A Mile Wide And An Inch Deep

Debugging into System.Windows.Forms

2005-09-07T20:16:00.000+01:00

Here.

Performance

2005-08-18T14:28:00.000+01:00

Good article about performance of asmx, enterprise svcs, remoting, etc.

Best. App. Ever.

2005-07-19T12:03:00.000+01:00

Google Earth has been around for a few weeks now, and is still utterly absorbing. (Windows-only, though.)

TiddlyWiki

2005-07-19T09:45:00.000+01:00

TiddlyWiki is a Wiki with a difference. It's one page of HTML, CSS and JavaScript, requires no server-side code at all, and seems generally lovely. Now all I need is a use for it.

Best headline yet

2005-07-17T22:42:00.000+01:00

This one is even stranger than the previously-mentioned gnomes.

I'm Joshua Abraham Norton...

2005-07-05T12:14:00.000+01:00

...first and only Emperor of the United States of America!Which Historical Lunatic Are You?

A Zillion Downloads...

2005-06-20T13:21:00.000+01:00

...and every one of them is geeky. Invaluable.

Mysteries of Google Search

2005-06-06T17:14:00.000+01:00

Pass the hát.

La Disparition, and on, and on

2005-05-10T15:00:00.000+01:00

There is at least one novel without the letter 'e'. Now there's a novel without verbs. And over on LanguageLog, people are producing other oddities (nounless, adjectiveless, and so on).And if that's not to your taste, LanguageLog also features Geoff Pullum giving Dan Brown a good kicking, and then doing it again and again and again.(Edit, 19/7/2005: and again! The man's obsessed; I haven't had

VPC tips

2005-04-26T09:29:00.000+01:00

Here.

International Regexps

2005-04-25T12:05:00.000+01:00

http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2005/04/23/411106.aspx

Google Maps comes to the UK

2005-04-20T23:49:00.000+01:00

http://maps.google.co.uk/. Yay!

Firefox Preferences

2005-04-06T11:09:00.000+01:00

Baffled by about:config? Preferential will integrate documentation into the configuration settings, so you can tell what you're tweaking.

Virtual Server in PowerPoint

2005-03-09T13:15:00.000Z

Embed Virtual Server into your PowerPoint slides. Now, when the demo goes down, it can take the slides with it. Fabulous.

AntiSpyware vs. Windows Scripting

2005-03-07T14:22:00.000Z

or: but what if I want to run scripts and also run antispyware?

Point-and-Click Elevation of Privilege

2005-03-03T10:55:00.000Z

Let's see if I have this right.[Update: No, I don't. See edit below.]Power Users can start the scheduler.The scheduler can start the Task Manager: at 10:30 /interactive taskmgr.exeThe Task Manager runs as System.The Task Manager can start anything (File>New Task (Run...))So: log on as Power User, schedule Task Manager for 1 minute's time, when it appears kill explorer and run a new explorer from

DNS Tools

2005-03-03T10:47:00.000Z

DNS lookup, tracert, ping, whois, covert decimal IPs, work out subnet masks, etc. Many, many such textboxes await you here, and a full report can be got with a single click here.

Port Requirements

2005-03-02T22:30:00.000Z

Windows Server services and ports.

AppLocale

2005-03-02T10:16:00.000Z

In Windows, non-Unicode programs often expect you to change the system locale before they'll work properly; there's no way to say "this program, and only this program, wants to be in Chinese", unless the program in question knows about Unicode.At least, I thought there wasn't, but I was wrong: meet AppLocale.

Bending Google to your will

2005-02-26T13:34:00.000Z

A new variation on the famous "French Military Victories": look who's top of the list for "fuckwit"...

Tips for Distributed Applications

2005-02-24T10:24:00.000Z

Ingo Rammer gave an excellent presentation on Optimising Distributed Applications at DNUG yesterday. I'm going to apply all my limited skills at précis to summarise it here, so that it won't matter when I lose the scrappy bit of paper that I took notes on. The following may be incomprehensible if you weren't at the talk.Preliminaries: Don't write distributed apps unless you have to! Seriously,

What .NET Developers Should Know

2005-02-24T10:19:00.000Z

Interesting article full of interview questions.

