This is very cool, roll on RTM!

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Glucose/Hanselminutes-on-9-Debugging-Crash-Dumps-with-Tess-Ferrandez-and-VS2010/

If your playback is jerky when playing video from the filesystem or a network share then increase the File cache size in:

Preferences –> Input –>Access Modules –> File

I bumped mine to 2000ms, no more jerky. There’s a whole bunch of other cache tuning you can do for other sources such as FTP, HTTP, TCP etc too.

Vanished is the first book in Joe Finder’s new “Nick Heller” series of books. Nick Heller is a “private spy” who works for a private intelligence firm, he’s ex-special forces, tough and doesn’t take any shit. In this first instalment Heller becomes involved in the hunt for his missing brother, a search which sees him embroiled in the goings on of the major defence contractor his brother works for.

Vanished starts off well but I got kind of bored about two thirds of the way through, in fact I don’t really remember much of interest that happened during those middle chapters. The last few chapters picked up my interest again but the ending felt so obvious (and awkward) that I was left feeling pretty disappointed. Vanished is ok, but not a patch on earlier corporate and political romps such as Paranoia or The Moscow Club. Hopefully the next Nick Heller instalment will be better.

5/10

Atheists and scientists are apparently fascists now for defending good science in the classroom and pushing back against teaching crackpot theories such as creationism and intelligent design:

http://richarddawkins.net/article,4432,n,n

Thought I’d give this Twitter malarky another go. You can read my haiverings and waffles at:

http://twitter.com/teh_klev

Normal service to be resumed when I get done with my Windows 2008 Server build docs etc.

The other day I was implementing a page block widget using jQuery and BlockUI. The code kinda looked like this:

The trick it seems is to close empty tags with an explicit closing tag. i.e. <div id=”progressMessage”></div> and then life is good again.

Fiddler to the rescue yet again….

If you’re doing jQuery/AJAX –> web service kinda things like this:

function submitWooshTest() {
    var adslOrderID = gQs.get("orderid"); 

    $.ajax({
        type: "POST", url: "ScriptServices/WooshTester.asmx/RequestWooshTest",
        data: {
            adslOrderID: adslOrderID,
            faultType: $('#wooshFaultType').val(),
            hasWorked: $('#wooshHasWorked').is(':checked'),
            disruptive: $('#wooshDisruptive').is(':checked'),
            faultDate: $('#wooshFaultDate').val(),
            faultTime: $('#wooshFaultHour').val() + ':' + $('#wooshFaultMinute').val()
        },
        success: function(result) {
            $.unblockUI();
            $.blockUI({ message: $('#wooshResults') });
            showWooshTests();
        },
        error: function(x, s, e) {
            debug(x, s, e);
        }
    });       
}

And the web service end point looks like:

Don’t forget to configure your web services protocols in your web.config:

Otherwise when accessing your functionality from a browser that isn’t on the localhost you’ll get the following cryptic error message:

System.InvalidOperationException: Request format is unrecognized for URL unexpectedly ending in '/RequestWooshTest.

[InvalidOperationException: Request format is unrecognized for URL unexpectedly ending in '/RequestWooshTest.]
   System.Web.Services.Protocols.WebServiceHandlerFactory.CoreGetHandler(Type type, HttpContext context, HttpRequest request, HttpResponse response) +405881
   System.Web.Services.Protocols.WebServiceHandlerFactory.GetHandler(HttpContext context, String verb, String url, String filePath) +212
   System.Web.Script.Services.ScriptHandlerFactory.GetHandler(HttpContext context, String requestType, String url, String pathTranslated) +47
   System.Web.HttpApplication.MapHttpHandler(HttpContext context, String requestType, VirtualPath path, String pathTranslated, Boolean useAppConfig) +193
   System.Web.MapHandlerExecutionStep.System.Web.HttpApplication.IExecutionStep.Execute() +93
   System.Web.HttpApplication.ExecuteStep(IExecutionStep step, Boolean&amp; completedSynchronously) +155

If you ever end up with a totally broken .NET Framework install (say, after the installer for .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 falls over), then head over here and get a copy of Aaron Stebners .NET Cleanup Tool:

http://blogs.msdn.com/astebner/archive/2006/05/30/611355.aspx

This is a tool of last resort and let me tell you things were pretty grim and last-resort like last Friday night for one of our production boxes (and me). This got me out of a huge hole where both .NET 3.0 and .NET 2.0 were so badly broken, the .NET 3.5 SP1 installer fell over mid flight, that I couldn't even repair/uninstall from Add/Remove Programs and I couldn't even run the redistributable installers to do a fix/replace/repair.

This is the book that the cult of Scientology seem to have managed to pull from sale on Amazon, Waterstones etc using their usual dodgy legal intimidation tactics. The book itself doesn't cover much more than you'll find on Operation Clambake other than a more personal story of one man's 22 year stint with the cult. I quite enjoyed it and read it cover to cover in a single sitting.

