I recently stopped drinking tea and coffee after some recent unpleasant side effects. I've been drinking coffee for years and just all of a sudden I became intollerant to anything with caffeine in it. Pretty damn annoying since I love coffee.

Anyway a friend John suggested a replacement - Red Bush Tea. Lets face it drinking just water all day is pretty boring, I'm not a big fan of sugary drinks and decaf just doesn't taste right.  It takes wee bit of getting used to but if made in a pot and allowed to infuse for at least 5-6 minutes it's actually pretty damn good. Good for you too apparently because it's high in anti-oxidants etc and it's very refreshing. The trick is also to have a tea pot just for Red Bush and not use it for regular tea because normal tea leaves (no pun intended) tannins and goop in the pot that affects the taste of RB and it's healthy goodness (apparently).

The new American Analogue Set release finally turned up. Damn good it is too so it deserved having two tracks played from it. I never like to make comparisons like this but there's a definite My Bloody Valentine and Stereolab sounding thing going on there and I'm not complaining.

The Doors - Queen of the Highway
Neil Young - Heart of Gold
Iron and Wine - Woman King
The American Analogue Set - Born on the Cusp
The Postal Service - The District Sleeps Alone Tonight
Massive Attack - Black Milk
Television - Marquee moon
Ambulance Ltd - Yoga is Union
Silver Apples - Program
The Egg - Angel of My Soul
Howie B - Hopscotch
Dirty Beatniks - Suicide Mission
Boards of Canada - 1969
Fluke - Squirt
The American Analogue Set - Cool Kids Keep
Dinosaur Junior - Quicksand
Gomez - Rie's Wagon
Revolting Cocks - D'ya Think I'm Sexy
Frank Zappa - Titties and Beer
Amorphous Androgynous (FSOL) - Mello Hippo Disco Show
Hawkwind - Space is Deep

I usually can't be bothered following a whole TV series like The West Wing or 24 on a week to week basis and prefer to wait until the latest season appears on DVD and then have a binge. However....'Lost' is something I've really got hooked into each week and I gotta say the one that aired on E4 tonight had an ending that creeped me out just a bit. I really love the drip feed approach to the story. Well recommended.

Ok...this is a bit of a Whyte and MacKay moment....

It's been 25 years since the Dead Kennedys 'Fresh Fruit for Rotten Veg' album was released so I decided to have a DK's night (annoyingly, Fresh Fruit is the only DK's vinyl I'm missing and as I remember it from my early teens it was a gatefold album with 'Fuck Facts' newsletter...anyone still got one and want to sell me one for a sensible price?).

Anyway...

I decided to not play anything from FFFRV mostly because 'We've Got a Bigger Problem Now' from In God We Trust captures the essence of California Uber Alles and reflects so timeously upon the election/re-election of GW Bush as it did when Ronald Reagan was first elected as US president in 1981.

'Holiday In Cambodia' could've been played as an alternative but I really wanted the un-initiated to hear tracks from later material in:

'In God We Trust (EP)'
'Plastic Surgey Distasters'
'Frankenchrist'
...and 'Bedtime For Democracy'.

Many of the lyrics from of those records are as poignant today as they were back in the 80's.

The DK's were often seen as a punk band but they were far more than that. With their soured west coast surf sound they were a bona-fide anti-establishment band and for good reasons too...check out their lyrics and see why.

A future blog entry may discuss them in more detail.. however...messrs Whyte and Mackay have some overwhelming control over my keyboard tonight so I'll leave it at that...anyhoo...here's last Fridays playlist...nighty nite.

Doves - Firesuite
Mercury Rev - Tides of the Moon (Thanks Chris)
Grandaddy - Collective Dreams of Upper Class Eligance
Dead Kennedys - We've Got a Bigger Problem Now (from In God We Trust)
Beta Band - It's Not Too Beautiful
Electrelane - Film Music
Caribou - Bee's
Dean Kennedys - Moon Over Marin (from Plastic Surgery Disasters)
Super Discount - Prix Choc
X-Ray Spex - Oh Bondage Up Yours
Family Of God - Goodnight Picadilly
Nucleus - Song For The Bearded Lady
Faust - It's a Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl
Sons And Daughters - La Lune
A Growing Boy Needs His Lunch (from Frankenchrist)
Death In Vegas - Aladdins Story
Royksopp - What Else Is There
The Orb - Once More
Fischerspooner - Ritz 107
Dead Kennedys - Cesspools In Eden (from Bedtime For Democracy)

ps: lucky listeners :-) to next weeks show might hear a track from Jello Biafra's spoken word album 'No More Cocoons'...if you're in the area (Perth and Pitlochry) tune into 97.5FM - Heartland FM between 10pm and 12am...I'm your weekend starter (apparently the schedule says so).

