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:

• Windows 7.
• A workplace with a compatible VPN End Point.
• Your account enabled to use the VPN.
• The IP address of your VPN End Point.
• Your Username, Password and Domain.

1. Click the “Networking” tray icon

It is a monitor with a network cable to the left of it, although quite understandably some users see it as a “monitor and a fork”:

2. Go to Network and Sharing Center

It is the link at the bottom of the popup you see after clicking the Networking tray icon.

3. Click “Connect to a network”

4. Click “Connect to a workplace”

5. Click “Use my Internet connection (VPN)”

6. Enter your settings then click Next

The “Internet address” is the four part IP address of your work place, your friendly help desk or company intranet should be able to provide this information. The destination name is purely a useful name for you to refer to your connection as I would suggest the name of your company.

7. Enter your Login details then click Next

Chances are these Login details are going to be the same details you login to the computer with. Whilst the domain is labelled as optional it may be required for your workplace, again your IT Helpdesk or Intranet should be able to provide this to you.

8. Wait

This bit can take a while, the VPN Client will connect to your workplace VPN send your login details then setup the connection.

9. Your Done!

You may find that anything that was connected such as MSN Messenger has disconnected, it should eventually connect again however it will be done through your workplaces internet connection so beware what you are doing. You shouldn’t do what you shouldn’t do, get over it.

10. Remember to disconnect (and how to reconnect)

Remember that “Monitor and Fork” icon in the bottom right hand corner of your screen, if you click that you will be able to see that your new VPN connection is connected. Once you are done you can disconnect by clicking the connection then clicking “Disconnect”. You can reconnect in the future in a similar way, click the “Monitor and Fork” select the connection then click “Connect”.

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)

public class DefinitionListPartDriver : ContentPartDriver<DefinitionListPart> {

    ...

    protected override DriverResult Display(
        DefinitionListPart part,
        string displayType,
        dynamic shapeHelper) {

        return ContentShape("Parts_DefinititionList",
            () => shapeHelper.Parts_DefinitionList(
                        ContentPart: part,
                        DefinitionList: part.Entries));
    }

    ...

}

You may have seen the mistake already, but just in case your not sure here is my placement.info file:

<Placement>
    <Place Parts_DefinitionList_Edit="Content:11"/>
    <Place Parts_DefinitionList="Content:11"/>
</Placement>

Yep, when I dispatched the shape it had an extra it in Definition… oh well, remember to check that first next time.

A List Apart’s Responsive Design Article

Key points I took away from this article are; the plethora of screen resolutions and orientations on the web is an advantage not a disadvantage. Mobile continues to rise in both business and the social web. Media queries are a neat implementation for modern browsers (IE9, Chrome, Safari 3+, Firefox 3.5+) with a practicable JavaScript backup for non compliant browsers.

CloudFour’s CSS Media Query for Mobile is Fool’s Gold Blog Post

This is quite a pragmatic stance on using Media Queries for the mobile platform as a direct response the aforementioned article from A List Apart. Key points for me were performance, specifically speed are very important for Mobile. The common use case for a mobile website is to find something quickly, waiting for large images and style sheets affects this performance. There are now low-power smartphones without the CPU power, resizing images in-browser does not work. There is a good response on Quirksmode.

Smashing Magazine’s Guidelines for Responsive Web Design Article

Kayla Knight goes into depth into the techniques and technologies that front end web developers have at their hands. There is a lot to take in in this article, and some great examples of responsive web design out in the wild. Further examples and discussion can be found on Adactio.

Windows Team Blog’s Targeting mobile optimized CSS at Windows Phone 7 Post

This was the article that kicked me off on my research spree this afternoon. I was seriously disappointed by Windows Phone 7′s 19/400 score on HTML5 test so I didn’t hold out much hope for support for CSS3 and Media Queries this article didn’t do much to reassure me. Microsoft advise going down the route of conditional HTML comments to import the correct style sheet for the platform you require.

Conclusion

Not being a “Front End” developer, I may never have to put any of this into practice however now I know more than when I started I can follow along when the design team talks about responsive design. If you know of any other resources or articles, please post them in the comments for me to read. If I find them useful I will update this post.

