After some searching around I came across an article that suggests deleting the “pkg” folder under certain circumstances. From this I assume that the contents of the “pkg” folder is generated each and every time you package and deploy your solution (or indeed project), thus it does not need to be added to source control.

Snow Havoc

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 19:58:49 +0000

Today was a very bizarre day, it seemed to me that the whole country ground to a halt (electronically too). I got a text message at 0630 this morning telling me to stay in bed as the school I work at is closed. After a slightly more gentle wake up than usual, I discovered that thelocal bus company had suspended services, twitter was going mad with snow reports from the UK, someone even came up with a Twitter & Google Maps mash up.

Driving Lesson #29

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 22:20:32 +0000

Today was not my best lesson so far, generally my driving was quite poor, I seem to have forgotten some fairly important things like using the hand break and putting the clutch down. I did change my driving position within the car as I was in quite a tense position which dosn’t give me the best view in the world, not sure if that affected it but it may have done. I am still having problems reversing round corners, despite spending some time today reading back my old notes I couldn’t really do it today either, it is a bit to analog for my digital brain. Kev had another way which might help, and was certainly a way of getting the job done.

Driving Lesson #28

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 19:23:04 +0000

Moving towards my 60th hour of driving, and I am still enjoying it. Made a couple of silly mistakes today, the first (not the first mistake just the first silly one) was not taking a right turn where I should of. It was down to my perception of how the road went, I hadn’t anticipated that the road itself went straight on, I thought it went off to the left. Kev asked me to take the next right, and I missed it and went straight on.

Driving Lesson #27

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 21:18:06 +0000

Today was a new skill, parking in a shopping center car park. Or at least an adaption of existing skills.

Get yourself parallel to the line kerb equivalent, roughly a doors width from the bounding line of the parking space.
Reverse until the near side bounding line of the parking space is about half way through rear window.
Once at this position steer full lock to the left.
Keep reversing, making corrections by straightening up then moving back to full lock.
As you finally come round to parallel to the left and right bounding lines straighten up.
Reverse until the front bounding line is level with the mirrors.

That’s roughly it, I think. Hopefuly I will get to practice it again next week and draw you all a diagram. This week I was less hesitant than I had been in the past, I still made mistakes and got confused by the trafic but I was more decicivie. Felt conftable and confident in the car, if a little weary of being asked to do emergency stops again.

Driving Lesson #26

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 20:53:08 +0000

Today was a day for gear changes and roundabouts, some dual carriageways and national speed limit single carriageways in the pitch black freezing cold. Kev was trying to get me more confident and less slightly dangerous on roundabouts which is good as I find them shockingly confusing, particularly if I need to do a gear change coming up to them.

Lifehack has an article on making decisions under preasure, which I think probably covers the broad techniques I should be using to make sure I am better at roundabouts than I am at the moment.

Happy New Year

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 20:54:24 +0000

This is just a quick post to wish everyone a Happy New Year. I have been wanting to post some statistics gathered through Google Analytics for some time now so here we go. The following data covers 1st January 2008 until the post time 31st December 2008, all data excludes administrator visits and search engine crawlers. Visit Statistics

Visits: 3,066
Visitors: 2,708
Page Views: 4,935
Bounce Rate: 74.72%

Top Visit Origins

Merry Christmas

Thu, 25 Dec 2008 09:51:08 +0000

It’s that Christmas time of year again, I am fortunate to be able to spend time with friends and family this Christmas. I hope my readers get to spend Christmas with those that you love too.

Merry Christmas!

Driving Lesson #25

Mon, 22 Dec 2008 19:21:59 +0000

First lesson in two weeks, for that matter I don’t get another lesson for two weeks either. I feel a little stuck with the driving to be honest, each lesson seems similar to the previous lesson, it is possibly a mix of the law of diminishing returns and fustration at doing the same thing over and over again.

Took a look at the Burgess Hill Test Center the website still says no information available, and I can’t seem to select any times or dates on the “book a test” page on direct.gov. Never mind, hopefuly will be able to book a test at some point in 2009!

Learn a Little More About Richard Slater

Sat, 13 Dec 2008 22:37:10 +0000

Graeme Arthur tagged me, normally I hate these things but this is kind of a reverse chain letter… sort of… maybe if i re-write the rules slightly.

Rules

Link to the original tagger(s), and list these rules on my blog.
Share 7 facts about myself in the post - some random, some weird.
Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

7 Facts About Me

At the time of writing I have been alive for approximately 871 million seconds.
I first started programming (in Spectrum BASIC) at about the age of 8 since then I have coded projects in Visual Basic, Pascal, C, C++, Java, Ada, PHP and C#.
I have played EVE Online for almost five years now, have been playing less often of late however I still get to enjoy the time I do spend in EVE, although it is getting increasingly more and more lonely in space.
I have been learning about Sharepoint over the past few weeks, I have already completed most of the Microsoft e-Learning on the topic and read several blogs, I recently signed up to the Sharepoint User Group UK.
I wrote my dissertation on the future of MMOGs, I disagree with a good proportion of what I wrote, however it was one of the most enjoyable parts of my Degree.
I type at between 40 and 60 words per minute, it has taken me 5 minutes to get to 300 words in this blog post, some of them however were copied and pasted from Graeme’s post.
Like Graeme I also play bass (albeit I play badly) and dabble in live PA, although I don’t really enjoy the later any more.

7 people to tag:

Driving Lesson #24

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 20:02:00 +0000

So today was the 48th hour of driving a car, we didn’t do anything new one emergency stop at the end after being chased round by a 4x4 for a bit, should have guessed that was going to happen after Kev had said he wanted me to do an emergency stop.

Trying to perfect manoeuvres on difficult roads (read steep), was quite interesting trying to do a three point turn on a large hill. One thing that is slightly concerning me is reversing into parking spaces in supermarkets and the such. I am not sure why I would want to reverse into a parking space when I could just go in forwards and then put the shopping in the boot, it just seems like something that might be useful at some point.

Ordering Pizza

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 19:48:22 +0000

I know I have only just blogged, but this wouldn’t fit in Twitter.

Ordered a Pizza tonight from Famous Moe’s Pizza, we ordered a large deep pan pizza with pineapple, sweetcorn & mushrooms; on the side we were going to have coleslaw, two sprites, garlic bread and Häagen Dazs.

Just had a phone call from said Pizza company who said they have no sweetcorn, coleslaw, sprites or Häagen Dazs. Leaving us with a pineapple and mushroom pizza with garlic bread… strangely enough I asked them to cancel the order and refund the money to me. In times when people are less likely to spend money on take-away it doesn’t bode well for your business model to not have 70% of products in stock.

Driving Lesson #23

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 19:23:19 +0000

Emergency Stops…

…DON’T LIKE

My head is buzzing after doing my first four emergency stops, it isn’t the emergency stops that I don’t like it is being in charge of a car after doing one, also having your mate shout “STOP” in your left ear, has a somewhat negative Pavlovian conditioning effect on the enjoyment of driving.

So as with my earlier posts I am going to try and write down the procedure for doing an emergency stop, as with previous posts this is my memory of what to do, not official. Please take advise of a qualified driving instructor (like Kev) before trying this.

Driving Lesson #22

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 20:22:21 +0000

Today was another chance to go through my driver record, Kev got to tick off a few more of the boxes which is always a nice feeling. I am definitely suffering from a case of diminishing returns when it comes to driving, Kev and I had a discussion at the end of the lesson about trying to get more polish on my driving rather than learning any new skills. My driver record now looks like this:

Driving Lesson #21

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 20:32:25 +0000

Today was quite a lot of driving around and a couple of manoeuve, based upon the deficiency in my driving last week. The majority of it went well, both turning round in the road and reverse parking worked well, it helped me greatly to look back over my notes and refresh my memory.

The other major thing we worked on was gear changes approaching junctions, particularly my lack of them! I have a tendency to forget to change gear and try and do roundabouts at 15mph in 4th gear or something equally daft. We decided that this was because I am pre-occupied with understanding the situation, and thus I forget to go through all of the essential steps when approaching a junction.

Driving Lesson #20

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 19:43:02 +0000

So today was a mock test, one of several before I take my actual test. We drove down to the test center in Brighton Marina where Kev explained the test to me, how majors and minors worked and what would score as what. I still haven’t done emergency stops so we could not cover that, other than that it seemed pretty much as I had read and expected.

Driving Lesson #19

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 20:10:28 +0000

So, Kev sprung a surprise on me today… a silver car, not just a silver car but a Renault. More or less the same thing I guess, well all the foot pedals were in the right place if somewhat sticky (not good). And most of the controls make sense.