A few years back Jakob Nielson's Alertbox published an article that hilighted the many usability deficiencies of Flash or Shockwave or whatever it's called these days. Tonight while researching a band for the show on Friday (Pure Reason Revolution) I took a look at their website. I think just about every rule of usability has been broken on their site. There's every damn thing from mystery meat buttons to nonstandard scroll-bars and this obsession by 'designers' to cram the whole site onto a postage sized Flash applet...yoohoo...my browser has vertical scrollbars can resize and wrap text. All these gimmicks totally distract the user from quickly gleaning information about the band.  This is a good example of a web site that sucks. It's a shame because the tune I plan to play is cool but sadly I can't link to the page on the site which has their discography because of flash abuse.

VS.NET/C#/ASP.NET are our main development tools, however over the last couple of weeks I've had to add new functionality to a site that still runs classic ASP code. It's the first time in three+ years since I've written any ASP for any serious purpose and I have to say it's been a painful experience going back to Response.Write debugging - yeh ok it's possible to coerce Interdev, IIS and MTS|COM+ into some kind of configuration to allow debugging of ASP script but I could never utter the incantations properly, balance on one leg long enough and my jaw hurt at that angle. Anyway....I wasn't paying attention and in an include file I had absent mindedly written code that looked something like....

Dim response
response = SendPaymentToGateway(amount, cardnumber, ...blah...)

...for a few seconds it puzzled me as to why calling methods on the Response object, such as Response.Redirect, started throwing the strangest errors:

Microsoft VBScript runtime error '800a01a8'

Object required: 'Response'

ASP just sat there quietly and handed out the rope..... :-)

Tonights show started off looking a bit dodgy because of time constraints this week to get it together, but now looking back at the playlist I think it turned out ok. The strangest track of the night was Basil Kirchin's Sketch 1 from the recently issued Charcoal Sketches/States of Mind CD. The CD comes complete with a recording error from the original masters which upon playing the first time sounded like the CD was knackered. The sleeve notes make a mention of this fault which actually ocurred in the studio when the album was recorded. My fav track of the night was 'Everything is Fixed' by Family of God. It comes from their self-titled album Family of God which sat on my CD shelf for 6 years never getting a proper listen until I dug it out again this week. It's music that's hard describe except to say that it cross cuts mellow ambient trippyness with 60's psychedlia. I think I'll be playing a few more tracks from it over the coming weeks. Rather annoyingly the CD I'd been looking forward to playing this week was the new album 'Set Free' by The American Analogue Set which was released on Monday. Unfortunately play.com, who seem to be the only retailer actually making the effort to stock American Analogue Set releases, are still awaiting stock. Play are a funny bunch. They look and feel like your usual big online retailer and you kinda expect just to see the usual big-label-mainstream-artists in their store but often surprise me by stocking releases that other retailers often won't go near. Anyhoo...here's the playlist for tonight:

Jesus and Mary Chain - Teenage Lust
Tad - Grease Box
Mudhoney - You got It (Keep It Outta My Face)
Stooges - I Wanna Be Your Dog
Stephen Malkmus - No More Shoes
Editors - Blood
Arab Strap - The First Big Weekend
Mogwai - Dial: revenge
Low - If You were Born Today
Silo - Those Adopted By People
Nurse With Wound/Stereolab - Simple Headphone Mind
Super Discount - Prix Choc
King of Woolworths - Delia Derbyshire
Basil Kirchin - Sketch 1
Tangerine Dream - Moments of a Visionary
The Egg - Angel of My Soul
The Postal Service - The District Sleeps Alone Tonight
Engineers - New Horizons
Family of God - Everything Is Fixed
Amon Duul II - Wie Der Wind Am Ende Einer Strasse
Banco De Gaia - Last Train to Lhasa

Well it's been six months since I started doing the radio show. I was reckoning I'd got the measure of the knobs and dials and gotcha's on the studio desk and had the beginning feelings of competancy doing this thing. Then some blob of discrete matter bloody well had to attach itself to the underside of a CD when I wasn't looking. My attentions were elsewhere prefading in another track in my headphones then I realised that there was no sound coming from the on-air monitor...two minutes in, The Egg got stopped in it's tracks then there was the deafening sound of dead air...all 20 seconds of it...ouch.