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.

Visitor Breakdown

• iPhone/iPad/iPod are the most popular mobile platforms to view my site with over three times as many visitors using iOS than Android.
• Most popular Browser is Firefox with 40% of the share, IE comes in at 33% and Chrome at 17.5%, strangely Opera has a 4.3% share – I was under the impression that Opera’s market share has been dropping off.
• Windows holds 95% of the operating system share, presumably the result of my Windows 7 posts.

Keywords

Unsurprisingly the most of the searches are for “windows 7 mtu” or similar. There also appear to be quite a few people searching for drivers by Googling device strings, this can work well, although in the first instance you should try PCI Database. Further down the list a couple of people have been searching for MSM/PSL which is the prescribed acronym for making a manovure as taught by the DSA, there are some good resources all over the internet including Smart Learners.

Someone has been searching for me on LinkedIn, it may not have been me you were looking for but here is my profile for reference purposes.

One user got to my site looking for an answer to the question “windows 7 what are the blue & yellow shields on desktop shortcut icons for”; unsure what it was for but these icons describe executables or shortcuts that either contain information in their manifest or have had their properties changes to require administration rights to execute. There are quite a few posts on social.microsoft.com but very little explaining exactly why they are there.

There don’t seem to be any funny keyword sequences any more (I looked through all 7,000 from 2010), maybe some will show up next year. So until 2011, good bye and have a happy new year!

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.

In large databases this can be laborious, I found a script that will collect this information and present it as a table. I have adapted it a little so that I can see the total size of the table and sort by each column to drill down to the problem tables.

SET NOCOUNT ON
CREATE TABLE #spaceused (
  name nvarchar(120),
  ROWS CHAR(11),
  reserved VARCHAR(18),
  DATA VARCHAR(18),
  index_size VARCHAR(18),
  unused VARCHAR(18)
)
 
DECLARE TablesFromSysObjects CURSOR FOR
  SELECT name
  FROM sysobjects WHERE TYPE='U'
  ORDER BY name ASC
 
OPEN TablesFromSysObjects
DECLARE @TABLE VARCHAR(128)
 
FETCH NEXT FROM TablesFromSysObjects INTO @TABLE
 
WHILE @@FETCH_STATUS = 0
BEGIN
  INSERT INTO #spaceused EXEC sp_spaceused @TABLE
  FETCH NEXT FROM TablesFromSysObjects INTO @TABLE
END
 
CLOSE TablesFromSysObjects
DEALLOCATE TablesFromSysObjects 
 
SELECT	name AS TableName,
		ROWS AS ROWS,
		CAST(LEFT(reserved, LEN(reserved) - 3) AS INT) AS Reserved,
		CAST(LEFT(DATA, LEN(DATA) - 3) AS INT) AS DATA,
		CAST(LEFT(index_size, LEN(index_size) - 3) AS INT) AS IndexSize,
		CAST(LEFT(unused, LEN(unused) - 3) AS INT) AS Unused,
		(CAST(LEFT(reserved, LEN(reserved) - 3) AS INT) + CAST(LEFT(DATA, LEN(DATA) - 3) AS INT) + CAST(LEFT(index_size, LEN(index_size) - 3) AS INT) + CAST(LEFT(unused, LEN(unused) - 3) AS INT)) AS Total
FROM #spaceused
ORDER BY Total DESC
DROP TABLE #spaceused

Cleaning up the Schema

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

SELECT Quality, COUNT(*) AS COUNT
FROM [OSOpenData].[dbo].[CodePointOpenCombined]
GROUP BY Quality
ORDER BY Quality

For my purposes I want to use the coordinate data stored in the Eastings and Northings columns, which makes postcodes with no data useless to me, I can remove these with the following SQL script:

DELETE FROM [CodePointOpenCombined]
WHERE [Quality] = 90

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:

1. Right Click the Database select “Tasks” – “Import Data”.
2. In the Data Source step change the drop down to “Flat File Source”.
3. Select the combined file we created above (you may have to change the filter).
4. Check the Columns page if Quotation Marks (“) appear in some of the columns change the Text qualifier field on the General Page to a “.
5. On the Advanced page click Suggest Types.
6. Set the number of rows to 1000 (the maximum), then click OK.
7. Go through each column and update the name and DataType to match those we discovered in the previous post.
8. Check the correct database and table are selected on the next two steps.
9. Click Next then Next again, then check over the data type mappings.
10. Click Next then ensure Run immediately is checked then click finish.
11. All being well, all of the data will be imported successfully.