The lesson itself went much the same as the past three lessons, having issues with my feet but getting my way through it. Moving off wasn’t perfect either, stalled more often than I would of liked and stuck around at junctions longer than I should have.

Driving Lesson #18

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 19:38:11 +0000

I had another ‘funny feet’ day today, not as bad as two lessons ago however. I was being a little hasty trying to move off - this is part of becoming more confident we think, I am no longer able to crawl away without any gas on the flat as I am bringing the clutch up much faster. This means I have to adjust my technique sligtly by putting on the gas and then bringing the clutch up, this is often coupled with taking the hand brake off. It is a lot to think about at once, but I picked it up well.

Driving Lesson #17

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 19:46:10 +0000

Today was another funny driving lesson my feet weren’t quite right, and I kept doing silly things made a bit of a mess of turning round in the road and didn’t get reversing round a corner quite right. One of the things I was doing particularly wrong was putting the clutch down while breaking, for some reason I have it stuck in my head that clutch goes down when slowing down, rather than just before I come to a stop. Kev got me too take my foot of clutch pedal when driving and rest it on the side (which has done wonders for my ankles) it also delays me putting the clutch down.

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along-Blog on iTunes

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 20:37:53 +0000

I promised myself I would blog about Dr. Horrible again once it was released on iTunes UK, it seems like an age since it was available for free over the web, and then so quickly it disappeared again. It is however now available through iTunes UK, along with the sound track (which has been available for a few weeks now). Unfortunately I didn’t pick it up on my RSS feeds until too late to download and watch tonight, hopefully get a chance to plug in and watch at the weekend.

Driving Lesson #16

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 18:41:50 +0000

So, today went much better than last week. We did quite a nice loop of the area I am contemplating taking a GPS with me next time and leaving it logging on the back seat so that I actually know where I have actually been. Maybe I will do that when I have passed my test, could be a little distracting if it started beeping at me.

I got two major things from my lesson today; first being that after last week driving isn’t that bad after all, the second is that speed limit signs should be seen on both sides of the road like a gate.

Driving Tips

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 17:48:05 +0000

The BBC has posted a list of 10 “driving tips” to make your driving experience more enjoyable and rewarding, the article has the added advantage of providing an insight into the day-to-day driving skills that people develop on thier own without any formal instruction.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7635486.stm

I particuarly liked number 3 - “Make Eye Contact When You Can”; which is something I picked up a few years ago while walking around town making eye contact with people walking towards you often helped both parties to pass eachother without bumping or jostling. It is not something I had thought about with regard to driving, although I am going to try and put it into practice at pedestrian crossings if I get a chance.

Driving Lesson #15

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 17:59:29 +0000

Grrr… argh… that didn’t go so well had massive problems with my feet today stalled on hill starts wanted to accelerate round corners, people beeping at me - if you are in the 0.01% of people that beep at learner drivers please try to remember it makes it worse! - Kev went through strategies for keeping moving on minor to major junctions.

I can’t think of a way to draw it as a picture but basically it is as follows:

Driving Lesson #14

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 20:02:35 +0000

Finished my 14th driving lesson about an hour ago, we covered much of the same thing as previous lessons some driving on fast roads and town roads the some manoeuvre. Not much to be said really I felt more relaxed despite stalling more than in the previous lesson. My observations were more than a little lax in places, I completely forgot to check my blind spot while reversing round the corner.

Driving Lesson #13

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 20:12:31 +0000

Had my first ever evening driving lesson this evening, Kev and I went to Seaford and back again over the course of the lesson, using some national speed limit single carriageways and some town driving.

Had a slightly hairy moment when I decided to change lanes while going round a roundabout, actually scratch the “slightly hairy”; it was down right dangerous. My mistake was; I had this image in my mind that if you are going straight on at a roundabout you go round the out side… what I had not got straight in my head was that if you are in the right hand lane stay in the right hand lane, all comes down to Mirror-Signal-Manovure.

Back to the Urban Battlefield

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 21:11:20 +0000

No, I haven’t taken up free running I have just been playing a little more Call of Duty 4 over the past week, I was encouraged to look back at it by a friend some time ago. Only just got round to trying it again.

Since I last played there has been another patch, that includes new maps (I thought there were four maps, however I have only played three.

Steam

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 19:12:24 +0000

The day I purchased AudioSurf was the first day that I even saw Steam, sure I had heard lots of people talk about it, many people praising its loveliness and many more complaining that it was evil.

I had never had the need to install it, I owned Half Life (never finished it) and had played a bit of Counter Strike 1.6 in my time, but I had never felt the need to take it any further and buy Half Life 2.

5 Commands I Use Every Day

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 17:07:48 +0000

For my regular day job I am a Systems Administrator, my team and I manage a network with 7 servers and approximately 600 workstations, 200 laptops and 2500 users. All clients are Windows XP SP2 or SP3 and all servers are Windows 2003 SP2 or Windows 2003 R2 SP2. I am sure I am not alone in knowing least 5 commands that I use day in and day out to manage workstations or servers on the network. I thought I would take the time to share some of these with you now.

Audiosurf

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 18:26:11 +0000

One of the many RSS feeds I subscribe to is Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Over the weekend Alec Meer posted an article about a game called AudioSurf.

Essentially you feed in an audio track in one of several popular formats, AudioSurf then analyzes the music and generates a racetrack. On this racetrack ride several coloured blocks. These blocks can be collected in a grid, in much the same way as Connect 4. Once you have collected three or more of these blocks of the same colour in a connecting pattern you will score points based upon the number of blocks and the colour.

Driving Lesson #12

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 17:26:25 +0000

Breaking my streak of 11 blog posts on the day of my driving lesson… I had a driving lesson yesterday. Strangely enough I feel that my driving is getting worse, I don’t think it actually is getting any worse I am just getting more confident and trying to do more things at once, at which point Kev steps in (literally) with the foot break.

Interesting experience today as we were driving round in the pouring rain, it was quite disturbing at first as the windscreen wipers were distracting, however once I got over that I was more or less ignoring them. The main issue I had was large blobs of rain obscuring entire cars, again once I got use to checking a bit more carefully I got over that too.

Google Chrome

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 20:41:01 +0000

I am sure almost everyone in the whole world will have seen this as I got told by two friends, my RSS feeds and my wife almost simultaneously, which was a disturbing experience in itself. Google has released their own browser, Google made a rather amusing and informative cartoon too. There is pleanty of coverage from all of the usual suspects such as Lifehacker, Lifehacker (Again), Official Google Blog and The Register.

I am making the commitment to use Google Chrome for the Google Web Applications that I use, from what I have skim read about the product it is probably more suited than my add-on rich Firefox install (I do a fair amount of website coding, and even more debugging other peoples code - for which Firebug is a must, and now part of Firefox Developer Tools).

Driving Lesson #11

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 16:46:50 +0000

Had quite a break between lessons this time, found it much harder to get into the frame of mind after an 8 day break, came back quickly enough. Kev has been trying to get me talking through what I am doing to improve my concentration and awareness of the situation, I am still struggling to get junctions and roundabout quite right, I still tend to come up to the junction to fast not giving myself enough time to get into position, change gear down and look.

Credit where credit is due Mythic!

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 20:08:41 +0000

Apparently this was released sometime last week however I had missed it completely, Mythic and its Electronic Arts overlords have decided that they will not be crediting former staff members in Warhammer Online. I really don’t understand it, Ryan Shwayder put it across better than I can.

Everyone who contributes to a project puts something in, even if their product is not explicitly included in the final complete product they are part of the process. Not including someone’s name in the credits of anything be it a game, a film or a TV show is a giant slap in the face. As a programmer I would be gutted to think that I had been excluded from the credits having put years of work into and then moved on to better things a few months before launch.

Getting into the Groove

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 12:01:06 +0000

Catherine and I put on a barbecue this weekend, in theory it was a housewarming party, however we have been here for 16 months - so not really a housewarming. One of the things that we didn’t have to put any effort into was the music, and that was down to something called Grooveshark Lite.

Groveshark is a Florida start up company who’s business model is basically to allow users to upload their music collection to Groveshark’s servers, registered users can download the music (at a price), of the said price a cut goes to the artist, a cut to the person who uploaded the music and presumably the rest goes to Groveshark.

Watching Films

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 20:36:48 +0000

I spent some selfish time on Tuesday watching Donnie Darko. I wasn’t giving the film my full attention so I had to watch it again, in between I spent some time on the website and reading the FAQ both of which are well worth going through, however they are full of spoilers, so best to watch the film first.