Anyway this is tonights playlist. I think my fav tracks were 13th Floor Elevators and Silver Apples.

Pere Ubu - Non Alignment Pact
Butthole Surfers - I Saw An X-Ray of a Girl Passing Gas
Mercury Rev - Something For Joey
Malka Spigal - Antimatter
Curve - Chinese Burn
The Knife - Pass This On
Lightning Bolt - Ride The Friendly Skies
Boris - Ibitsu
Stereolab - Moogie Wonderland
Four Tet - Sleep, Eat, Food, Have Visions
Julian Cope - Mystery Trend
Grandaddy - A.M. 180
Electrelane - Film Music
Comets on Fire - Brotherhood of the Harvest
13th Floor Elevators - Slip Inside This House
Quantic - Apricot Morning
Captain Beefheart - I Got Love On My Mind
Nick Drake - Sunday
Wagon Christ - Bend Over
Wire - Pink Flag
Ozric Tentacles - Disolution
The Egg - Angel of my Soul
Silver Apples - Program
Royksopp - What Else Is There?

Took a night off to do normal stuff like drinking beer! Back to normal this week though. If you're in the area (Perth) then tune into 97.5FM at 10pm for 2hrs of top tunes.

This was last night's playlist. Played quite a few 8-10 minute tracks which I couldn't really get away with when it was just a 1hr show. Fave track of the night? Belle and Sebastian's 'Sleep Around The Clock' and Electrelane's 'Film Music'.

Bert Jansch - Strolling Down The Highway
Belle and Sebastian - Sleep Around The Clock
Malcolm Middleton - Loneliness Shines
Television - Marquee Moon
Wolfgang Press - Kansas
Tom Vek - C-C (You Set The Fire In Me)
Ladytron - Sugar
Electrelane - Film Music
The Fall - Hilary
Stephen Malkmus - No More Shoes
Joy Division - Transmission
The Sensational Alex Harvey Band - Framed
The Rezillos - I Can't Stand My Baby
Alien Sex Fiend - I Walk The Line
The American Analogue Set - Hard To Find
The Egg - Angel of My Soul
Tangerine Dream - Stratosfear
Nurse With Wound/Sterolab - Simple Headphone Mind
Kraftwerk - Spacelab
Curve - Chinese Burn
Frank Zappa - Peaches en regalia

Kinda had enough of the .Text wierdness which I'm sure wasn't instrinsic to the .Text code but it just wouldn't work properly here. So I've bitten the bullet and defected to dasBlog.

All in all quite nice. It's also nice having comments back again and dasBlog has HIP-CAP built in too so hopefully no more comment spam.

Another handful of tunes played on the show. Fav track(s) of the night were The Widow/L'Viaquez by The Mars Volta (you should listen to the lyrics...mind bending) and Grandaddy's Collective Dreams of Upper Class Elegance.

Stephen Malkmus - No More Shoes
Low - California
Mogwai - Dial: Revenge
Mogwai - You Don't Know Jesus - Bonus extra track because of finger trouble :)
Black Mountain - Don't Run Our Hearts Around
Explosions In the Sky - Your Hand in Mine
Iron and Wine - Woman King
The Postal Service - The District Sleeps Alone Tonight
The Orb - Perpetual Dawn (Album Version)
The American Analogue Set - Hard To Find
Goldfrapp - Utopia
Arcade Fire - Neighbourhood 2
Polygon Window - Polygon Window
Boards of Canada - In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country
Hawkwind - Master of the Universe
The Mars Volta - The Widow
The Mars Volta - L'Via, L'Viaquez
Tom Vek - The Lower The Sun
Grandaddy - Collective Dreams of Upper Class Elegance
Magoo - East Polar Opposites Meet
The Polyphonic Spree - Light and Day/Reach For the Sun

A bit late but if you're interested this is the playlist from the show a couple of Fridays ago. If not...move along...