You can still order the book from Eason books in Ireland at http://www.eason.ie/look/9781903582848/Complex/John-Duignan.

7/10

Somehow just about every order I placed that was eligible for Amazon Prime arrived later than if I'd stuck to the 2-3 day free delivery. At the moment I'm waiting on a couple of books I'd normally order from Computer Manuals (they're always delivered next day). The books in question were dispatched from Amazon's fulfillment centre in Glasgow and have somehow got lost between there and the local City Link depot in Glenrothes. How hard can it be to send a box from one side of Scotland to the other?

Utterly useless.

Add to that I find that the royal mail have been saving up packages sent by first class letter post and delivering when it was more convenient to the postman.

Amazon Prime is a nice idea but so dependant on the vagaries of our postal service. I cancelled and I got my money back.

More like nothing happening, not even acting. M. Night Shyamalan seems to have some kinda hold over Hollywood but to be honest his films are pretty average to below par. The Happening is just a total waste of time and money. Walberg's acting was appalling and the rest of the cast were a joke.

Utter rubbish: 0/10

Sometime back in July or August Microsoft slipped out a driver for PHP 5 on windows. It uses the SQL Native Client which means that it also supports automatic transparent client redirect. Change this connection info array from:

$connectionInfo = array("Database"=>"AdventureWorks",
                            "UID"=>"sa",
                            "PWD"=>"foobar23$");

to

$connectionInfo = array("Database"=>"AdventureWorks",
                            "UID"=>"sa",
                            "PWD"=>"foobar23$",
                            "Failover_Partner"=>"mirror.sql.local");

and you've now got automatic failover capability. You need to be running a witness for this magic to happen. If you're running on a Linux box this capability is not available but you can always try something like:

http://www.evolt.org/failover-database-connection-with-php-mysql

Despite what SQL Books Online tell you about being able to use IP addresses to specify the failover partner and witness servers, this appears to be not quite true in practice.

I spent almost a day and a half configuring a HA mirroring rig using certificates for authentication (the servers are standalone and not in a domain) and was buggered if I could get the mirror and the witness to connect. Without this there'd be no automatic failover. Manual failover worked just fine, but our project requires Automatic Failover. It all seemed like an exercise in futility.

I even had the FQ domain names of all the machines participating in the Principal, Mirror and Witness rig in their respective HOSTS files, but still no dice.

Eventually I tried setting the PARTNER and WITNESS using the FQ machine names as they appear in the HOSTS files. Suddenly it all started working. Querying sys.database_mirroring on both principal and mirror at last showed the witness as connected.

I caved and bought a Mac Mini 2ghz a couple of days back. I quite like OS X and it has quite a good out of box experience. My only complaint so far is that arty farty aluminium keyboard and the one button mighty mouse. For a developer they both suck in terms of usability and ergonomics. I ended up buying an older A1048 wireless keyboard with proper keys and a proper two button Logitech LX6 mouse to replace them both.

Anyway it's been a long time since I got quite so excited about a new computer. I'm looking forward to honing my Python and Ruby skills in an environment that doesn't have my usual MS crutches like VS.

This quite a handy wee tool from MS -

Bumff:

XML Notepad 2007 Home

Download from:

XML Notepad 2007 Download

Attempting to use aerosol furniture polish as an air freshener in your linoleum floored kitchen...my back hurts...nuff said.

Update: Cats none too pleased either.

This film is so bad that after 20 minutes of watching it my eyes fell out.

Absolutely no redeeming features, not even funny in it's badness. I'm surprised Dan O'Bannon continues to allow himself to be involved in this franchise.

A 'my eyes, my ears!' - 0/10

All I can say is, bloody marvelous. Daniel Day-Lewis at his best. It's a longish film (2hrs 38mins) but you pretty soon become immersed in the story and at no time did I feel compelled to look at my watch.

10/10

I'll keep it simple: "I upgraded to Firefox 3 and all I got was this lousy new back button".

It's hard to believe that Carl Sagan's Cosmos is nearly 30 years old and I never got around to reading it until now, although I do remember watching the TV series as a kid. Whilst the science of astronomy and astrophysics has moved on somewhat since the book was written, Cosmos is a timeless book. Before I started to read it I thought it might feel dated and of its time, but not so. Forget Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything", Cosmos is the daddy. It truly is the the Total Perspective Vortex in a handy book format.

I just took delivery of my new video card which got slotted into the new Dell. The Quadro FX1700 cards weren't cutting it for 3D work, but I knew this would be the case any way. The new card is an overclocked NVidia GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB (MSI branded). The first thought I had when I unwrapped it from the anti-static bag was "jings, this thing is huge!". This is one of these cards that takes up two bays because of all the cooling and other heat sinking gubbins that go into making high performance video cards. Anyhow, go here to read all about it if you're so inclined: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/GeForce-8800-GTS-512,review-29805.html.