Anyway, watching the film re-kindled my love of watching films with a complex plot, films like WALL-E], The Dark Knight and Iron Man are great to watch, however you hardly leave the cinema wondering what just happened… in a good way. It is a fine balance between creating a film that totally confuses, and makes you think.

Driving Lesson #10

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 18:14:22 +0000

20 hours of driving lessons completed now, and Kev and I took the time to go through the Driver’s Record that the Driving Standards Agency provides people who book a theory test for the first time. The Driver’s Record is broken down into twenty driving skills and four other skills related to car ownership. You can read more about the Driver’s Record on direct.gov.

Each of the 20 driving skills are rated between 1 and 5, where 1 is Introduced and 5 is independent without prompts from the driving instructor. In total I have one of the skills at level 5, three at level 4, twelve at level 3 none at level 2, two at level 1 and there are two that I have not looked at yet (emergency stops and parking). I am pleased with the progress I have made although I expect I will need another 40 hours of lessons before I will be close to being able to take my practical test.

Twitter by SMS is no more

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 20:23:02 +0000

In Europe at least, Twitter was unable to come to an agreement with mobile phone operators to continue to send incoming Tweets to mobile phones via SMS, at least one person thinks that SMS is a deceptively profitable service for the network operators. Surely services that use SMS are going to generate more revenue as people pass funny Tweets onto non-Twitter users.

After all, all of those jokes that zip round like wildfire whenever something happens in the news aren’t just the creative juices of the masses expressed in a short message, they are written by the networks to encourage people to send more messages (by passing the jokes on).

Driving Lesson #9

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 18:44:09 +0000

Well roundabouts went well today, I am still not anywhere near confident on them but I was bringing my speed down most of the time. I must admit I am itching to get out in a car again to practice more. I will have to wait as my two weeks of regular lessons have come to an end, could only book one lesson next week as Kev is off to Rivercamp on Friday, and has lessons the rest of the week.

Driving Lesson #8

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 20:28:27 +0000

If you are following me on Twitter you will have seen that Peacehaven was very wet this morning, of course by the time I have left my basement office it was bright sunshine. I was glad of it as we went off towards Shoreham and then onto the A27 to head back towards Newhaven. It seems that driving fast and overtaking comes fairly easily to me, perhaps being on my bike has provided me with practical practice.

Driving Lesson #7

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 16:25:34 +0000

I don’t have much time to blog today, so it is fortunate that much of what I described yesterday was practiced today. It was a narrower road and it was much harder to get it right. I have got the procedure down in my head now though, will need more practice but I am making progress.

Tomorrow is “driving a bit faster” which should be fun, not to0 fun mind… I am not one for speeding… intentionally.

Driving Lesson #6

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 20:59:56 +0000

Today’s lesson was very distinctly split into two, Kev allowed me to drive off from work in Hove much to the amusement of the caretakers who didn’t know that I couldn’t drive. From there Kev took me through the area between the Old Shoreham Road (A270) and the coast road (A259) drilling the MSM-PSL junction procedure I had been taught previously. I have been having trouble linking up the stopping at junctions and starting off again, basically I spent too long at a junction that in some cases I shouldn’t have to stop at.

Where the hell is Matt?

Sat, 09 Aug 2008 10:18:32 +0000

I know this is quite old news really, but I had not seen this until it was linked on Twitter, so I thought I would blog it on the off chance that some one else hadn’t seen it either.

Essentially all it is three videos of some guy (Matt Harding) who travels round the world recording short clips of him doing a little dance (very badly - his own words), each video has been set to the lyrics sung in a dieing Solomon Islands. in the third, and most recent, video Matt is joined by thousands of people who wanted to dance with him.

Never underestimate the power of the Internet?

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 22:21:28 +0000

I have been using StumbleUpon for a couple of years now, it is a superb way of finding websites that you wish you had known about a long time ago. Once in a while you stumble upon a page that you really wonder how they got there so fast.

I am not sure if this person has underestimated the capacity of the Internet to spread information really quickly or if it is a marketing thing. I have decided to blur out the identifiable information until I can work out which of the above it is.

Driving Lesson #5

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 20:41:23 +0000

My tenth hour of driving lessons is over, and I am pleased with my progress. It takes a surprising amount out of you driving around, it is possible that because I am quite tense while driving I am making it worse for myself, I am relaxing more. My steering has improved and I am more or less getting everything done. That is not to say that I am not making mistakes - I am making a lot of mistakes - but that is okay mistakes are part of the process.

Driving Lesson #4

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 20:10:29 +0000

Spent some more time driving round Woodingdean, Kev went through who has priority in which situations. For example if an obstruction is on your side of the road then the oncoming traffic has priority, the situation can obviously be reversed if the obstruction is on the other side of the road the you have priority.

I have been drawing out some of the diagrams from Kev’s folder of pictures, to save anyone else the trouble I have included the source files here for anyone to play with all licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported Licence.

Electrical Storm

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 09:41:18 +0000

Peacehaven saw a much anticipated thunderstorm last night, I say much antcipated as it has felt very close and muggy all day. It was actually the most impressive storm I have seen whilst living on the south coast, for some reason we don’t get very many over the land on the coast.

It started off with just flashes of lightning and claps of thunder moving closer and closer, then came the rain, when I say rain I mean a torrent of water coming from the sky so much so that gutters and drains were overwhelmed making it all the more impressive. During this time I needed to get from a front door of a friend’s house to a car and the four of us, plus the other people going to other cars got soaked in the few seconds we were out in the rain.

Driving Lesson #3

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 18:36:31 +0000

Third driving lesson went really well, Kev taught me about hill starts specifically if you are going up the hill I need a little more gas than and keep the clutch just above the biting point when on the flat. When going down the hill the clutch can be fully depressed and thus the accelerator isn’t needed, you can basically just roll down the hill - must remember to bringing the clutch up once I am moving as engine braking is actually quite substantial.

Driving Lesson #2

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 18:26:36 +0000

So today went well, I am starting the cement the moving off procedure in my head now and I got a bit more comfortable breaking (which is always good when moving at anything above stopped). I edited the previous post with corrections from the previous day. Most notably I forgot about checking the position of the mirrors before putting my seat belt on and the hand brake should be the second thing to check after getting in the car.

Driving Lesson #1

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 19:38:40 +0000

I had my first driving lesson today with Kevin Tant, started off a little nervous however I got more relaxed as the lesson continued. I am going to try and write down what I learnt here to help me remember for the next lesson - please do not take this as official or instructional (in fact it may well be TOTALLY WRONG!) if you are learning to drive there are lots of excellent resources on Amazon and I honestly can’t stress how important it has to have an Approved Driving Instructor.

Center Parcs - Longleat Forrest

Sat, 02 Aug 2008 22:09:11 +0000

Myself and my wife visited Center Parcs in Longleat Forest at the end of July 2008 for a mid-week break. I thought that I would do a quick write up to help refresh my memory in the future and maybe answer a couple of questions that other people may have.

I could give a blow-by-blow account of everything that happened on the day, but I think that could be a little tiresome so essentially what I am going to do is give a quick overview of the break (Monday - Friday) and then go into a little more detail on the parts of the break that stood out for me. I have included images where appropriate, I took about 60 shots of which 45 were worth keeping, if you are interested in seeing the rest of the shots mail me and I will send you a link to my gallery on Facebook.

Strangely Worded Guide

Sat, 02 Aug 2008 10:23:28 +0000

Catherine and I went to Center Parcs in the week just gone, having not been for a number of years we looked through the “Guest Information” pack which contained a couple of rather interestingly worded paragraphs. I am facinated to know what events in the past have prompted Center Parcs UK to add this in the guest information. I think perhaps it would be good to note that there was not fireplace in our accommodation, so does this mean that if we bought a slow burning log we could burn it in the middle of the room? I thinks perhaps we will give that a miss.

EasyWorship

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 17:59:14 +0000

I am not in the habit of writing product reviews on my blog, however this review was prompted by being asked for the n’th time what software I use at church to display words, videos and scripture on the projector. The short answer is to say that we use EasyWorship 2007. The reasoning behind using it is not that good really, as it was chosen before my time and as far as I know no one really did any major research into it. However since using it I have had the opportunity to really try and get into it and to see if there are any good alternatives to do the job. First of all we have three basic requirements, the first and most important was to be able to organise and display words during worship, the second is as a multimedia presentation platform (i.e. the ability to play sound, display video and PowerPoints) the third is to be able to display scripture during a sermon. Second there are the alternatives two of which I have tried in a “live” situation and two I have seen used very proficiency:

Google Search Results

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 18:34:18 +0000

Inspired by other similar posts on many other blogs I decided provide some answers to questions that people come to this blog via search engines with. Sorted in descending order of the number of requests ever.

lakeland revival (with and without quotes and various prefixes and postfixes) - My Post, NewChristian.org, matthewblogroll, Wikipedia’s Florida Healing Outpouring page
richard slater - Yes that is me, there are more Richard Slaters though - you can find a list at richardslater.com!