Uh-oh

2005-02-21T11:42:00.000Z

This is what I get for reading other people's blogs:

Caution! Stressed Penguins!

2005-02-21T11:10:00.000Z

Do not harass the penguins.

More Firefox tips

2005-02-21T10:40:00.000Z

Scot's newsletter.

Oddest headline of the year so far...

2005-02-18T18:28:00.000Z

"Underwater Gnome Threat Returns" (what would we do without the b3ta.com newsletter?)

Devious boxing example

2005-02-18T11:04:00.000Z

How not to use boxing in .net...

VS Powertoys

2005-02-18T10:58:00.000Z

Editor Zoom.Core Powertoys.Powertoys Weblog.

Running Civ on VPC

2005-02-17T12:44:00.000Z

Tips available here.

Evaluating expressions at the command prompt

2005-02-16T11:01:00.000Z

CMD.EXE can do more than you think.

Geek Love

2005-02-12T01:15:00.000Z

A little early for Valentine's Day, but this touched my heart...

Disk Compaction in VPC

2005-02-11T09:14:00.000Z

Script available here.

Test Your VBScript Intuition

2005-02-11T09:13:00.000Z

Will you answer all the questions correctly? Would you want to?

Gay Penguin Update

2005-02-10T14:25:00.000Z

Here.

Indigo

2005-02-10T10:36:00.000Z

An introduction to Indigo, from the Longhorn Developer Centre.

Debugging the debugger

2005-02-10T10:09:00.000Z

The most complete collection of fixes for debugger problems in VS7 that I've ever seen...

Unicode Frenzy!

2005-02-09T16:34:00.000Z

Two Very Large Fonts: Code2000 and Code2001.Enable support for surrogates in 2000/XP as follows: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\LanguagePack] SURROGATE=(REG_DWORD)0x00000002 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\International\Scripts\42] IEFixedFontName=Code2001 IEPropFontName=Code2001(optionally)[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\

We Are Zogg

2005-02-09T14:13:00.000Z

A Child's Primer.

Prettifying SPS/WSS

2005-02-08T14:12:00.000Z

A guide to the startlingly bletcherous process of customising sharepoint.

Speeding up Firefox the right way

2005-02-07T15:49:00.000Z

Tips here.

SharePoint Stuff

2005-02-04T13:09:00.000Z

SmartPart allows ascx user controls to become web parts with minimal fuss. Web Part Toolkit has a bunch of useful admin tools, including SCA and InstallAssemblies. SharePoint Explorer and SharePoint User Manager.

Biztalk Power Toys

2005-02-03T13:07:00.000Z

Useful BizTalk gizmos.

MS Enterprise Library

2005-02-01T09:33:00.000Z

This looks like a useful collection of application blocks. Can't quite tell at the minute, since you have to register and the server seems to be down. More info in this blog.

Speed up VPC Disk I/O

2005-02-01T09:19:00.000Z

(if you're lucky) http://blogs.msdn.com/Virtual_PC_Guy/archive/2005/02/01/364383.aspx

Font bonanza

2005-01-31T15:32:00.000Z

Download and view Unicode fonts here. Cantonese for the bewildered here.

More FireFox Extensions

2004-11-17T14:01:00.000Z

I'm still trying to install enough junk to make FireFox as big as IE... FoxyTunes ChromEdit Tweak Network Settings

XP Tips

2004-11-17T13:50:00.000Z

Windows XP tips: here and here. Particularly this one, on removing the "web service for file extensions" nonsense.

Software Watch

2004-11-10T15:54:00.000Z

The Daily Grind seems to spot most things pretty quickly.

TurboRisk

2004-11-10T15:52:00.000Z

Classic game, requires no installation, available here. Makes a change from FreeCell.

