Yes, yesterday I received an SMS message saying that O2 had connected my broadband that it was now safe to plug in the router. Why you can’t do it beforehand I don’t know. I just did what they told me.

After setting up the router, that is just plugging it in, I went straight to think broadband and did a speed test. 10 Mbps down and 1.5 Mbps up, which probably what you would expect from a 16meg line. On an 8meg line with Pipex the fastest down was just 3Mbps, but possibly I only ever tested the speed if it was really slow.

So the fun began, downloading email, news feeds and the podcasts that I’d missed over the last week. Then it was just a case of setting up the wireless connection for my Apple TV and the Dell laptop that I have for work. All connected to the O2 router fine.

I hit Send/Receive in Microshite® Outlook 2000 on the laptop and downloaded the three waiting emails. Then, for some reason, I had to send an email, no doubt to let the world know that I was back and online. The indicator kept saying that it was sending, sending, sending, failed. I hadn’t changed anything in Outlook. It had worked fine at my sisters house the other day. Try again… and again. Nothing. I phone the company tech guy and he suggests deleting the account and adding it again. I take screen shots of the settings, delete the account and add it again. Still nothing. SMTP was timing out, obviously when trying to send. I switch off the firewall in the router and try again… nothing. I delete the dial-up account that Pipex had given me that didn’t work… nothing. I change the sequence of the wireless connections, my sister’s being the top one… still nothing. But if I connect to the office I can send email fine. I install the O2 software from the disc that came with the router, just in case… nothing. I start looking at the firewall settings in the router again… nothing. Not a problem, I’ll switch to the Belkin router tomorrow.

This morning I reset the Belkin router and try to get it working with O2. You can see why O2 supply and support their own router. All this is tricky enough if know a little about how this stuff works, but if you don’t you’ll be screwed. I restored to factory settings and spent about an hour trying to get it to connect to O2 with no luck. Annoyed, very annoyed. Considering that my iMac worked fine with the O2 router and that my laptop worked fine with the O2 router… except this little problem sending email. I put the O2 router back tried to do some work. But a little problem like this just nags and nags. You think that it’s just going to be a little setting or a check-box that you’ve overlooked. So I downloaded Thunderbird. God knows why a software company should still be using Microshite® Office 2000 anyway. I set up my pop account and it sent email fine. I imported my contacts and old emails from Outlook and haven’t looked back since. It’s all working fine.

I just hate the fact that I wasted over a day trying to get something that simple to work, even if I was being paid for it. Good old Microshite®!

The Magic Circle

Yes, I have stood on the stage of The Magic Circle in London.

Something that I didn’t know is that you can hire The Magic Circle for corporate functions and conferences. The company whose software we use at work held a conference to demonstrate the new functionality available in the next release. Certainly reason enough to attend as we currently use the oldest version of their program compiler and user interface. Yes, you would think that all information technology companies were on the very cutting edge of their profession. We are so far away from the cutting edge that we are practically Amish.

The fun started before lunch with James “The Man of Steal” Freedman beginning his performance by saying that banks, because of security concerns, have to be sure that you are who you are. He asked members of the audience various questions, name of a school, how much change they have and the name of a bank. This he wrote on a piece of paper. Then I was picked to go up onto the stage and he asked if I smoked. I don’t so he handed me a cigarette lighter. He asked me to light it and touched the note to the flame and it flared up and disappeared. James then took out his wallet. Unzipped a compartment and pulled out a piece of paper which he asked me to read. It was a letter from a bank which mentioned all the items of information that the people in the audience had chosen at random.

James performed a few more tricks before introducing Martyn Rowland who did some more. During lunch both of them mingled around doing card tricks and we were all really amazed. I’d seen the same kinds of tricks on TV before but never live and never that close up.

The first floor of the building had display cabinets containing magic props, Tommy Cooper’s fez and his Martini bottles, and also a few items that belonged to David Nixon, if you’re old enough to remember him. The auditorium was on the second floor and could seat about a hundred people. Each of the seats had the members name on it. The only name that I recognised was behind me and was for Geoffrey Durham.

After lunch we had a quick tour of the museum in the basement. Two of the doors in the corridor were labelled ‘Members Only’. One was an extensive library and the other a prop room.

The Magic Circle really is a great and unique venue for corporate events.

Ruby on Rails

I’ve been busy learning, or at least trying to learn, Ruby on Rails. For people who don’t know this is a new programming language/application which allows programmers, like myself, to create web applications really fast.