Blog Updates

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 21:55:22 +0000

I have spent most of the day messing arround with the blog, much of the work has gone on behind the scenes adding sitemap.org sitemaps to make spidering the site easier. Moving the links section to a menu so that it isn’t taking up valuable sidebar space and adding buttons to share posts on popular social networking sites such as Facebook, Linkedin and Technorati.

Tweaked the templates a bit more so that it didn’t just give snippits of articles on categories, archives and tag pages. Made the pagination slightly more useful you can now jump to any page, the same way you would be able to for Google.

Driving Theory Test

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 21:58:15 +0000

I passed. Had a good chat to the guy at the desk who did wonders to ease my nerves by being funny and blunt. I got 50 out of 50 for the multiple choice questions and 53 out of 75 for the hazard perception. Which according to Kev is good, the pass mark for the hazard perception was 44. I scored 6 for the double hazard clip, 5 on 3 clips, 4 on 4 clips, 3 on 4 clips and 2 on 2 clips. Which means that I was only below the pass mark on 2 clips.

Thinking and Breaking Distances

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 15:07:13 +0000

I have been trying to find a way of remembering my thinking and breaking distances for my theory test, part of my problem is I think in metric not imperial except for road speeds which are always in miles per hour.

According to the book…

@20mph thinking distance is 6m and breaking distance is 6m

@30mph thinking distance is 9m and breaking distance is 14m

@40mph thinking distance is 12m and breaking distance is 24m

Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 21:07:01 +0000

I have been meaning to post about this since I first heard about it, and spectacuarly didn’t. As of Tuesday last week www.drhorrible.com was host to the first of three episodes of Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog. The title is great in itself, however as it has been said seeing is believing and honestly if you have enjoyed any of Joss Whedon’s work then you will really love this.

The mini-series covers a snapshot in the lives of Dr. Horrible (Neil Patrick Harris) the protagonist and his arch-nemisis Captin Hammer (Nathan Fillion of Firefly/Serenity fame). Unusally for Joss Whedon’s work it dosn’t have a strong feminist female character as such, however you will have to watch it to see why that may be!

Site Upgrade

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 20:53:53 +0000

Upgraded the site to WordPress 2.6, also switched the style to use widgets so everything down the left hand side is now a widget rather than some hand coded SQL stuff, that worked but could have been much better, now it is!

As you can probably see I am experementing with Twitter I don’t know if I am going to get along with it, but I do like the idea of blogging with less than 140 characters.

SMART Notebook File Format

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 12:48:09 +0000

The SMART .notebook format is simply a zipped set of XML and SVG files, This may be common knowledge but it is certainly the first time I have come across it.

To test it you can create a file in SMART Notebook rename the extension from .notebook to .zip, double click to open, you will be presented with several files named page_n_.svg where n is a number, as well as a series of other files and folders including settings.xml, preview.png and metadata.xml.

Visual Studio 2005 Web Development under Vista

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 13:27:08 +0000

I have had an issue today with Visual Studio 2005 and Vista today, specificly I have been unable to use the built in mini-web server that is used for debugging web projects. When you run a project from within the development environment it starts WebDev.WebServer.exe and then points an instance of Internet Explorer at http://localhost:port/path/to/default.aspx.

Now I remember this working well in the past, and indeed if I replace localhost with 127.0.0.1 it worked fine, I didn’t fancy having to type this every time I went to build and run a program. I could not find any way of configuring Visual Studio to point to the IP address rather than the host name.

Driving

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 19:28:48 +0000

I have had my Provisional driving licence for some time now, however I have done little or nothing about it since the idea of driving doesn’t exactly fill me with joy. I don’t know why that is but never the less I don’t particularly want to spend the time and money on learning to drive.

That said, it would make sense now Catherine and I are living in Peacehaven to be able to drive, it would also open up more job opportunities for me as I would be able to travel further than the bus can carry me, as well as being able to drive company cars and the such.

Artists Open Houses

Fri, 09 May 2008 20:00:06 +0000

Several of my friends and one of my colleagues are presenting their work at the artists open houses as part of the 2008 Brighton Festival. In no particular order other than that of the Fiveways Artists Group trail listing:

Rex Matthews - A colleague of mine.
Deborah Fleming - A friend from church, who is also displaying work with Liz Calmiano and Maureen Hawthorne.

Impressed with how creative everyone is!

Lakeland Revival

Thu, 08 May 2008 19:00:23 +0000

Catherine and I have been watching the GOD channel over the past three days, there has been and still is a great outpouring of the holy spirit in Lakeland, Florida, and the GOD channel have been broadcasting it to the world (well most of it).

I don’t know what God is going to do, but I am sure that he is changing lives there in Florida and all over the world through the ministries of the leaders there. It is not without criticism, I don’t know enough about everyone involved to make up my mind, chances are I will never know till I get to meet my Lord face to face.

Bartle claims victory in battle

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 18:36:50 +0000

I am sure that title is going to annoy someone an awful lot, but never mind. Richard Bartle submitted an opinion piece to The Guardian today, and as he puts it in his blog it is “Opinionated”.

I like it! I think it is something I had realised and accepted a long time ago (I was born in 1981) games are part of the norm for me. I learnt to program on a ZX Spectrum when I was 8, what did I write - computer games of course - pong, breakout, Thunderbirds, rolling shooters. I even tried to write a Windows like GUI in BASIC (yes it had some serious design flaws). All of that was normal to me.

Rescueing Kittens

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 19:27:46 +0000

I did something today that I have never done, that is rescue a kitten (maybe it was a young cat) from a tree. Initially I was going to leave it, as it is going to have to learn how to get down somehow, then it tried to get down forward and ended up clinging on to the tree. It was quite happy for me to coax it down as I stood below till I could reach down and lift it from the trunk.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Thu, 03 Jan 2008 11:09:50 +0000

Bought the game last week, finished the single player campaign a couple of days ago. It plays more like being in a film than a game, which for me is great, as a cinematic experience it is superb, the game play is better than any other game I have played before (which doesn’t say much really - have been out of touch of the FPS market over the past few years).

Happy New Year

Mon, 31 Dec 2007 23:00:49 +0000

Hope everyone enjoys the following year as much I have enjoyed the past. Have fun.

HP 22" Widescreen Monitors

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 08:39:12 +0000

Now, I know that the larger monitors of this world have some interesting technological issues to overcome, however I think HP has made one too many sacrifices with this monitor: w2207h 22 inch WIDESCREEN TFT For those of you that didn’t spot it: As pointed out on the E-O forums, the perfect monitor for fleet battles.

Bass

Sat, 29 Sep 2007 17:51:32 +0000

So after begging and borrowing the various parts I needed I finally have everything that would technically allow me to play a bass guitar, hopefully over the next few months I will have the time to dedicate to learning to play it properly. Had a bit of a play over the last day and it is great fun!

Quantifying Ourselves

Sun, 23 Sep 2007 20:21:52 +0000

Some friends on a forum I frequent have spotted a web application called The Political Compass the premise is you answer 6 pages of questions that gauge your political views. The result is two numbers which can be plotted as X and Y axis onto a graph that represent your political views.

My result was Economic Left/Right: -3.25 and Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: 0.15. This is a result I don’t disagree with, however I don’t think it is as clean cut as this. Peoples views change over time, moral choices are affected by different influences to economic or financial issues, those influences can change regularly. When it comes down to it a decision needs to be made at the moment it is required to make, if I am presented with an problem be it moral, social, financial, technical, etc. I make a decision based upon experiences, morality, knowledge and in my case and more importantly for me prayer.

Nate Combs on "Security" as an resource

Mon, 17 Sep 2007 19:21:06 +0000

Nate Combs has again posted on Terra Nova about what makes rare minerals rare. Nate makes the very good point; that rare minerals are not as scarce as the name might suggest. It is well worth a read as his his personal “scratchpad”.

Microsoft attacks Google Apps

Sat, 15 Sep 2007 11:43:19 +0000

I was reading Pete’s Images of Broken Light, specifically the interesting post about Microsoft’s public attitude towards Google’s Apps, it seems fairly typical of modern corporate America to rubbish someone else technology, brushing over their own failings without a second thought.