The Stooges - I Wanna Be Your Dog
Jesus and Mary Chain - Teenage Lust
Sparkle Horse - It's a Wonderful Life
Malcolm Middleton - Loneliness Shines
Spiritualised -Ladies and Gentlemess We are Floating In Space
Royksopp - What Else Is There
Black Mountain - Don't Run Our Hearts Around
Boards of Canada - Music is Math
Caribou - Bees
Like a Stuntman - King Kongs
The Orb - Ghost Dancing
System 7 - Gliding on Duotone Curves
Kraftwerk - Kling Klang
Grandaddy - A.M. 180
Revolting Cocks - Do Ya Think I'm Sexy
Can - Pinch
Egg - Angel Of My Soul
Engineers - New Horizons
Killing Joke - Like Like Blood
Portishead - Mourning Air
Lush - Light From a Dead Star

I just treated myself to a new toy (excuse the fuzzy photo). It's a Creative Zen Micro which is compatible with Napster To Go which I am about to upgrade to (more on that in a later post). Anyway...the 5GB disk might not seem huge compared to the Zen Touch, iRivers or the rather nice looking Toshiba Gigabeat, but it's enough storage for roughly 1200 tracks at around 3 to 5MB a track. Plenty to keep me entertained whilst cycling, walking and my forthcoming trip to see my wee bro in NZ in October...anything with a bigger disk was another 100GBP and the dimensions became less than comfortable for my pockets.

Another selling point is the built in FM radio (I missed listening to the radio on public transport) which works a treat even in my office which has more RF generating kit than Edinburgh Airport. The unit is solidly put together and I'd even go so far to say that the quality of the built is at least as good if not better than Apple's iPod range.

When re-charging (either from the mains adapter or USB cable) the Zen emits a gentle pulsating blue glow which is aesthetically pleasing to the eye and is a nice touch.

The touch sensitive controls initially took some getting used to, however switching to the least sensitive mode got me past my initial finger trouble. There's also a reassuring click from a built in speaker to give you an audible cue when you've selected a menu option, track etc, though this can be turned off.

The sound quality is also excellent and the headphones that come out of the box are comfortable to wear and give a good sound reproduction. There is also a range of preset EQ settings but you can also customise your own EQ settings from a 5 band graphic equaliser.

Finally, the retail box I bought came with a bonus rigid case with belt clip and desk stand.

All in all I'm well pleased with the Zen Micro and it's huge improvement on my bulky old Zen DAB

Score: 8/10

Despite rebuilding and extensively testing on my dev workstation, .Text still persists in displaying January in the LHS post archive on the deployment box. Wierd...I've checked SQL and all sorts of stuff to make sure that the date formats, localisation etc are correct but this needs more than an hour or so to investigate and fix. I also re-enabled comments with HIP-CAPTCHA but it's not working right either ...the wheels have definitely come off the bus with comments, new or historical.

Time to move on and get my blogging module completed for DotNetNuke I think.

So little time.

Not just content with polluting blogs with comment spam, I just took a look at my referrer list....jeez referrer spam now, heaps of it.....sigh.

Spence continues his take on undocumented interfaces. I'd also like to extend the argument to the use of reflection to get at values and data-structures that, for reasons known only to themselves, designers of libraries chose to remain private.

Before casting any stones, I'll confess that for one project due to the lack of machine parsable data from the XML Validating Reader Schema Exception (lets face it, the Message property is totally unparsable) I had to resort to reflection in the callback to access data in the schema exception that wasn't and still isn't exposed (in FW 1.1)  (res and args[]) to enable me to generate both machine and human friendly parse failures. I've haven't checked FW2.0 to see if these values are still present and if not this may present a problem for the dev's maintaining this code under FW2.0 in the future.

Anyone else for humble pie?

Seems I rattled through and fair old set on Friday. If you heard the show then I hope you enjoyed it.