If there are problems importing the data you can go back and make changes to the configuration, typically the issue is incorrect data types (too small) or incorrect text delimiters.

You may be asking why we went to tall that trouble, and time, only to let the Import Data Wizard suggest the data types. The reason I wrote the script was the wizard is limited to checking the first 1,000 lines; even if you set the value to 2,000,000 it will default down to 1000 after you move your focus away.

The result being if your data is naturally sorted on a specific column as some of the Ordinance Survey data appears to be the import will fail. Running the schema scanner allows you to scan through all of the data so that you can modify the suggested data types to match the maximum values.

In this post I am going to look at Code-Point Open, a list of all UK postcodes with their corresponding spatial positions. Unlike many other OS OpenData downloads the ZIP file does not contain the User Guide or the Schema Data, this can be found on the website, I spent a good 10 minutes searching for this data.

The term for what we are doing in this post is Extract-Transform -Load (ETL), a process in which we take data in one format and covert it for use in another format. Generally ETL is used to take a flat file format and load it for use in a relational database, although technically any format or database could be used. SQL Server offers two built-in mechanisms to perform ETL; the “Import Export Wizard” and SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS). The “Import Export Wizard” actually creates a SSIS package in the background and is available to all versions of SQL Server, SSIS  is not available in SQL Express.

Before we create a table in a SQL Server Database we need to know something about the data we are importing, the documentation for Code-Point Open tells us the data contains the following fields:

Postcode, Quality, Unused1, Unused2, Unused3, Unused4, Unused5, Unused6, Unused7, Unused8, Eastings, Northings, CountryCode, RegionalHealthAuthority, HealthAuthority, AdminCounty, AdminDistrict, AdminWard, Unused10

A number of the fields are not used, the fields and the dummy data held within them will be weeded out at a later date, we know the fields but we don’t know the format of the data it contains, it could be numeric, strings, decimals, telephone numbers? I created a PowerShell script which scans through all of these files to work out what type of field it is and the range of data held within it, be warned it will take a few hours to run!

# Schema Scanner v1.0
# ©2010 Richard Slater
 
# Create an empty hash table
$columns = @{}
 
# Loop through every file that matches this pattern
foreach ($file in Get-ChildItem -Path "D:\OSOpenData\Code-Point Open\data\ze.csv")
{
	Write-Host "Processing $file"
 
	# PowerShell Import-Csv cmdlet is pretty powerful, but if there is no header row you must feed it in
	$PostCodeData = Import-Csv $file -Header "Postcode","Quality","Unused1","Unused2","Unused3","Unused4","Unused5","Unused6","Unused7","Unused8","Eastings","Northings","CountryCode","RegionalHealthAuthority","HealthAuthority","AdminCounty","AdminDistrict","AdminWard","Unused10"
 
	# Go through each row in the file
	foreach($row in $PostCodeData)
    {
		# Go through each column in the row
		foreach ($attr in (Get-Member -InputObject $PostCodeData[0] -MemberType NoteProperty))
		{
			$key = $attr.Name
 
			# Ignore unused columns
			if ($key.StartsWith("Unused"))
				{ continue }
 
			# Construct an object to store the meta data, store it in the hash table to retreive next loop
			$column = New-Object PSObject
			if (!$columns.ContainsKey($key))
			{
				$column | Add-Member -Type NoteProperty -Name StringLength -Value 0
				$column | Add-Member -Type NoteProperty -Name MaxValue -Value ([System.Int32]::MinValue)
				$column | Add-Member -Type NoteProperty -Name MinValue -Value ([System.Int32]::MaxValue)
				$columns.Add($key, $column)
			}
			else
				{ $column = $columns.Get_Item($key) }
 