I don’t quite understand companies that do this, who are they targeting these comments at? Perhaps home users? surely they would use the free Google Apps Standard Edition as opposed to Microsoft Office Standard at £200 - £300, anyone could use Microsoft Office Live in the UK for free as well however it is still in “Beta” itself - how is that different from Google Apps “Beta”. What about Enterprise decision makers, clearly a press release is going to swing the opinions for a multi million pound roll out of a particular productivity suite - or not. Perhaps it is just sour grapes, after all Office Live hasn’t made nearly the impression I thought it was going to, certainly not in the UK.

Blocking Adverts

Thu, 13 Sep 2007 17:51:33 +0000

I read an interesting article on The Register about the Firefox Plugin AdBlock Plus, the article covers a bit about the current favourable relationship between Firefox and Google which could be threatened by the increased usage of products that block adverts from being displayed.

I am no fan of adverts on websites, as you can see; this site is devoid of adverts for the conscious reason that I find them distracting. Many adverts can not be controlled, if I add adverts to a page then I am leaving some of my screen space open to be used by another company, doubtlessly this company will have different views on what is appropriate, perhaps they promote content I would find objectionable (betting or breaking of game rules for example).

Economics of Virtual Worlds

Tue, 11 Sep 2007 19:33:10 +0000

I have been thinking about the economics of Online Games MMORPGs for some time. Most of my interest comes from writing my undergraduate dissertation which was more of an overview of the future of MMOGs than any specific focus. Lately, and most importantly with EVE Online, economics has shot into the public eye.

Wedding Aniversary

Tue, 04 Sep 2007 18:16:56 +0000

Catherine and I have been married for 3 years now, I have posted a bit more over at I Married You

Facebook

Sun, 02 Sep 2007 19:41:34 +0000

We had some friends down at the end of last week, and they both have Facebook accounts (or is that Facebooks, or Faces, or Facebook Profile pages. They use Facebook in other words) so Catherine signed up, then I signed up, then I spent an hour deciding what I wanted my permissions to be. I have finally settled on a partiuar group of settings that I like to call “Totally Paranoid”, everything is set to only be visible to “My Friends” including search, you will have to contact me outside Facebook unless you are entirely better at Social Networking than I am and can still send me a Friend Request. On a lighter note this post should be published on Facebook via Flog.

Desktop Blogging Client

Sat, 01 Sep 2007 12:20:54 +0000

Thanks to Ian’s Messy Desk and BlogWell this post comes courtesy of w.bloggar. Going to give this a go and see if I get on with it, shame it is not a WYSIWIG tool, but it seems to have some useful features.

Home Networking

Sat, 01 Sep 2007 11:46:31 +0000

Seeing as Catherine and I finally bought our own house and it looks like we might be staying here for much longer than we have ever stayed anywhere else, we are looking at options for home networking, our current solution involves a 802.11b Wireless Network for laptop connectivity and a cable for my PC, that has to be removed each night to close the living room door.

The Options

1) Wireless Network

802.11g provides a maximum wire speed of 54mbps which results in a typical throughput of 25-27mbps, our existing 802.11b network gives us a typical throughput of about 4mbps which is below that of our broadband service (6.6mbps - Zen Internet ADSL Max Service)

New Computer

Fri, 31 Aug 2007 19:10:00 +0000

I never got round to getting the money together for the last computer I wanted to build, so I have started again from scratch, the following is intended to run Windows Vista Ultimate in my current Cooler Master 210.

1 x Abit IP-35 Pro
1 x Intel Core 2 Quad-Core Q6600 G0 SLACR
2 x 2GB Corsair Memory TwinX XMS2 PC5400
1 x 520W Corsair HX Series Modular PSU
1 x Optiarc AD-7170A-0S 18x DVD±R
1 x 640MB EVGA 8800GTS Superclocked
1 x 320 Gb Seagate Technology ST3320620AS Barracuda 7200.10
1 x 22" Samsung SM-226BW Black Widescreen LCD

If anyone reading this has any thoughts please leave a comment, hope to get the whole lot for just over £1000.

Vista is the issue

Wed, 29 Aug 2007 13:54:20 +0000

I am currently trying to diagnose several Windows XP SP2 computers with severe network problems, the bottleneck is in the network. Whilst deploying a group policy object the Windows Installer Service crashed due to a network time-out, and this was the resultant response from Error Reporting: So there you go the problem with Windows XP is Windows Vista!

New Server

Wed, 29 Aug 2007 10:30:42 +0000

Recently purchaced and installed a new HP ProLiant DL320s to run as the site primary file server, had some issues with Windows 2003 R2 32-bit as it repeatedly BSODed before getting into graphical setup, tried the drivers for the SAS controller also tried the disc on a different computer to no avail. After chatting with a few people someone asked why I wasn’t going for 2k3 R2 64-bit, the main reason for not using it was it I had not had a chance to test it out in a test environment and wasn’t overly happy putting it into a live environment, looked at the software that was going on the File Server and all seemed ok, installed the ProLiant Support Pack migrated files, setup file screening and quotas. All was well, server running very fast and very happy.

Wikipedia Plugins for Wordpress

Tue, 28 Aug 2007 11:53:49 +0000

I have great faith that Wikipedia can make a great day to day resource for personal reasearch, and be a starting point for academic research (not that I would recomend using Wikipedia as a reference for anything remotely important). As I tend to like linking to Wikipedia from blog posts I am looking for a plugin that allows me to do so quickly. I have found two plugins that seem to contain the features I want.

Ooops! I Did It Again

Mon, 27 Aug 2007 22:20:37 +0000

Yes, it has come to that time of the year again that I remember that I was meant to be blogging more, in fact I made it a New Year’s resolution to blog more often, and that came to absolutely nothing and here we are almost 9 months later.

It has been a busy day, I have installed WordPress 2.2 both on here and on I Married You and removed almost all of the old site for storage space reasons, the only part of my website that is still there is my CS335 - Dissertation which several people link to, so I thought it only fair not to move that one. I will look through my University Stuff and see if any of it is worth bringing across to WordPress.

Well now that is cool!

Tue, 03 Oct 2006 07:54:44 +0000

A friend of mine from EVE, Planetside and OcPS has managed to get some of his photo graphs on his local BBC website, you can see the gallery on his website here

Welcome Back Old Friend

Fri, 24 Feb 2006 07:12:09 +0000

I have recently rediscovered a old friend, Digiguide I used to use it all the time before I went to university to remind me of when stuff I want to watch is on TV, however lack of TV meant that I wasn’t quite so enthralled by the possability of having it back. However if you want an electronic TV guide that reminds you of what you want to watch then it is about as good as it gets.

Crash Reporting Crashed

Fri, 27 Jan 2006 17:09:49 +0000

Yeah you got to love it, when you are reporting a crash to Sun because OpenOffice.org crashed, the crash reporting program crashed!

Our Purpose?

Thu, 08 Sep 2005 07:42:55 +0000

Today I start a course of sunday meetings, weekly house groups and daily readings centered arround God’s purpose for our lives, Rick Warren wrote it, God designed it.

Todays topic is It all starts with God, and the point of todays reading was it’s not about me, I would say that this could also be read as It’s all about God which reminds me of a song by Delerious called The Heart Of Worship, google the Lyrics they are quite something.

New Computer

Fri, 02 Sep 2005 08:18:10 +0000

Looking at getting myself a new computer so I have come up with a setup which looks good, we will have to see if I can afford it however.

1x Abit AN8 SLi nForce4 SLi (Socket 939) £102.17 Reasons: SATAII RAID for future proofing, SLI for future expansion
1x ThermalRight XP-120 £39.89 Reasons: Never faulted previous models
1x Vantec SF12025L Stealth 120mm fan £9.34 Reasons: Quiet yet fairly high (59) CFM

Forgot to Blog

Fri, 02 Sep 2005 08:17:35 +0000

All the mad hat stuff going on arround here and I have been forgetting to blog, that said before this weekend there was virtualy nothing to blog about!

OK… will start from last Thursday, headed off to RiverCamp at about 10:30. For those that don’t know I am a Christian, I go to a church and count myself as part of an church organisation called Elim (Elim Foursquare Gospel Alliance technicaly) and RiverCamp is our yearly prayer, worship and teaching event. Jon and Carol Arnott were doing most of the teaching this year, which was great for the most part, even though I missed the teaching that you would get at Spring Harvest or similar. All in all it was a really great weekend I feel that RiverCamp is still very young and very much in its infancy but it is growning up fast, huge future ahead of us I am sure.

Resetting TCP/IP under Windows XP

Wed, 03 Aug 2005 07:05:02 +0000

I have done this a couple of times at the request of BT and NTL engineers when internet connections haven’t been working as expected:

netsh int ip reset [log_file_name]

Very useful if you a struggling to figure out why you can’t even ping 127.0.0.1.