The new card boosted my 'Windows Experience Index' by a good bit, which is nice:

I can now run Eve with all the premium high quality rendering bits turned up to full at 1900x1200 and the average frame rate is around 120+fps.

And without further ado, the obligitory hardware pr0n:

1. Big, isn't it?

2. Even the Buzz thinks it's a chunky looking affair, or maybe just eyeing up the leftover ketchup

3. Two slots big...

Quite amusing. I'm platform agnostic and a reasonable kinda guy when it comes to using the right tools for the job (Linux hums away processing around 2million messages a day on our mail platform) but MS pays the rent and the beer for me. Actually, you'd have to pry my lovely VS08 and .NET tools out of my cold dead hands before forcing me to switch to being a LAMP/Mono stack developer. But that doesn't mean to say that if you came along and doubled my salary I wouldn't completely rule out the blue pill.

Anyway, go have a chuckle here: http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/

[Via: Miguel de Icaza]

I don't watch copied DVD's. I like to own the original media and box. Also because most DVD's are so cheap these days why wouldn't I just buy the original? Lately, one thing that's really been seriously pissing me off big time is the way that film companies take control of my DVD player and decide how I watch the DVD. i.e. forcing me to watch their 'COPYING IS STEALING' crap and a boat load of trailers for films I've no interest in.

Let's face it, if I was watching a hooky DVD or rip, none of this crap would be present and therefore completely missing the target audience...people who are watching hooky DVDs and rips. And, if I was so inclined to duplicate, say the rental copy, then I'd rip and burn the DVD minus all this crap anyway. The other thing that uniquely grips my shit are trailers I can't easily skip past. LionsGate DVD's are particularly guilty of this trick. I can fast forward (better than nothing, but as you fast forward past each trailer, the next one needs to be manually fast forwarded and so on; still a pain in the arse) but I'm not allowed just to go straight to the main feature menu.

So the movie I'm about to watch tonight made me sit through two mandatory 'YOU ARE A THIEF' messages and then made me fast forward through 4 trailers and 2 chocolate adverts and some other crap. Some are even worse, last week one DVD (I forget which one) did this to me -

1. Twenty seconds warning me not to dare copy the DVD, with fast forward/skip/menu prohibited.
2. Twenty seconds warning me not to even think about watching it in a public place, with fast forward/skip/menu prohibited.
3. Fifteen seconds of animated logos advertising the main production company, with fast forward/skip/menu prohibited.
4. Another fifteen seconds of shiny logos advertising how clever they were for using Dolby Digital, with fast forward/skip/menu prohibited.
5. Fifteen seconds advertising another film company involved in making the movie, with fast forward/skip/menu prohibited.
6. About four minutes of trailers and other spam with no option to skip to menu other than fast forward EACH trailer, skipping/menu prohibited.
7. Approximately 15-20 seconds of animation just to show the menu before I could select 'Play'

Talk about making enemies with the customers who actually paid for your product.

So...Dear Film Companies...stop assuming I'm a thief and stop taking control of MY DVD player which I paid for with MY MONEY and let me decide, or not, whether I watch your crappy legal messages and second rate movie trailers/spam. I don't have to put up with this nonsense every time I open a book or play my CD's (though wouldn't the music biz love that eh?). I'm not stupid and I know the book is protected by copyright, but I don't have to remind myself every time by re-reading the copyright page each time I pick it up, so why inflict this crap on me when watching a DVD. Yeah ok I could get the player chipped and made region free, blah, blah, blah, but why should I resort to invalidating my warranty just to be able to have the freedom to decide that today I want to watch the film now, and not after ten minutes of threats and unwanted DVD spam.

Yay! Re-sharper 4 just shipped (in the last hour by the looks of it, their blog entry says 10th of June and it's still the 9th) after the shortest Beta/RC period I think I've seen ever. Finally, support for all the clever new C#3.0 bits.

For the past week or so in my spare time I've been trying to get my head around DI and IoC. Last night the light flickered on and stayed on thanks to this series of articles by Simone Busoli on dotnetslackers:

http://dotnetslackers.com/articles/designpatterns/InversionOfControlAndDependencyInjectionWithCastleWindsorContainerPart1.aspx
http://dotnetslackers.com/articles/designpatterns/InversionOfControlAndDependencyInjectionWithCastleWindsorContainerPart2.aspx
http://dotnetslackers.com/articles/designpatterns/InversionOfControlAndDependencyInjectionWithCastleWindsorContainerPart3.aspx
http://dotnetslackers.com/articles/designpatterns/InversionOfControlAndDependencyInjectionWithCastleWindsorContainerPart4.aspx

Although the articles focus on the Castle Windsor container, the principles apply to containers such as Microsoft's own Unity container.