Marilyn Manson - Disposable Teens
Editors - Blood
Ladytron - Sugar
David Holmes - My Mate Paul
Nurse With Wound/Stereolab - Simple Headphone Mind
Boards of Canada - In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country
Silo - Prime Movers
Dead Kennedy's - Winnebago Warrior
The Fall - Black Monk Theme
At The Drive-In - One Armed Scissor
Tom Waits - Hang on Saint Christopher
Fischerspooner - Ritz 107
Manitoba - Hendrix With KO
Battles - HI LO
Hawkwind - Golden Void
Wire - Pink Flag
King Crimson - Starless
King Crimson - Red
Mudhoney - You Got It
Royksopp - What Else Is There?
Boredoms - (spiral)
Boris - Ibitsu
Stephen Malkmus - Pencil Rot
Amon Duul II - Wie der Wind Am Ende Einer Strass

Sadly I've had to turn off comments due to the amount of comment spam. Contact me on k e v i n . k e n n y  _a t_  z y g o n i a . n e t if you want me to tack on a comment.

A house move and rejig of some of my IT bits seemed to have unsettled .Text and I finally got round to sorting it. Anyway...moving along...

Spence has a very good article on reasons why you don't go messing with underlying implementations and undocumented API's. I couldn't agree more. You just end up delivering fragile systems to your customer and when the next hotfix, SP or upgrade comes along the rod for your back arrives a-knocking at your door. If the functionality ain't there in the API then let the vendor know and live with it until it does.

If you're in the Perth/Pitlochry/Aberfeldy area then you can tune into my 2 hr slot of eclectic (dare I say) tunes every Friday night from 10pm onwards. The frequency is 97.5FM and the station is Heartland FM . We're also holding an open day tomorrow (30/7/05) from 10am to 4pm where you can come visit the station meet the the folks involved, get a tour and see how things work. I do believe there's a BBQ and liquid refreshments to be had too. I'll be there from about 1pm.

Be sure to visit all the options under "Configuration" in the Admin Menu Bar above. There are 16 themes to choose from, and you can also create your own.

Downloaded over the weekend, and finally got around to installing into a fresh Virtual Server build. Kicked off the install over an hour ago and its still going...but so far so good.  Looking forward to getting stuck in later this week. All I can report so far is that the installer looks polished :)

Yep...just noticed the summary of posts by date control is broken always showing January.

Wednesday 23rd Feb

Transactions in .NET 2.0 - Ingo Rammer - http://www.thinktecture.com/staff/ingo/weblog/

Ingo's session covered the present methods of coding transactional components (explicit transactions, implicit transactions using Enterprise Services) and a quick refresher on the DTC and Two-Phase Commit. The .NET 2.0 framework has a new namespace called System.Transactions which provides enhanced support for distributed transactions without the need to inherit from ServicedComponent. The session described the new TransactionScope class which is used in local and distributed implicit transactions and the Transaction class which provides support for explicit transactions. All in all a very good session.

Extending the VS.NET IDE - John Robbins - http://www.wintellect.com/about/instructors/default.aspx#2

The session starting with an intro to building VS.NET macros to automate simple tasks in the IDE. Next we moved onto the IDE extensibility model and all the IDE objects that can be got at e.g. solution and project access, output windows, text manipulation and so on. The session also covered the different types of events that macros and AddIns can be notified of when things happen in the IDE. The last part of the session then covered building fully fledged VS.NET addins and importantly how to overcome some of the hurdles the VS.NET team put in your way when getting started doing this. Another good session and I left with plenty of food for thought on building some addins of my own....yet another SQL Stored Procedure Parameter code generator maybe :) ?

ASP.NET 2.0 Configuration and Instrumentation - Jeff Prosise - http://www.wintellect.com/about/instructors/default.aspx#1

Excellent session covering the new ASP.NET MMC snap-in and WebAdmin.axd tools for configuring ASP.NET which should take the pain out of managing the machine.config and your app's web.config files. We then moved onto the new configuration API features which provide the ability to read and write configuration settings. This API is used by the MMC and WebAdmin.axd tools and gives the programmer strongly typed access to configuration sections. There are too many new neat things to list but I recommend digging around the expanded System.Configuration and System.Web.Configuration namespaces. Next in the session we got into the new ASP.NET 2.0 instrumentation capabilities that provide enhancements such as new perf counters (25 new ones), Windows Event Tracing which facilitates end-to-end tracing of requests through the ASP.NET system and application tracing improvements. We then covered the new config section and HeartBeat event which can be fired at user defined intervals and can be used to gather vital info about the state of your app. The session ended with a couple of demo's on building custom web events that can be wired up to the health monitoring features. One neat one was to ensure that your web.config section (new) was always encrypted.