London Bommings

Wed, 27 Jul 2005 11:04:46 +0000

I am listening to the BBC Radio 5 Live feeds from the house of commons about the London Transport Blasts, it seems very little is known a unknown islamic group seems to of claimed responsability for the blasts however no one is sure if they can be beleived.

Inteligent Bears in Croatia

Wed, 06 Jul 2005 10:57:05 +0000

Pete and Elkanah better be watching out, it seems that bears in Croatia (where they have gone for their honeymoon) have become “Brighter than the average bear”: Ananova.com The Loknar family from Gerovo in western Croatia said the bear had knocked at their door three times and they were now refusing to answer the door.

Congratulations Pete & Elkanah!

Mon, 04 Jul 2005 08:03:03 +0000

Congratulations Pete and Elkanah, welcome to the world of married life!

I feel that I redeamed myself somewhat I delivered my best mans speech on Saturday with only a couple of stutters and fluff ups and got a fair few laughs in the right place:

Good evening Ladies and Gentlemen –

I would like to start by thanking Pete on behalf of the bridesmaids for his kind comments and echo the fact that they look wonderful and performed their role fantastically.

ISO Creator/Writer

Tue, 21 Jun 2005 12:27:19 +0000

Found a very useful tool called ISORecorder for creating ISOs from CDs, it works well with daemon tools, and burns ISO images created with nLite, pretty good replacement for the ISO Burning portions of Nero.

If you wanted a burning tool similar to Nero with the ability to add individual files and directories to a CD Image take a look at the free CD Burner XP.

On a totaly different topic, there is a heated discussion going on over here about the relative merrits and disadvantages of Wireless Mice over Wired Mice… if you feel like a bit of an expert feel free to join in!

It's hot in Brighton

Mon, 20 Jun 2005 07:08:48 +0000

Whilst some of the country is suffering flash floods and landslides, Brighton is boiling hot… fortunatly I work in a basement which keeps it quite cool for the moment, however last night was excruciatingly hot even with a fan on.

On another note, I think I am going to have to take a crash course in Microsoft Internet Information Services, as it is perfectly clear it has changed quite a bit since IIS4 (I believe it was re-written for IIS6) either way, I feel a little lost in it at the moment, all the functions are there… they are just in the wrong place.

Dr Who - The Transformation

Sun, 19 Jun 2005 09:59:10 +0000

If you missed it last night, you missed a bit of a treat… just in case some people haven’t seen it yet I won’t spoil the surprises. You can find the trailers and teasers for the whole series here On another note, Catherine and I are feeling much better, we haven’t eaten much in the last couple of days so we are a little shakey on our feet, but on the mend. Hopefuly I will be well enough to go into work tomorrow.

Worst Best Man... EVER!

Sat, 18 Jun 2005 15:17:28 +0000

If prizes were handed out for those people who were the worst at partular roles in life I think I would probably be up there in the Worst Best Man chart. Yesterday evening Catherine was in pain, really suffering from something… so I phoned the doctor who says it sounds much like gastroenteritis, all she could suggest was that she gets pleanty of fluid and doesn’t eat anything… so this morning I wake up at about 5AM in major pain… oh crap!

Dr Who

Thu, 16 Jun 2005 07:46:35 +0000

Excited dosn’t even begin to explain how I am feeling about the climax of the current series of Dr. Who; I am not going to be able to watch it on the night so that is going to get to me even more knowing that I am going to have to wait an extra day to see the end of the series.

The thought that this episode explains how Christopher Eccleston comes to an end as The Doctor? how the Daleks managed to survive the time war? are the time lords still in existance? Aaagh so many questions.

Month of Madness!

Mon, 13 Jun 2005 20:48:53 +0000

This month could possibly be the busiest month of my life, I am feeling quite stressed as it is because Catherine has been feeling much worse with her arms, so I have been doing more round the house. Starting a new job is always tiring particularly when you have a 1 hour round trip by foot to get there and back. My body was rebelling against me over the weekend, I ached from head to toe and honestly don’t feel rested in the slightest.

people actually read this!

Tue, 07 Jun 2005 15:32:19 +0000

I can’t believe it, people out there actually read my blog, I am fairly impressed I thought I was blogging to myself… not a necessaraly a bad thing that.

New Job

Mon, 06 Jun 2005 18:11:34 +0000

Started a new job today, won’t tell you lot where ;) Seems like it is going to be a challenge though… I am sure I am going to be making an occasional post about what I am doing, but basicly my task is to take the Environment up from Windows NT 4 to Windows 2003… sound familiar?

What happened to Windows Installer 3.1

Fri, 06 May 2005 07:23:58 +0000

n Aprils raft of patches, hotfixes and updates delivered via SUS, WSUS or Windows Update; Microsoft chose to release Windows Installer 3.1 the updated version of the install engine Microsoft has been pushing for the last 2 years.

However at the beginning of the week Steven Bink of bink.nu noticed that the update had been pulled from SUS, further inspection showed that it had in fact gone totaly missing from the Microsoft Website. Many have pointed to KB Article 898628

Software Update Services (SUS) Problems

Thu, 28 Apr 2005 12:44:10 +0000

We have been having a couple of problems with the soon to be replaced Software Update Services (SUS):

First and formost, large files do not syncronise between the Master SUS Server and the Slave at a satalite site. The two that have caused us the most problems have been Windows XP SP2 (266MB) and Windows 2003 SP1 (337MB). The error message is the rather criptic “0x80072EFE: The connection to the server was lost”. The soloution, however, is a simple one. Simply take the files from the Master SUS server on USB key or CD and dump them on the Slave SUS Server.

InstallShield

Wed, 13 Apr 2005 20:15:21 +0000

I have discovered a serious gripe, I have been trying to deploy all sorts of applications via GPSI into a Windows XP domain. For the most part I have had great sucess, old executables with a setup.exe I have been able to extract the files and install them manualy, or take an instalation image. Some new installs I have just been able to copy the install MSI files.

However there is a certain company who creates a product called InstallSheild, that produces the most convolute, screwy, malformed MSI packages you could imagine. Why? I don’t know, everyone else manages it perfectly well, maybe it is so that we all have to use their AdminStudio package to re-package our software, who knows.

Microwave Banana and Rasin Sponge

Sun, 06 Feb 2005 17:19:33 +0000

Ingredients

2 Bananas
100g self raising flour
100g butter or Margarine
100g sugar
2 Eggs
half a tsp of baking soda
milk as required

Instructions

Put the bananas in a microwavable bowl, and soften in the microwave for 4 minutes. Cream the butter and the sugar together, add the eggs, flour and baking soda slowly and beat to an almost pourable mix. sprinkle the rasins over the bananas and pour over the sponge mix. Put in microwave for about 5 minutes (750w).

bash.org #450301

Tue, 25 Jan 2005 21:26:51 +0000

#450301 +(602)- X <@buo> A byte walks into a bar and orders a pint. Bartender asks him “What’s wrong?” Byte says “Parity error.” Bartender nods and says “Yeah, I thought you looked a bit off.”

Yeah its one of those stupid geek jokes but i liked it.

BETA, BETA, BETA

Sat, 08 Jan 2005 12:52:01 +0000

It is obviously the time of year for MMORPG betas at the moment, Wish 2 beta started on 1st January, City of Heros Europe started not long after and it looks like World of Warcraft Europe is on the horizon.

It is very nice to see so many games taking the european market so seriously, games like Lineage II, CoH and WoW are going to mop up after SOE decided all european players would have to play on US servers.

Power Up (or not)

Wed, 05 Jan 2005 17:17:10 +0000

Having issues today with power at work, yesterday we had a new generator installed, then we had a power cut… at least we know the generator will kick in, as long as we don’t mind waiting 15 seconds. Of course the computers, servers and all can’t cope with this.

So we have ordered UPSs for all the computers in the Admin Block, hopefuly will get some for the servers too, you never know we might be able to have an up time longer than one week.

A Break from MMOGs

Wed, 03 Nov 2004 18:07:27 +0000

I have decided to take a break from EVE and MMOGs in general, I say I have decided… I can’t afford it at the moment so I havn’t got a huge choice in the matter.

I did get a chance to play Guild Wars for a weekend last weekend, which was a huge amount of fun.. not strictly a MMOG but it feels pretty good, kind of a cross between Lineage II and Phantasy Star Online.

Exam Results

Mon, 26 Jul 2004 04:55:54 +0000

Got my results for my final year through in the post today, forwarded from home, which is why it took so long to find out about it.