So I succumbed to peer pressure (or something like that) and got me a Twitter account. I'm still not sure I get the whole 'micro-blogging' thing but I'll give it a go. So if you fancy tuning in and finding out when I've gone to the bathroom, scratched my arse or wiped my nose then get it hot off the press from here: http://twitter.com/cosmicklev.

Look what we have to put up with in Perth. This is my residential line (Nildram, but shows as Tiscali now):

This is the business line:

This is on a good day. Neither results them are particularly inspiring and BT refuse to do anything about fixing the residential line to match the business line, other than having replaced the master socket when a fault manifested itself last year. Both copper circuits follow the same path back to the exchange (or so a BT engineer assured me) so I'm guessing the residential line has some pretty crappy jointing along the way. To make matters worse, changes in humidity, temperature and the phases of the moon can reduce the speed by as much as 30%. There's even some folk in the estate who've been turned down by BT Broadband, yet the adjacent business estate which houses HBoS, The Scottish Executive and Scottish and Southern Energy had new fibre especially pulled up to this end of town for them.

There's also Virgin Cable duct roughly a 100 yards round the corner from the estate but sadly they never made it down our street when the houses were built. So much for de-regulation, competition and choice.

1. Running the wrong version of SysInternals Process Monitor makes your screen go blue:

Remember to launch Procmon64.exe and not procmon.exe.

2. Remember to enable 32 bit mode in your app pool when running those legacy 32 bit COM widgets in your antiquarian ASP apps:

Otherwise...

Microsoft VBScript runtime error '800a01ad'

ActiveX component can't create object: 'MSSOAP.SoapClient30'

My new dev box arrived last Friday. It's a Dell Precision T5400 with the following spec:

Intel Xeon E5450 Quad Core 3Ghz
12Gb Quad Channel ECC Memory
2 x 73Gb 15,000RPM SAS drives
2 x NVidia Quadro FX1700 Dual Head Graphics
1 x 150Gb 10,000RPM SATA drive

The motherboard sports two CPU sockets but only one is populated (for now). I installed Vista 64 bit and all seems well so far. I've got most of my work/dev stuff installed (Office 2007, VS05, VS08 etc) and it seems real zippy. The Vista performance score (4.8) is let down a bit by the Quadro FX cards (scored 4.8/5.3) because the 1700's aren't intended as balls out graphics boards.

That said the Vista Aero GUI is snappy and fast and Eve runs as well as it does on my laptop which has a GeForce 8600M GT. I'll maybe upgrade to an 8800 or better on pay day.

I do quite a lot of development and testing inside a number of virtual machine builds and MS have been nice enough to allow Virtual Server 2005 R2 run on Vista. This means I'll be able to take advantage of all those CPU cores which I don't think Virtual PC could do (correct me if I'm wrong).

I also got myself another 24" Dell TFT (2408FPW) to match my existing 2405FPW, although 2405 looks a bit tired now compared to the new screen. That said it's still way better than the old setup where I was running a 20" 1680 x 1050 TFT next to the 2405. I now have a grand total of 3800 x 1200 in desktop real estate which is nice.

Anyway, here's some gratuitous (blurry) hardware pr0n for you to gaze upon:

1. Back of machine with the drive carrier in the stowed position -

2. Drive carrier flipped out in maintenance position-

3. CPU cooler (bottom) and spare socket -

4. Memory (12 Gb). Has to be the heaviest memory I've ever run with what with all the heat sinks. FB memory runs pretty damn hot -

5. The memory gets a fan all to itself. If you trip the chassis intrusion switch this fan spools up and sounds like 747 on take-off. Under normal use it's pretty quiet and gently wafts the hot air out the rear grill.

6. Two NVidia Quadro FX1700's and the PERC 6/i SAS controller -

If you want understand the background behind Iran's some what caustic relationship with the west, and in particular America and Britain, then I recommend you read 'All The Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror' by Stephen Kinzer. It's a fairly detailed account of the 1953 plot by the CIA and the British to overthrow the democratically elected government of Iran, which then lead to 25 years of dictatorship and repression under the Shah. The culmination of these fateful events lead Iran to the 1979 revolution and the rest is history.

A fascinating: 8/10

In case you've had your head in the sand for the past few days, there's a two day strike by the Unite members who work at the Ineos refinery in Grangemouth. The strike is over Ineos making changes to the pension scheme, and you can find out more about the dispute from both sides here and here.