Signs of the Imminent Capitalist Apocalypse, #45,637

2004-11-10T15:16:00.000Z

USB Sushi

The Simple Joys Of Repetition, Examples 1 To 3

2004-10-17T23:34:00.000+01:00

Yatta Yatta.Badger Badger.Llama Llama.

Reinventing the Recipe

2004-10-16T12:05:00.000+01:00

Cooking For Engineers has two-dimensional recipes. Clever idea...

Techno-trousers, of a sort

2004-10-15T13:06:00.000+01:00

When I see you, my heart beats faster. And so my underwear phones for an ambulance.

Argh! My Eyes!

2004-10-04T23:54:00.000+01:00

Akiyoshi's illusion pages

MSMQ and MSMQT

2004-09-27T19:57:00.000+01:00

Darren Jefford explains what MSMQT is, and why it's not happy to coexist with MSMQ.

MOBA

2004-09-27T10:00:00.000+01:00

The Museum Of Bad Art (MOBA).

Map of Springfield

2004-09-15T10:14:00.000+01:00

...in ludicrous detail. May be Slashdotted by now, so wait a while.

Make Acrobat Reader start up faster

2004-09-08T19:10:00.000+01:00

Get Acrobat Reader to open up faster – Go to your Acrobat\Reader folder and take everything from the "plug_ins" folder and move it into "Optional" except the following: Search.api, Search5.api, IA32.api, EWH32.api, EScript.api. Printing and search will still work, and it will load 75% faster. Cut and pasted from here, which has oodles of handy tips like that.

A Thousand Things You Can't Say in China

2004-09-02T08:24:00.000+01:00

The words you never see in Chinese cyberspace, courtesy of Slashdot.

Uninstall non-present devices

2004-09-01T20:26:00.000+01:00

Cool trick for cleaning up your installed devices.

Bye-Bye Bandwidth

2004-09-01T08:28:00.000+01:00

Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 Refresh with Visual Studio 2005 Team System was just released to MSDN. It runs to 3GB, so I still have 12 hours of downloading to go - it's almost like being back on a dial-up line.

What's a MSPX?

2004-08-31T14:38:00.000+01:00

A FAQ from my ASP.NET classes: what is a .mspx file? The answer is here.

FireFox Extensions

2004-08-27T14:04:00.000+01:00

I switched to FireFox a couple of months ago, but never looked too closely at extensions until now. After trawling through them this week, I say hooray for: Sage, an RSS/Atom aggregator. GoogleBar, of course. Web Developer Toolbar. Image Zoom. AdBlock (get your filters here, and the web will seem a whole lot less shouty). FlashBlock, which replaces all Flash with a "play" button, and instantly

The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint

2004-08-25T20:43:00.000+01:00

Edward Tufte's essay about the ineffectiveness of Powerpoint, delivered as a Powerpoint presentation. An effective PowerPoint presentation. It even manages a pointer to the Gettysburg PowerPoint, but not to the much funnier PowerPoint Anthology of Literature.

We all scream for...

2004-08-25T19:01:00.000+01:00

Yuck. I'm still not sure if this is genuine or not, but it makes this look delicious.

Things I Didn't Know I Didn't Know

2004-08-25T18:17:00.000+01:00

How to Fold a Shirt.

Slap a penguin for fun and profit

2004-08-21T01:00:00.000+01:00

Yeti Pentathlon

The Ancient Mysteries of Zone 4

2004-08-20T09:06:00.000+01:00

ThisisLondon: "A quarter of people thought Richmond-on-Thames was part of the Amazon..."(edit: original has expired, a copy is here)

Reading Zen in the Rocks

2004-08-19T12:28:00.000+01:00

Today's Guardian pointed out this page about Japanese gardens. Oh well, there goes most of this afternoon...