Object Oriented Design and Architecture 48% (D)
Computing Engineering Concepts 44% (D)
Computing Dissertation 65% (B)
Comparative Programming Languages 56% (C)
Design of Communitcation Protocols 36% (Fail)
Client Server Technologies 34% (Fail)
Network Management 42% (D)

In summary a Third Class degree, which is a bit rubbish… they are asking me to retake the Design of Communitaction Protocals exam at the end of august (the week before I get married) and re-submit my Client Server technologies coursework.

Exam

Mon, 14 Jun 2004 07:47:20 +0000

That has to be the most amusing exam in the world, I answered half of three questions, the maxium number of marks I can obtain is about 25 out of 100, ergo I need to get a fairly high grade for the courswork to even pass the module… FUN!

Exam Tomorrow and Tuesday

Sun, 13 Jun 2004 20:46:10 +0000

I have an exam tomorrow, Design of Communication Protocols (room W623), I have done little or no revision for it, because I have only turned up to three lectures because I have been ill, Saeed the lecturer failed repetedly to put the lecture notes up on the Internet… I don’t know how he expects me to pass the module when he has failed those of us on the module who have not been able to attend the lecutures due to the extreme workload of the final year at University.

Dissertation All Over

Fri, 04 Jun 2004 10:40:27 +0000

Had my dissertation presentation today, went quite well nothing of note particuarly, but it does mark the waypoint of the end of the dissertation, you are are welcome to read it. I also got an extention to the Client Server Technologies coursework, which I am going to work on after the weekend once Catheirne has gone home.

Fonts Site

Tue, 01 Jun 2004 10:15:20 +0000

If you are looking for free fonts then you cant go far wrong with DaFont, they have a huge number of free and commercial fonts, I have not looked into the licences for the free fonts but for personal publications they are free to use :)

Some People Shouldn't Phone Radio Stations

Thu, 13 May 2004 17:47:36 +0000

I heard this on EVE-Radio, and then spent half hour searching for it on Google. Mark from Greenacre contemplating the spelling of AC/DC

Something Scarey

Wed, 12 May 2004 21:47:28 +0000

I saw something scarey today, it was a man having his head sawn off by al-Queda militants… the mans name is Nick Berg, I know many people have seen this video, many people have told me different things about the video some thought it was faked some thought it was real. I wanted to see for my self. Through the shield the media places in front of us i saw what happens when people get so enraged they kill another human being.

Provisional Exam Timetable Released

Wed, 12 May 2004 12:15:51 +0000

A Provisional exam timetable has been released for my course:

IS345 - Network Management : 15th June 2004 : 0900 - 1200 : Watts 310 / Watts 502
CS333 - Design of Communication Protocols : 14th June 2004 : 0900 - 1200 : Watts 623

I also know what my hand in dates for my coursework:

CS333 - Design of Communication Protocols (Due 19th May) Finite State Machine and Petri net are techniques for formally specifying protocols. Write an essay on the concept and introduction of the techniques. It is expected, the techniques are at least applied to two well known protocols commercially in use and form part of the argument for using formal specification and validation of protocols. [Reading: Holzmann, GJ Prentice Hall, Computer Networks Various]
CS346 - Client Server Computing (Due 3rd June) Build a system to allow the playing of a game between co-operating users over the internet. As a minimum your game should involve two players on different computers.
IS345 - Network Management (Due 3rd June) You will produce a case study, which will be a work of fact or fiction (or a combination of the two) of around 1,500-2000 words describing a situation where the five functional areas of network management (FCAPS) are not adhered to.
Dissertation Presentations The presentations have not yet been confirmed with Richard Bosworth

Long Time

Tue, 11 May 2004 07:50:56 +0000

I can only say that I am sorry, that is of course if anyone is still reading this, which I don’t expect for a second. I have been mega stressed recently, from my past posts you can probably see that there has been a lot going on with my course. I have got some stuff sorted out, Dissertation is all but over and done with, I have got my project defered until the end of the summer (if the course office and Saeed can communicate clearly with me regarding which forms they want me to fill in). the rest of the work is moving at an acceptable yet not brisk pace.

Oh Dear! Oh Dear!

Mon, 15 Mar 2004 17:45:46 +0000

My degree isnt going to well, I got my transcript through for the most recent exams I took… I was dissapointed to say the least.

Comparative Programming Languages (56%)
Computer Enginering Concepts (43%)
Object Oriented Design and Implementation (48%)

I have spent most of the afternoon figuring out what I need to get to be able to get which grades:

Average 85% on all remaining exams and assessments to get a First Average
70% on all remaining exams and assessments to get a Upper Second Average
50% on all remaining exams and assessments to get a Lower Second Average
32% on all remaining exams and assessments to get a Third Average less than
32% on all remaining exams and assessments to Fail

My point average for this year is 49.3% it was 51% for last year so I have to pull my grades up just to get a 2:2… and to get a 2:1 i have to pretty much ace everything else… I have got a long two months ahead of me. I want to cry.

Microsoft Word Viewer

Thu, 04 Mar 2004 14:21:32 +0000

Because of the way that the Microsoft website is arranged it is near on impossable to find the download for the Word Viewer for Windows XP, so here it is for anyone who googles for it… Word 97 / 2000 Viewer (Windows XP / 2000 / NT / 98 / 98SE / 95)

Finished Dissertation / EVE

Mon, 01 Mar 2004 23:02:08 +0000

I have totaly neglected this blog over the weekend, Catherine came to stay with me for the weekend which was great we had a really great time at both of the wedding shows we went to, we also spent quite a lot of time talking about stuff. I have been feeling quite ill, I have been having all sorts of problems with acid reflux over the last week, the doctor has put me on various things to help calm it down, but we will see.

Integers, EVE and Medical Issues

Wed, 25 Feb 2004 00:12:06 +0000

PHP Integers are really getting on my nerves at the moment, it seems that anything more than 32-bits is just plain not supported in PHP… to be honest that is awful… that is the most apauling degree of accuracy I have come across since BASIC. Oh well never mind rant over.

EVE:The Second Genesis

Wed, 18 Feb 2004 21:11:17 +0000

OK… so all of my old planetside chums have defected to this new MMORPG called EVE Online: The Second Genesis… so here I am writeing a dissertation about the future of MMOGs, thinking I wander what this game is all about… and I wish I could have a go just to see what it is like… so I did, got a 3 day trial of Dreeder (cheers matey) and started playing today… the tutorial was less than clear and I gave up after fiddeling trying to get it to work for a couple of hours, then I just spent some time mining stuff for seemingly no point oh well never mind… from what I see of the game so far it looks vast… there are a huge number of systems in the EVE universe and they all seem quite big in themselves. From a design perspective I imagine it is largely an illusion as there is little between each asteroid/station/planet and so on… the theory behind the game is very simple. However a huge amount of work has gone into the economy, which is a really good thing as it ads layers and layers of complexity to the game, anyway if you are interested in EVE take a look at this affilliate link you can then look round the website and if you sign up CCP (the makers of EVE) will give OC-PS.co.uk $7, which isnt bad at all.

On the Dissertation front

Wed, 18 Feb 2004 09:13:50 +0000

On the Dissertation front I have got some work done today, I am fairly pleased with myself… could of done more though, you can see the fruits of my labor in the university section.

AAAGHHHH! Charlotte

Tue, 17 Feb 2004 19:33:44 +0000

I am feeling especialy poor at the moment, Charlotte owes me money from before Christmas, the person that owed me money for furnature for my old house has dissapeared off the face of the earth and I owe other people money… I have the application forms for the Hardship Loan which hopefuly will be enough to pay for my rent for a couple more months till my next loan payment comes in… I can’t belive how expensive this year is turning out!

I'm off for the weekend

Fri, 13 Feb 2004 12:08:09 +0000

I am heading up to London to visit Catherine for the weekend, I do have net access but I doub’t I will spend any time on it. I want to spend some quality time with Catherine as I am not getting to see her as much any more. I will be back monday to work on my disseratation.

Auraxis is Looking Pretty Dead

Thu, 12 Feb 2004 21:00:32 +0000

Finished my last exam of semester one today, yippie… got to start working on my Project and Dissertation pretty soon… decided to have an evening of fun thoug so I thought I would fire up Planetside for some fun with the gang only to find that there really was no one from OcUK playing the game any more, and to top that it seems most of the players that I respected have also left the game (BigAlBNC, ArchAngel).

Insanely Hard Game

Wed, 11 Feb 2004 21:11:06 +0000

I found this game called Balm, the plot is you have to rid a computer core of a virus, essentialy what you have are green discs (you) and red discs (computer). Each disc has a single tab on it which connects it to any other discs if that tab comes into contact with any other disc that is not of its colour the disc changes color to your colour, and follows any path from there. You can rotate any disc that is your own colour but only clockwise.