At work we have one of our applications written in ASP.NET and since the beginning of last year I have been the unfortunate soul who has to debug and maintain this piece of software. At first I did think that it was pretty good. Towards the end of last year I had an idea to write some web pages linking to a database so that we could store client information, contacts, which clients have what software, what platform they are using etc. Just, more or less, everything that we need to know, all in one place. I felt that this was a good idea so I started writing it. I set-up the database and the tables in SQL Server and started to code the pages having copied chunks of code from our web application. Of course it has never been finished.

Let me warn you that if you work for a software company and one of the managers, who we’ll call Scouse Boy No. 1, buys a Rolodex to store contact information then leave immediately. Just run as far and as fast as you can and don’t look back.

This year I’ve had to convert our ASP.NET application so that it works with the new version of our main software. Even after having ASP training last year it was a slow and tortuous task. The fact that one of the pages doesn’t render correctly in Firefox, that it’s all tied into Microshites® web server and probably doesn’t validate to any W3 standard makes me think that it’s not going to be a possible career path. Maybe if we had spent £500 on Visual Studio things may have been less painful.

So, Ruby on Rails, is just the kind of thing that I’ve been looking for. A development environment written by programmers to make life easier so that more time can be spent writing clean, well structured, code. I ordered the Agile Web Development with Rails book, downloaded the necessary software for Tiger and started to work through a great little Ruby tutorial by Chris Pine. When that was done I started on the book proper, reading through the first section before promptly coming to a grinding halt on page 57. This is when I had a MySQL database and tables created and was about to see the power of Rails for the first time. I must have spent at least 2 days, on and off, trying to figure out why the views of the table weren’t being created. I even un-installed the latest version of Xcode and and re-installed the old version from the Tiger DVD, all to no avail. It just wasn’t seeing the database for some reason. Last Saturday afternoon I found the solution. In the config/database.yml file specify the username, in the book ‘dave’, that you granted database access for. Then re-run the ruby script/generate scaffold Product admin and you should see app/views/admin pages being created. Since then I’ve been working through the Book Store application. Everything is so easy, well not exactly easy, but just a joy to use. The scaffold that is generated by Rails knows what the database table looks like so you don’t have to key in lines of HTML with the different types of input code embedded in it. You don’t have to give each field a name, as this is already done for you from the field names. Links for edit/list/show/delete are already created and all the pages behind them. With one Rails command I generated a set of table maintenance pages. This is something that would have taken me at least a few hours using ASP.NET. And all without writing SQL statements.

I think to get the most out of the book you do need to have your own application to work on yourself. It would be really easy to just blindly get the demonstration application working without understanding how the principles can be put into practice. It hasn’t all been plain sailing. Just last night none of the controllers for my application would display in Safari. I found that emptying the cache and deleting any localhost cookies did the trick.

You’ve been with the same people for eight hours during the day, then you have to suffer a little longer in the name of team bonding.

We sold some of our unused office furniture at work and decided to have a night out at the Rawhide Comedy Club in Liverpool. A meal was booked at La Tasca for 6:30pm then it was on to The Royal Court Theatre where a table had been pre-booked by our Party Organiser. The comedy club used to reside in the Central Hall, so this was it’s first night in the new, larger, venue.

I’ve always been a fan of stand-up comedians since my grandmother introduced me to an album of Billy Connolly’s many many years ago. I went to see Billy back in the eighties at the Apollo in Manchester. Then I saw Phil Coole and Jasper Carrott in Stoke, Lee Evans in Stockport and Henry Rollins a couple of times in Manchester. I don’t think that Rollins really counts as a comedian as such, he isn’t going to start saying, “Is there anyone in from Bolton?”, “Take my wife… please.”, “My mother-in-law is so fat…” etc etc. Since I do like a chuckle or three I started buying stand-up comedy videos. In fact I think that one of the very first videos that I did buy was a Jasper Carrott video. This was back in the days when people would say, “Oh! Have you got a video?” and when Woolworths only had about fifteen videos on the one rack :- snooker, improve your golf, championship fishing, a comedian and about three films, all on The Video Collection label. This was back in the days when video recorders were so expensive that I actually heard of some people who wouldn’t rent videos. Their thinking was that all someone at the video store needed to do was wait until you were out so they could break in and steal the video. At the time video recorders were the size of a suitcase and weighed the same as a mini metro.

So, yes over the years I’ve accumulated many videos, and now of course DVD’s of stand-up comedians. I was quite looking forward to the evening ahead.

The Rawhide Comedy Club also serves food. If you book a table with food you get to sit near the back. The place isn’t that vast that you would need opera glasses, so this is no bad thing. If you book just a table you get to sit at tables nearer the stage. If you’ve travelled from Manchester, on a works ‘do’, and there are six of you in your party you get to sit right at the front just underneath the microphone. I knew what was coming.