The BBC opened a 'Have Your Say' about the strike and the impact of possible fuel shortages. As usual, HYS brings out the best and the worst in folk, but there are some choice comments that made me laugh out loud or spit my tea out over the keyboard:

"I've thought ahead and have been buying all the frozen sweet corn from the supermarkets to put in my tank (its not a real tank by the way). The manual says I can use bio fuels and its tax free, so I'm quids in"

"I don't recommend this bio fuel nonsense, since I started using it the car is running really badly!! and now there's a terrible smell I can only describe as reminiscent of someone having eaten fire-lighters in a cinema"

"Is this strike a threat to national security? If so why haven't the Army occupied the plant?
scottow, norwich
Indeed, the first thing novice soldiers learn is how to operate an oil refinery..."

"I was doing fine till I read the Daily Mail and then I had to go out and fill up my tank and all the spare containers I have. If only Mrs Thatcher was in charge, she knew how to deal with strikers. And these workers fussing over their pensions, they should be glad that they have got a job"

A personal favourite:

"No problems yet, plenty of fuel in the pumps.
The real story is that the treasury will lose £25m per day from the closure of the forties pipeline. This amounts to over £9bn per year! And that's only one third of the output.
Can the whingers in the South now please stop moaning about subsidising Scotland, it appears to be the other way round."

Someone with a bit of sense pointing out the obvious:

"I wonder how many here complaining about people trying to protect their pensions are Civil Servants?"

Then there's the looney fringe:

"Bring back Maggie, she would know how to deal with this lot. Holding a country to ransom put you lot in the same league as Mugabe."

"here come the scotish argo again over the uk people(the war between us have finish long ago)
if i was the goverment i sack them all and bring in the immargants worker they do the work with out moining
so have another think my scottish friends fuel for thought
d, preston

What language is this?"

"Selfish or stupid call me what you will, I have purposely gone out today and filled my vehicles up with the hope of making this problem worse. "

"I drive a very expensive car which uses a lot of fuel. It is a luxury car of which I am very proud. I may have to think twice before driving to the shops because of fuel costs. I don't want to sell it because it is such a head turner. If fuel prices go up much more I may have to take the bus instead. I am disgusted that Labour has so little time for the motorist. I feel persecuted. This fuel crisis could end in ignominy for me. What is an oil plant? We have a castor oil plant on the patio."

"I went to fill my gallon can for the lawnmower as I do once a month at my local filling station - I'm known to all the staff - and was told I can't because they're not allowing anyone to fill cans.
Well that's *all* of my future custom lost then - even if it means I have to go 10 miles to the next station."

"Here on Rockall Island we have no Petrol so fill out tanks with Petrels instead which are more than abundent and untaxed (albeit we pay no taxes here anyhow).
Failing that I hear budgies are going cheep on the mainland.Mr James T Haddock, Rockall Island (Scotland), United Kingdom"

And Finally:

"It wouldn't be a proper Labour government without the country grinding to a halt at least once."

"If I had to live and work in Grangemouth I'd want a very good pension, too. What else is there to look forward to there?"

The Execution Channel is a strange and compelling read with the most bizarre ending which bites you in the ass in the last seven or eight pages. It reads like a modern day spy thriller (ala Wolstencroft) but in typical KM fashion reality is shifted half a notch to the left; Gore won the 2000 Presidential elections, a different pair of towers were collapsed on September 11th 2001 and the familiar is somewhat unfamiliar. I'm also quite pleased I read this after reading The New Cold War by Edward Lucas because the book extrapolates a possible and plausible near future depiction of political interplay between France, the UK, Scotland, the US and the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organisation). Martin probably sums up the book far better than I can, but the last eight pages definitely left me with a 'WTF!?' look on my face.

A great romp at 7/10.

Yeah I know it's old news, but being able to step into and debug the .NET Framework source code really does rock my world. I had a customer today who was getting a FileIOPermission exception caused by code like this:

FileInfo fi = new FileInfo(uploadedFile.PostedFile.FileName); // Exception thrown here
string fileExt = fi.Extension.ToLower();

He was creating a FileInfo object just to get at the file extension of a file he was uploading in ASP.NET, he should really have been using Path.GetExtension(string filename) instead, but that's by the by.

Anyhow I was pretty certain as to the cause of the issue, and he explained that this all worked fine on his machine, which I guessed was running at full trust, whereas we operate ASP.NET in partial trust. I suspected that because he was just passing the filename and not a full path, a path was being pre-pended with some location that he had no rights to access i.e. the location where the w3wp.exe is launched from.

Enter .NET Framework Reference source....after some minor fiddling about it was quite neat to be able to step right into the FileInfo constructor and confirm my suspicions:

The call to Path.GetFullPathInternal(filename) returns a fully qualified path to C:\windows\system32\inetsrv which is where the app pool worker process exe resides.  A FileIOPermission Demand is requested for Read access to this file which of course fails because we configure the FileIOPermission Read/Write/Append and PathDiscovery properties as $AppDir$ only.