Kings of Chaos - Age 3 Beta

Sun, 08 Feb 2004 13:24:58 +0000

Kings of Chaos is a web based Masivly Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG), create your army of Elves, Dwarfs, Humans or Orcs, build up your army to someday rule over all Chaos.

I ended Age 2 at a rank of 28,490 before I sold all of my weapons to upgrade to Level 10 spies and retrain all of my Soldiers to Spies… not a fantastic rank, but I had only been playing half way through the age.

Googlewhack!

Fri, 06 Feb 2004 20:32:53 +0000

I found two googlewhacks today!

dyspraxic tiramisu
omniscient taramasalata

Of course by putting them on my website like this they are no longer going to be Googlewhacks. If you don’t know what a Googlewhack is, it is two words from dictionary.com that when searched for on google.com it returns only one result. The result cant be a list, it must be something someone has actually typed… they usualy seem to be blogs actually, so maybe I am a googlewhack too!

Blog Up and Working

Fri, 06 Feb 2004 19:48:33 +0000

Yay… my blog is up and working… richard-slater.co.uk is getting neglected at the moment because I am working on www.imarriedyou.co.uk which is the website for me and my fiancee… I will still post random blog stuff here though dont worry. Not that there is anyone reading this!

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

New Cards

Uraeus

Djinn Chwala

Efreet Elder

Silvershield Sheriff

Kelp Initiate

Centauri Mage

Harklaw

Fineas Rage

Evangelist

Djinn Biljka

Torhilo the Frozen

Axemaster

Charlok Minotaur (Gold)

Venari Crystalsmith (Gold)

Venari Wavesmith (Gold)

Nectar Queen (Gold)

Warrior of Peace (Gold)

Demented Shark (Gold)

Djinn Renova (Gold)

Lava Launcher (Gold)

Hunter Jarx

Djinn Inferni

Wave Brood

Prismologist

Magi Necrosi

Grund

Azmare Harpoonist

Thunderbird

Soul Fiend

Fungus Fiend

Corpse Fiend

Lira the Dark

The Gorlodon

Adelade Brightwing

Mitica Headhunter

Coral Wraith

Grum Flameblade

Spirit Hoarder

Baakjira

Queen Mycelia

Cards to Upgrade

Sand Worm - Level 2 (4x Level 1)

Nerissa Tridawn - Level 2 (4x Level 1)

Magi of Chaos - Level 2 (4x Level 1)

Tusk the Wide - Level 2 (4x Level 1)

Forgotten One - Level 2 (4x Level 1)

Scorch Fiend - Level 2 (4x Level 1)

2023 AI Art Calendar

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

About

I’ve been creating AI art for about a year now, in that time several friends asked for copies. I put this calendar together, initially to share with the handful of friends who enjoy my art. I generated all of the art in the calendar using Stable Diffusion on Google Colaboratory with the following parameters:

Steps: 50
Sampler: k_lms
CFG Scale: 7.5

Each image was gengerated at 640x1088 px then upscaled using Real-ESRGAN then edited extensively in Adobe Photoshop to remove inconsistencies and errors. In theory given all of the information on this page you could re-generate the images, although not with my manual edits.

Crypto Exchanges

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I have compiled this list of Cryptocurrency Exchanges that I use and recommend. Some are better than others but each have their own distinct advantages.

Disclaimer

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Our Disclaimer was last updated on Wednesday, 19 Nov 2025.

Website Disclaimer

The information provided by Richard Slater (‘we’, ‘us’, or ‘our’) on https://www.richard-slater.co.uk (the ‘Site’) is for general informational purposes only. All information on the Site is provided in good faith, however we make no representation or warranty of any kind, express or implied, regarding the accuracy, adequacy, validity, reliability, availability, or completeness of any information on the Site . UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCE SHALL WE HAVE ANY LIABILITY TO YOU FOR ANY LOSS OR DAMAGE OF ANY KIND INCURRED AS A RESULT OF THE USE OF THE SITE OR RELIANCE ON ANY INFORMATION PROVIDED ON THE SITE . YOUR USE OF THE SITE AND YOUR RELIANCE ON ANY INFORMATION ON THE SITE IS SOLELY AT YOUR OWN RISK.

Privacy Policy

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

On Richard Slater’s website, accessible from https://www.richard-slater.co.uk, one of Our main priorities is the privacy of Our visitors. This Privacy Policy document contains types of information that is collected and recorded on Richard Slater’s website (“the website”, “Our website”) and how we use it.

Our Privacy Policy was last updated on Wednesday, 19 Nov 2025.

If you have additional questions or require more information about our Privacy Policy, do not hesitate to contact me on Twitter, Keybase, or Discord.

Support Me

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Creating content can be a thankless task. However, it is a way of giving back, building a better internet, and something enjoyable to do in my spare time. Therefore, if you feel moved to support me financially, either as a one-off or a monthly donation, you will enable me to spend more time focusing on creating new content.

Richard Slater

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) SSH Connection Timeout

Creating a basic Development Environment for RISC-V

Using GPG keys stored on a YubiKey for SSH Authentication on Windows and Windows Subsystem for Linux

Copyright on Cryptocurrency Logos

Sony α6600 Camera

Long-Covid Recovery Routine

Creating AI Art? Has your Super-SloMo model stopped working?

Integral Crypto FIPS 197: “failed to initialize secure device”

2020 Weekly Update 50: Retail, Healthcare, Vulnerabilities and Politics

Hiding Malware in Share Buttons

Google, Adobe, Valve and Microsoft Patches

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Settings

Mouse

2020 Weekly Update 49: Threat Hunting, Vulnerabilities, COVID-19

Threat Hunting with JARM

If you know code is vulnerable, would you ship it?

2020 Weekly Update 48: Threat Models, Cyber Monday and Data Leaks

Proactive Security and Threat Modeling

2020 Weekly Update 47: Inbox Shenanigans, Unpatched Vulns, Big Sur OCSP, Cyber Insurance and…

I’ll just sneak this into your in-tray

2020 Weekly Update 46:

Victim Blaming in Information Security

2020 Weekly Update 44: Cyber Skills, Healthcare Attacks, North Korea, Machine Learning and Threat…

Google’s Project Zero discloses a vulnerability in the Windows Kernel

The need for BeyondCorp-type organisations; Threat Models and Breaches (2020: Week 44)

IT moves to a zero-trust, decentralised model (Saturday)

Office 365 and G-Suite Targeted, Tesla Autopilot confused, NSA points a finger (2020: Week 43)

Cyber-villains Targeting Office 365 and G-Suite users (Monday)

Tesla AutoPilot can be tricked with subliminal messages (Monday)

Sooty the Security Operations Centre Client

Privacy vs. the Government, Trickbot disrupted, and more (2020: Week 42)

National Security vs. Privacy: Round 3 (Monday)

Managing and Mitigating CVE-2020–16898 (Bad Neighbour/Ping of Death)

Reality Check

Configuring a SSH Client on Windows 10

There is no such thing as NoOps!

My Journey to Google Certified Professional Cloud Architect

The fifteen-minute Blog with Netlify and Jekyll on Windows

Azure: No current subscription has been designated

Iain M. Banks gave me more than Science Fiction books

Elevated Command Prompt on Windows 8

Public Virtual Auto-Properties and CodeRush

Connect to VPN with Windows 7

Orchard Placement ID Strings Must Match

Responsive Design for Programmers

2010 Blogging Year In Review

Listing Table Sizes

Ordinance Survey OpenData (Part 3 - Cleaning Up)

Cleaning up the Schema

Cleaning up the Data

Ordinance Survey OpenData (Part 2 - Importing The Data)

Ordinance Survey OpenData (Part 1 - Schema Scanner)

Things to listen to on the way to work

SteamBirds

Encapsulating Alpha Fade in Unity3d

Unity3d plus three weeks

Unity 3D

Changing code accessibility modifiers quickly

Elevated Command Prompt on Vista and Windows 7

Finding Code Issues

Spot The Mistake 1

Using EVEMon Data with LINQPad

Tracing A Method Signature

ASP.net 3.5 GridView RowCommand event fired twice

Lack of AutoEllipsis support in ToolStripSystemRenderer

LINQPad Crash

Preventing the PictureBox control from locking files

OneNote vs Evernote

Login failed for user ''

Christmas Cake

Debugging "Just My Code"

Controling Code Outlining with the Keyboard

Card Reader on Acer Aspire 5100 Series Under Windows 7

Change your MTU under Vista, Windows 7 or Windows 8

Music to Install Windows By

Adjusting Selections in CodeRush Xpress

Find Files in CodeRush Xpress

Long time no blog

Running through the rain