Script it With ASP.NET 2.0 - Dino Esposito - http://www.wintellect.com/about/instructors/default.aspx#5

Last session of the day and my first proper ASP.NET 2.0 one. Dino covered new features such as script callbacks that allow a page to update it's content without performing a full page refresh, cross page scripting that allow one page to post form values back to a different page, the new HtmlHead class which allows easier access to the tag and its contents, the enhanced HttpBrowserCapabilities class, the new Page.ClientScript property which is used to inject script into ASP.NET pages and  finally the new SetFocus() method of the Page class which permits the programmer to assign the initial input focus on a page to the control of his choice..

All in all a pretty interesting day.

Tuesday 22nd Feb
 

Keynote - John Robbins - http://www.wintellect.com/about/instructors/default.aspx#2
 
Whatever John Robbins talks about he keeps his audience interested (as I subsequently discovered after attending one of his later sessions). His keynote speech discussed the new features of VS.NET 2005 and covered a whole bunch of stuff from the new refactoring tools (which looked a lot like Re-Sharper) to Code Snippets to smarter debugging features like Data Tips. Very enjoyable.
 

Visual Studio Team System - Benjamin Mitchel - http://benjaminm.net/
 
Sadly a last minute change to the schedule meant that the double session originally planned didn't go ahead. Even worse the session was marred by the speaker having to present a whirlwind tour of VSTS using an extremely flaky build.
 

Building Managed Code Office Solutions with Visual Studio 2005 - Mike Pelton - http://blogs.msdn.com/MikePelton/
 
Its been a long time since I did any Office programming so I thought'd take a look at what was new in this space. Unfortunately Sharepoint and InfoPath were excluded from the session. However, we did get into Office Primary Interop Assemblies, Smart Tags, Smart Documents, The Information Bridge Framework (briefly) and VS Tools for Office. The session was a good primer for developers who need to get started in this area. Many of the examples also came from this book (http://www.compman.co.uk/scripts/browse.asp?ref=697430) which was recommended by the speaker.
 

What's New in ASP.NET Web Services - Tim Ewald - http://www.pluralsite.com/blogs/tewald/default.aspx
 
Tim's session covered new Type Sharing features that overcome .NET 1.x shortcomings, nullable types, IXmlSerializable which allows a type to customise the XML serialisation process, response compression (gzip'd responses), sequence support , partial class support and support for hosting

Just back from DevWeek 2005 last week - well Sunday night, but felt the need for a IT free day off today. Sadly connectivity issues with the admin bit of my blog prevented me giving a day by day account of the proceedings. I'll post more about it tonight.

Didn't notice this behaviour until today when a customer in the hosting environment was experiencing sporadic problems where his web app would just die with Access Denied errors all over the shop. I double checked the environment to make sure that the security was as it should be though I couldn't understand why my diagnostic script would run just fine (write some files, open and update an Access database etc etc) yet his app was failing.

Turns out he was starting a thread in his Global.asax.cs Application_Start() method which would sleep until certain times of the day and then wake up to do some background database tidy up and writing to an XML log file. This was when things just stopped.

Now, in the shared web hosting environment, ASP.NET application web requests are served by ASP.NET impersonating the anonymous user account created for that user and his website. After bit of head scratching I suspected that the thread wasn't running under the impersonated anonymous user account and hence the permissions errors. A quick look at WindowsIdentity.GetCurrent().Name upon entering Application_Start() told me as much and it was the aspnet_wp.exe process account being used. However, because the thread would sleep until certain times of the day his app would run fine for hours and then just suddenly hit the floor.

In a nutshell, when an ASP.NET application starts up, it executes its startup code in the context of the worker process (aspnet_wp.exe or w3wp.exe depending on whether you run 2k or 2k3) account. When the Application_Start() event is fired, it is fired under the worker process identity, not the impersonation account.

So basically his thread was being created and run under the low privileged process account which doesn't have sufficient rights to perform all of the operations it expected to be able to perform.

Something new learned every day