Prior to this capability I'd have disassembled mscorlib and manually walked through the code to see what was going on, no big hassle, but just being able to step through the code and skip stuff I didn't really need to read and see it 'living' during execution is totally neat.

Nice one MS.

Good solid SciFi 'First Contact' type story but with a few inventive but also old school twists.

7/10 - Solid and Enjoyable.

It's been ten years or so since I last saw Portishead at the Glasgow Barrowlands and it's been 10 years or so since they toured and recorded their past masterpiece 'Portishead'. The new album is typically leftfield and their performance at Edinburgh's Corn Exchange was nothing short of excellent (excepting the acoustics of the ECE). Portishead are a better live band than they are in the studio, the polish of the studio is worn off and what we are presented with is a raw and unnatural aural force to be reckoned with.  I sincerely hope it doesn't take another ten years for them to record the next album and tour again, and I sincerely hope they never use the Corn Exchange again if they do return.....

So....quick rant: I hate the Corn Exchange, it's a big old barn of a place with the worst acoustics and layout in the world, even my toilet pan has better acoustics. What is it with the conference centre business? Just because you have a big box you can fill up with 2 to 3 thousand bodies doesn't automatically make you acoustically eligible to host gigs. The last time I saw a band at ECE was when The Beta Band played and it was a bloody awful sounding and laid out venue back then.

Verdict: 7/10 - let down by choice of venue.

For years a few friends have been urging me to read the Flashman books, I wish I'd taken their advice. I read the first book over the weekend and laughed and chuckled my my all the way the end. For those who don't know, Harry Flashman is a coward, cad, bounder and generally likeable rogue who's various exploits find his fictional character caught up in the middle of many landmark events of the 19th century.

The first book, Flashman, finds 'Flashy' smack bang in the middle of events in Afghanistan in 1842 when the British retreated from Kabul. Flashman's survival lies solely on his innate sense of self preservation at all costs. All in all an excellent boys own adventure.

Great fun at 8/10.

Edward Lucas is the Central and Eastern European correspondent for The Economist and his new book The New Cold War analyses the new dangers and risks we face in our dealings with Putin's new autocratic Russia. Whilst the book is somewhat short (300 pages), for such an expansive subject, it's a fascinating starting point for further reading which I most certainly will be. More about the book here on Lucas' website.

A provocative 7/10.

Generally I'm not a big computer/console game player, I've had an x-box and have a PS3. The PS3 is mostly used for streaming media from my TVersity box and watching movies. However back in early 2003 or thereabouts I heard about a MMOG space faring game called Eve Online, I think it was in beta at the time or had just been launched. I took a look but never got round to signing up, Kinross was still in the Dark Ages as far as broadband was concerned and the download was pretty big. So Eve was forgotten about until the back end of last year when I gave it another look. Unfortunately work constraints kinda put the kaibosh on getting past the 14 day trial and getting any sensible time to learn the ropes, but what I saw I liked.

Fast forward to two weeks ago, I signed up again, life has never been the same. A pal of mine who plays WoW advised caution saying "these MM games are like crack", and he's right. Eve is amazing, I've never felt quite so immersed in a game that practically takes over your whole life. I'm still at the noob stage, crafting my pilot and building his skills, but there's still fun to be had and every day there's something new to find out about the Eve universe. The game/universe is huge as well, you start off with your rookie ship and if you stay in the game you can form fleets, corporations and build your own space stations and build whole new economies. It's awesome. One cool thing about Eve is that the game is what you make of it, you can eek out a life mining asteroids and head down a career path of honest to goodness blue collar industrial safety in the carebear empire zone or you can pick up a destroyer and head out to the badland low security regions of space and rack up some PvP time or running contraband past the local law enforcement.

Eve is a beautifully crafted game, the graphics are stunning, the game play is what you make of it (there's very little that isn't possible it seems), and it has a biosphere of enthusiast sites and bloggers that extends well outside of the game. I also like the feeling that the game imposes a modicum of discipline with regards to strategy and cooperation which keeps it from becoming just another shoot'em up. That last aspect I think tends to make it attractive to more mature gamers who can't be bothered, or are past, instant gratification shoot 'em ups like Halo or Doom.

Anyway, give it a shot on the 14 day trial, but be careful, you *will* turn into an Eve crack monkey.

Every now and again the local Blockbuster get something in that isn't straight out of the Hollywood cookie cutter. The Bothersome Man is one of these little gems. The film starts out with a man throwing himself in front of a moving subway train, the scene then cuts to a desolate wilderness where a bus arrives at a disused filling station and delivers our protagonist (Andreas). At the petrol station Andreas is taken by car to a city where life is perfect, you work as much or as little as you want to, relationships are easy to make and break, there is no hardship or crime, but everything just seems a bit wrong, bland and unemotional. Andreas' seems to have no memory of a previous life but the discovery of a crack in this utopia fills him with unknown but familiar pleasures that are absent in this new world he exists in and he begins to long for them. There's a bit more about the film here: http://www.nfi.no/english/norwegianfilms/show.html?id=616 but I suggest you grab it from your local DVD shop, you won't be disappointed.