Mick Ferry was the compere for the evening. It was his job to warm the audience up, not physically you understand and to introduce the acts for the evenings entertainment. This involved asking people their names, where they’re from and what they do for a living. And generally taking the mickey. Of course we were sitting targets, but thankfully two people out of our party survived unscathed.

The acts generally improved as the night went on :- Simon Clayton was good, Alex Horne was better and Phil Nichol was the best of the bunch. He is quite manic to say the least and I thought Canadians were cultured and reserved. There are only two seasons in Canada :- winter and six months of poor snow-mobiling. He ended his set by singing “The Only Gay Eskimo”, a song which I had heard of before, only because I had downloaded it thinking that the artist was Tenacious D. It wasn’t and isn’t. It was apparently written and sung by Corky and the Juice Pigs of which Phil was a member. Thinking about it now it seems right that a Canadian should sing about Eskimos. For the last couple of verses he dragged “Steve”, from our group, onto the stage to sing along. “Steve” was giggling so much he could barely speak. To his credit he did manage to sing the last chorus in nearly a pitch perfect falsetto. I think that he’d been practising at home.

Mona Switcher

I was at work uploading ASP files to the website, connecting to our server in Dublin, downloading, extracting and making changes to files when the connection dropped and the terminal window disappeared. I wasn’t in the best of moods anyway so I decided to test the bouncing capability of my Microshite® mouse by throwing at my screen. Unfortunately I made my long-suffering colleague jump out of her skin. She obviously saw the air-bourne projectile heading in her general direction without realising that I was aiming it at the screen and that it was securely tethered to my laptop by the mouse cable. Of course I had to apologise for startling her so early in the working week. Luckily Microshite® do seem to make very sturdy mice. I remember slamming one of the old white ones repeatedly into a mouse mat from a height of about 2 foot above the desk with no ill affects at all. Maybe they should stick to just making mice instead of… I guess you could see that remark coming.

Back to the thing that cheered me up… the Steve Jobs Dress-up Contest. I didn’t really spend too much of the working day seeing how Uncle Steve would look in the various outfits, basically because I was too busy laughing.

I’d never really looked at the Geek Culture web-site before but after seeing the Mona Switcher I think it is safe to say that I’m hooked. As soon as I arrived home I ordered a copy of the Mona Switcher painting to put on the wall above my iMac. Here’s the Joy of Tech comic that the original Mona Switcher came from.

Yes, we have had our Toshiba laptops delivered at work. When I booted the thing up and XP Pro started it was just like being transported back to ‘95 when I bought my Dell laptop. Except that Windows ‘95 didn’t have the sickly sweet sugar coating that XP has. The ‘Fisher Price’ theme as Neil Martin at Four Js once said. The damn thing seems to come pre-installed with loads of junk. The system tray seem to contains at least 10 programs running for some reason. I haven’t had a look at them yet but I’m sure that half of them can go… that XP theme certainly has.

At work I have to make changes to our ASP application so that it works with the latest version of our software. I received an email saying that a new development suite, Microsoft® Visual Web Developer™ 2005 Express Edition Beta 2, was available for download so I decided to give it a try.

It’s a 2mb download which you run and it downloads the rest. With the options that I selected it was a 305mb download. Two hours later it started doing the installing and copying files, then the usual ‘Do you wanna reboot now or what?’ message. I chose ‘later’, closed all my applications by hand and rebooted. Can I see what it’s done? Can I find any of the files? 305mb seems to have disappeared into thin air. There are no menu options, there is no new folder on my harddrive. There was no error message when it installed.

So, I carry on coding by hand using Notepad. I don’t trust the WebMatrix editor anymore as it converts the € codes into ?. Yes a valid character entity into nothing. There is no WebMatrix fix, workaround, patch or update for this ‘little’ problem.

Hours of gut wrenching tedium pass by and I’m debugging an ASP page. I had edited the SQL statements and was testing the pages in FireFox. I filled in a form and clicked the OK button and nothing happened. I commented out large portions of the code and a bit of it worked. I uncommented a few lines and found a problem with the SQL. I uncommented a few more and it didn’t work at all. I found that the field validation popups only work in IE and not FireFox.

I read on a Mac news website, either MacUser or Macworld, that Microshite, yes I can’t even bring myself to say their name correctly, are going to spend $200 million advertising Windows XP. And XP is how many years old now? How long has Longhorn been in development? They should be spending this money on the next version of their operating system not trying desperately trying to flog the old one. Who would want to buy Windows XP anyhow? Everyone who has bought a new PC over the last 3/4 years has paid for a copy anyhow! Anyone who builds a PC from parts is just going to use a patched copy. What are they thinking?

Related Links
Fuck Microsoft
That Funny Steve Ballmer Video Thing