			$isInt = $false
			$value = 0;
 
			# Work out if this is an integer type
			if ([System.Int32]::TryParse($row.($key), [ref] $value))
            	{ $isInt = $true }
 
			if (!$isInt)
            {
				# it is not an integer how many characters is the string
            	if (($row.($key)).Length -gt $column.StringLength)
                	{ $column.StringLength = ($row.($key)).Length }
 
				continue
            }
 
			# it is an integer start working out the maximum and minimum values
			if ( $value -gt $column.MaxValue ) { $column.MaxValue = $value }
			if ( $value -lt $column.MinValue ) { $column.MinValue = $value }
 
			$columns.Set_Item($key, $column)
		}
	}
}
 
# Print a report of all of the fields
foreach ($field in $columns.Keys)
{
	$stringLength = $columns[$field].StringLength
	$numericMax = $columns[$field].MaxValue
	$numericMin = $columns[$field].MinValue
 
	if ($stringLength -gt 0)
	{
		Write-Host "$field (String) : Length =" $columns[$field].StringLength
	}
	elseif (($numericMax -gt ([System.Int32]::MinValue)) -and ($numericMin -lt ([System.Int32]::MaxValue)))
	{
		Write-Host "$field (Numeric) : MaxValue =" $numericMax ", MinValue =" $numericMin
	}
	else
	{
		Write-Host "$field (Empty)"
	}
}

The output from the script should give you enough information to construct a nice tight schema to import the data:

AdminWard (String) : Length = 2
AdminDistrict (String) : Length = 2
AdminCounty (Numeric) : MinValue = 0 , MaxValue = 47
Quality (Numeric) :  MinValue = 10 , MaxValue = 90
RegionalHealthAuthority (String) : Length = 3
Postcode (String) : Length = 7
Eastings (Numeric) : MinValue = 0 , MaxValue = 655448
Northings (Numeric) : MinValue = 0 , MaxValue = 1213660
CountryCode (Numeric) : = 64 ,  MaxValue   = 220
HealthAuthority (String) : Length = 3

In a future post I am going to take it to the next stage; create a table and complete the import with the Import Export Wizard. I would also like to improve the performance of the schema scanner by converting the code into C#.

SchemaScanner

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:

Software Development / Programming

• DotNetRocks – one of the best produced .NET podcasts out there, Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell. All topics related to the .NET Platform and software development in general.
• Hanselminutes – Scott Hanselman is a Microsoft Developer, Family Man and general Geek, podcasts are of a concise and casual nature covering mainly programming matters, but sometimes branching out into other areas of Scott’s interests.
• Herding Code – kind of reminds me of the Spanish Inquisition (which I remember well…) many hosts one topic or guest. The shows can be a little long.
• SitePoint Podcast – a fairly new addition to my listening list, I am not convinced on the format but there have been some good shows.
• Sparkling Client – is short, really short. Which is great as the information is presented clearly and quickly, very programmer like. Makes me happy to see it appear on my List.

Entertainment

• This Developers Life - modelled after This American Life some podcast I have never heard of, hosted by Scott Hanselman and Rob Conery; it is different, it’s not information its about experience it is also fairly new and has music.
• Escape Pod – Sci-Fi podcast and blog, what can I say… I love Sci-Fi. Have a listen some of the stories are absolutely fantastic, well worth a listen.

So if you have the time to try some of these give them a go, let me know what you think and what else you find.

The premise is you are flying a nuclear-powered steam driven air plane. I encourage you to read the embeded back-story in the initial levels, it is great to see good writing has gone in with the game.

The game is turn based, you control your planes by selecting the type of manoeuvre then dragging navigation icon to the location you wish the plane to be at the next turn; the black line shows the path your plane will take.

If you tap your plane you see the name, health, stats and the manoeuvres it is capable of, as you have probably gathered by now the concept is to shoot down the other teams.

The healthier you keep your planes the more stars you get when you are victorious, the more stars you get the higher the rank you achieve.

I am really pleased I took the time to download this game, and even more pleased that Danc and SpryFox have been able to break away from the mould and start creating well designed, fun and highly polished games without loosing the indie edge.