I give it a thought provoking 8/10.

Like Martin, I pretty much enjoyed Halting State but thought it got into a bit of a mess around the middle part of the book. The story does get back on track and trots along at a decent pace to the end. The end however ends a bit suddenly, yes the crime is solved but the wrap up is just a bit too quick for my liking, and I'd have preferred a longer post-tale tale about what happens to Jack and Elaine.

All in all 7/10.

I had a mates PC over for a visit the other night (and him too with a very nice home made thai beef curry and sticky rice - yum). He reported that the PC was taking ages to get to the login screen and when he booted in safe mode it got stuck for ages loading c:\windows\system32\crcdisk.sys.

Initially I was a tad concerned because any driver not starting properly, or taking ages to load, and with the words 'crc' and 'disk' in the name sounds like a world of pain is about to unfold. Googling around showed loads of folk with the same problem but no real definitive answers/solutions. There was a rumour/theory that some nvidia nforce chipset driver update was the cause and that reverting to a previous system checkpoint would get things going again. Being that the box was a Dell XPS with said chipset I gave this a go and knocked the machine back to a restore point earlier in the week when the PC did actually work... but no joy.

After a few hours of head scratching and mucking about with Vista's recovery mode I was about to give up and suggest to pal in question that he take the box to PC World or somewhere to get it checked over. It's been years since I did PC fault diags, I'm a dev now and the hardware world has moved on quite a bit since I fiddled about with interrupt jumpers and olde worlde stuff like that.

Anyway, just as I was about to pack it in, I noticed that the second DVD drive in the PC was flashing its wee light at me which I failed to notice earlier (mainly because this behemoth of a box has doors and flaps and all kinds of flare, it being a gamer box and all that, so I never caught the flickering first time around). So I opened the drive tray and there was a recordable DVD sitting there looking at me. I removed said item, rebooted the box and hey presto normal behaviour resumed. Turns out that pal's lovely wife and her mate were trying to burn tunes (onto DVD :-| ) and having problems with the media. Looks like Vista was booting, having a sniff at the DVD drives and was waiting for the offending drive to come ready before moving along, obviously this troublesome frisby was being a bit of bugger for the drive to read. What's most annoying about this is that the Vista boot-from-dvd-recovery mode does the same trick, so you sit there thinking something *must* be really shafted about the machine

So, word to the wise, before starting down the hairy arse road of pulling your PC apart to resolve boot failures/loitering-around-on-crcdisk.sys issues, check there's no dodgy media in your DVD/CD drives first.

[Updated: Fixed some shocking spelling and truly awful grammar, never drink a bottle of wine and blog]

Three months ago I cancelled my Sky sub and reduced it to their so called 'Freesat' package. This was because I wasn't watching anything other than BBC News 24, and also because most of the channels I was paying for were pretty awful, even BBC 4 seems to be reduced to endless recycling of the same programming. Subsequently I've found myself involved in other more interesting activities where even the need to switch on the set top box has become even less of a must.

BBC News 24 was my last 'need to see' channel on 'broadcast TV', but sadly its cable and 'red top' condescending style of presentation finally turned me off. So...now that I've finally weaned myself off of broadcast telly I decided to bin my sat receiver. The house has no arial and I've unbolted the Sky dish from the wall. I also made a point of cutting up my Sky card just to be sure temptation didn't get the better of me.

I also took the righteous step of cancelling my TV license, something I've longed to do for years. This should be an interesting step because whilst I still have my 40" LCD for playback of HD and DVD content, I've no doubt that the TV licensing authorities will swing by the house with their rubber gloves and give me a vigorous probing.

Stopping watching broadcast telly this last month or so has allowed me to plough through four books (this month alone) and return to scoping out new music (my true love), whereas otherwise I'd be glued to the box decaying my brain and doing little else in the evenings.

I really look forward to the day when the telly licensing racketeers come round the house to do their 'statutory' checkup now that they don't get their telly tax. I'll report back on how that goes.

One thing I'll say though, it's hard to give up telly, but it's well worth it. You get way more things done in an evening...like Eve. :)

For a while I've had Stross in my sights to add to the reading pile, and grabbed copies of The Atrocity Archives, The Jennifer Morgue and Halting State (Martin gave Halting State a favourable review). The Atrocity Archive is actually one of Stross's early/first works but it wasn't published until 2006. It's in the form of a novel with a novella tacked on the end, though this doesn't spoil the enjoyment. The book is a pretty unusual combination of spy novel, scifi and occult. I'm not a big fan of horror/occult but this book rocks and I read it cover to cover over a couple of evenings. It has all the best elements of a modern hip spy novel with a healthy dose of science fiction/fact and the occult aspects of the writing is fortunately more Lovecraft than Denis Wheatly.

