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An Englishman living in small town America

James Shaw

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June 2005 - Posts

Http objects and Unit testing
Following yesterday's Unit testing and Caching blog I've decided to spend a little time writing support for all Http-based objects, like Response, Request, Server as well as Context.Items and Cache. So, now I have a new class called Context in the Utils Read More...
Walton Fortune
This interesting quote found while reading about John Walton (Wal-Mart heir) who died on Monday: "If Sam [Walton, Wal-Mart Founder] were alive today, he would be worth twice as much as Bill Gates" From Forbes , via Wikipedia Read More...
Unit testing and Caching
I'm adding unit tests to the Dozing Dogs code to help me test the recent major stored procedure changes and I had a problem with my extensive caching. What tends to happen in our code is that whenever I read something from database it gets stored into Read More...
Great Idea: RSS for searches!
Now THAT'S a great idea, thanks Rick! The Longsleeves blog has a search that shows an RSS button on the search results page - so you can subscribe to the feed and get updated results. That is so obvious, so simple and such genius. Let's see if I can get Read More...
Targetting earlier .NET frameworks
Unfortunately, VS2005 and/or MSBuild is not going to allow us to build applications targetted at .NET 1.0 or 1.1 frameworks. Why is this a big deal? Well, to most people it isn't frankly, but ISV's need to offer products that run on 1.0 because that's Read More...
Refactor your SQL too
I'm almost finished with a widespread change in the Dozing Dogs CMS database; changing all the varchar to nvarchar and one particular varchar to ntext. This will answer questions that potential customers have about non-ASCII languages such as Chinese. Read More...
ASP.NET TDD
I'm a big fan of Test Driven Development (TDD), but I've only used it on one project. Even then it wasn't strict TDD, but we did use NUnit to write a lot of tests. (For those not familiar with TDD here's an overview - basically you write the test first, Read More...
Branson's Think Big contest
UPDATE 06/24/05: It's hard to find the definitive answer, but a comment on theunofficialyahooweblog says that www.staircycle.com won the contest. I only just found out about Richard Branson's partnership with Yahoo! on their Think Big contest , where Read More...
Review your old habits
I'm 41, right, so officially closer to " old fart " than " young whippersnapper ". So why did it take me until today to notice something quite obvious to everyone else - I wore my watch on the wrong hand. It's been bugging me semi-consciously for a few Read More...
If you were to die today..
It's old news in a way, but I have only just read Steve Jobs' speech today (via Kathy Sierra ) As she says, everyone should read it. It's interesting thinking of someone like Steve Jobs as a normal person. He is, right? Certainly talented, and probably Read More...
Wasting time in LAX
Back to business this morning, but before I start let me say that from now on I shall always try and get a 7 hour stopover between my flights through LA! I thought flying in from NZ at 3:10 and not flying to ATL until 10:30 was going to be a PITA, but Read More...
In search of the "Good Times" Video
So, this morning I woke up with a mission - to find the Good Times video that was a freebie on the Windows 95 CD back in the good old days. Remember that? I admit that I loved that song even then, but now it has added reminiscence-value too. So I started Read More...
What was that?
From " Random Kiwi Thoughts ".. I'm really getting a kick from being here. I'll never move back to England, but I sure do miss the old ways sometimes.. Perhaps I was too hasty - maybe never is too strong a word. I'm having a great time here after work. Read More...
Use RSS correctly
Did you get this post as an update? You shouldn't have. Read my update below why your aggregator, not your blog publishing software, may be to blame.. One thing I hate about RSS - no, let me start over. One thing I hate about some people's use of RSS Read More...
ReverseDOS
Mike Campbell launched an interesting tool recently, and has been getting astonishing results with it . I plan on investigating it when I get back in front of my desktop next week, just to see how it could be integrated into my CMS and start giving it Read More...
Random Kiwi Thoughts
Some random thoughts about New Zealand and Kiwi's: It's just like England. Small cars, smaller houses, miserable weather I love miserable weather; reminds me of my childhood All women have dyed hair, mostly a dark purply/red color. I keep walking into Read More...
In New Zealand
I landed safely in NZ after a 24 hour journey - I think, it's hard to keep track of "real" hours - and got to my hotel in Christchurch at 6am. Great flight due to the luck of getting an exit row seat. It's cold here; like 5 degrees F cold. Nice though Read More...
URL123
www.URL123.com is a site that I take for granted now, and when I used it this morning I realized that I hadn't told you about it. It's a URL-shortening service run by my friend Francesco Sanfilippo Everyone at some point will want to send a link to a Read More...
Beat me with a stick
The world’s most easy-to-use, feature-rich and affordable Content Management Solution (CMS) just got better! I really hope you didn't think I wrote that! I just got this in an email, and all I can say is, what a prat . Most easy-to-use Most feature-rich Read More...
Preprocessing in C#
I need your help. If you work for a company with other developers, mention this around the coke machine (like you even know where the water cooler is).. In the good old days, there was a C++ compiler command line option to preprocess your file(s) to an Read More...
The Dark Tower
I'm taking a short trip to New Zealand on Sunday-Friday next week. Sound reasonable? Well, put it this way, I leave Sunday afternoon, and arrive Tuesday morning. Even with the time difference, it's a long way. But it'll be a lot easier now - my wife came Read More...
Act like a user, not a loser
Note to all businesses - PURCHASE YOUR OWN PRODUCTS! I like GeoTrust ; I use them for all my SSL and other security/identity needs. But they have some issues. Today I renewed a certificate for a friend (I'm a reseller) and they didn't fill in some of Read More...
Fraudulent Orders
This morning another fraudulent order was trapped by our payment processor RegSoft . They are doing an impressive job of catching the stolen credit cards using a variety of methods. If there is a source code purchase I actually double check the order Read More...
Not getting wet at Tech Ed
No, I'm not at TechEd. I'm saving my travel dollars for the MVP/ASP Insiders Summit in late September/early October. [ASIDE: Dave, you gotta come. As you told me the other day - screw 'em, this is business . Think of it as a brainstorming conference..] Read More...
ISAPI Rewrite
You really need to check out ISAPI Rewrite . I've used it for so long that I forgot that many people haven't even heard about it. ORCS Web hosts this web site and www.DozingDogs.com , some secured staging web sites and under development sites (about 10 Read More...
Blogging Fiend
From friend Terri Morton: And wow, you have been a blogging fiend, haven't you?? I hadn't realized it and had never added your blog to my aggregator. It's there now. Yes, blogging has picked up a lot since I installed the latest version of the CMS . Before Read More...
I want a big "Do PR" button
I want a button like this one, that I can just press and some clever Artificial Intelligence does what I want. Every 8 weeks or so we release a new version , and I send out press releases, post announcements, update directory websites, send emails, etc. Read More...
Paid $100,000 to blog
If you think you have it easy, consider the guy who just landed this job - he has to watch the Dukes of Hazzard every night and blog about it. For his "trouble" he gets paid $100 grand a year. Read More...
Open Office - no, the other one
I think this is huge - Microsoft Office is switching to XML for many of it's default file formats. So now you'll be able to look inside a Word document, hell, now you'll be able to write a Word document! Of course, this means that all the files will be Read More...