7/10 - A bloody good romp.

In Search of Stupidity: Over Twenty Years of High Tech Marketing Disasters, Second Edition: Over Twenty Years of High Tech Marketing Disasters is a revised and updated edition of the the original In Search of Stupidity. I read the first edition a couple of years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. The Second Edition is well worth picking up because there's loads of new material added from recent computing times. A hand book on how not to run an IT business. 8/10.

We all take our fresh drinking water supplies as a given every time we fill our kettles. The Blue Death traces the history of the goal of clean drinking water from the days when cholera was rife in the UK to present day water borne disease outbreaks and the dangers still inherent in our present supply systems. Fascinating stuff. 8/10

Just grabbed the new NIN Ghosts album. I got the $5 download of all 36 tracks in FLAC and it's pretty good value and the album is excellent. Reznor's sound has come a long way from the gloom and doom inspired nail-your-balls-to-a-plank-of-wood grittyness of the 90's. I liked the sound so much I was going to blow the $300 asking price for the super deluxe box set, but thankfully my bank account was spared the clean out because it was gone by the time I'd made my mind up. I settled for the $75 edition instead.

This is another ground breaking example from another artist willing to take a chance and release his material in a DRM free format in return for sales, i.e. if people think the material is any good then they'll part with the money. Made me spend the extra dosh and I haven't listened to NIN for years. Good show Trent!.

I tend to leave my machines on for days or weeks on end. I've recently switched to Vista full time and that switch started with a new PC I bought for the lounge. I noticed that after being left on for around 24-36 hours the task bar would go all transparent or white and the task bar buttons would cram into the left hand side. There was other oddness going on such as the start menu getting corrupted. At first I thought it was a fault with the graphics card (sinking feeling) or possibly the driver but a reboot would make the problem go away for another 24-36 hours and then it would come back. This smelled of a resource leak somewhere because there was a reasonably identifiable trend in time and the fault manifesting itself.

I googled around for a bit and discovered that there's a known problem with a GDI object leak in ComCtl32.dll. More about it here and how to fix -

The Windows desktop may stop updating correctly after a Windows Vista-based computer has been running for an extended period of time (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/932406/en-us)

For a long time I've experienced some odd behaviour where IE 7 refuses to open any more tabs even though there's only a couple open, or, sometimes a tab will open but just say 'Connecting...' and no content is rendered. At first I thought it was an IE 7 bug but then I noticed Firefox do the same thing. At other times drop down menus and context menus would render with only half to a quarter of the menu items that should be present. Then things would get really weird and Windows would refuse to open application windows (there exe would launch but no UI) or even task manager. I had a hunch it was some kind of resource leak or I'd reached some upper limit of some heap memory somewhere (e.g. not enough contiguous memory due to fragmentation) because closing some apps or windows would make the problem go away for a short while.

I googled around for a bit to see if this was a known issue but came up with nada. I guess because my computers are never rebooted for days or weeks at a time then this 'leak' was a slow burner that most folks wouldn't notice if they shut their PC's down immediately after use.

Then I came across this article in Jeff Atwood's Coding Horror site -

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000966.html

And this gem of a link http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=269 in the comments. The article describes how to increase the desktop heap size to a value that makes the weirdness go away. Just in case the article goes offline for whatever reason, here's the registry key and value to play with -

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\SubSystems

Edit the string value 'Windows' which contains -

%SystemRoot%\system32\csrss.exe ObjectDirectory=\Windows SharedSection=1024,8192,512 Windows=On SubSystemType=Windows ServerDll=basesrv,1 ServerDll=winsrv:UserServerDllInitialization,3 ServerDll=winsrv:ConServerDllInitialization,2 ProfileControl=Off MaxRequestThreads=16

The number in red is the value to tinker with.

This works with both Vista and Windows 2003 Server. I haven't tried XP but should probably work there as well.

We rolled out .NET Framework 3.0 SP1 via our update server this week. Then the support ticket queue started to fill up with complaints that ASP.NET 2.0 apps were being denied write access to their site private data folders and public facing web folders.

Coincidentally, this service pack also installs .NET Framework 2.0 SP1 as well if it's not already installed, which it wasn't on our servers.

Turns out that if .NET 2.0 SP1 isn't already previously installed then for some odd reason the machine.config and web.config files are 'tampered' with by the .NET 3.0 SP1 installer. These alterations cause the <identity impersonate="true|false" /> in machine.config to be removed and for the trust level in web.config to be reset to Full.

Just so you know.