How to Write Unmaintainable Code

2004-08-19T10:46:00.000+01:00

Great article that did the rounds a few years ago. I'm just happy because I can still read the code in these snippets, so I can't have been completely Microsoft-ised just yet: "LISP is a dream language for the writer of unmaintainable code. Consider these baffling fragments: (lambda (*<8-]= *<8-[= ) (or *<8-]= *<8-[= )) (defun :-] (<) (= < 2)) (defun !(!)(if(and(funcall(lambda(!)(if(and '(< 0

Why I love .NET

2004-08-19T10:27:00.000+01:00

Reasons to be cheerful, parts one and two.

Back from the dead

2004-08-19T10:16:00.000+01:00

Why no blogs for the last week? Well, I'm an idiot. I applied Windows XP SP2, and my computer blue-screened constantly on startup. On the blue screen, it said "check your BIOS", and I thought well, why not? So I flashed a new BIOS image and, of course, it all failed horribly and my computer turned into a doorstop. So much for the ASUS "crashproof" BIOS (if this happens, it's supposed to detect

Skyscrapers

2004-08-09T21:44:00.000+01:00

Tall Buildings in Flash, from MOMA.

BizTalk Debugging for Lunatics

2004-08-08T23:27:00.000+01:00

I've just spent entirely too long trawling the web for useful BizTalk 2004 resources - there are loads, most of them linked from Scott Woodgate's blog so I won't repeat them. Well, except maybe for some of the fabulous downloads he's linked to. Mostly, I was looking for practical hints, particularly for debugging. Debugging in BTS is a particular nuisance because of the effort of stopping

Sales Technique

2004-08-04T10:33:00.000+01:00

My Volvo 340 is 15 years old and fit only for scrap, so it's off to a car showroom in Streatham, where we've booked a test drive in a brand sparkly new Mazda. When we get there, it turns out that the car is being customized for another buyer. The air conditioning doesn't work, because the electrical system is being changed around, so we have the window open. The seat controls haven't been

Why Eccentra?

2004-07-30T15:00:00.000+01:00

Way back in the mid-1990s, it was an overheard mispronunciation of Encarta, and I just liked the idea. I wouldn't pay for Encarta; in fact, if you gave me a copy I'm not sure I'd even install it. What I really wanted was Eccentra: an encyclopaedia that would go off on interesting tangents. Type in "Henry VIII" and, instead of getting a tedious list of dates, wives, and so on, you'd be presented

Mind the Gap

2004-07-30T13:57:00.000+01:00

Hours of fun.

Command Completion

2004-07-30T13:08:00.000+01:00

It irks me that the Windows command prompt doesn't do command completion with TAB (like, say, bash). I usually fix it with TweakUI, but why use a GUI when you can hack the registry directly? Like this: 310530 - How To Use Automatic Completion with a Command Prompt in Windows XP

The Weetabixes of Gdansk

2004-07-30T11:35:00.000+01:00

Is it just me, or do other people enjoy the bizarre names generated by spam mailers? Just this morning, my webmail account has had messages from "Addicted Q. Redrafting" and "Gigged M. Aqueducts". I like my daily peek into the alternative worlds of, in this case, A.Q.Redrafting and Partners, the world's least productive architects. I'm not keen enough that I actually open the emails, of course.

Using Virtual PC Without Going Mad

2004-07-30T10:06:00.000+01:00

So let's have something geeky but useful in this blog: how to fix the "stuck-control-key" problem in Microsoft Virtual PC 2004. This bug drives me nuts, and even at TechEd the lab assistants seemed to have no idea how to fix it. So here's the answer. (I didn't find this out myself, but I must have passed it on to about two dozen people so far, so it can't be widely known...) Problem: With a

As I Was Saying on LiveJournal...

2004-07-30T09:39:00.000+01:00

It's traditional to explain why you've bothered to start a blog. Or, in this case, why I'm starting again, having already got a perfectly good blog at LiveJournal (admittedly, that blog has exactly six entries, all from mid-2002). Well, it's peer pressure. Not having a blog is becoming almost like not having an email address. Plus, I could do with a place to leave notes for myself, since I'm

Woo. Yay.

2004-07-29T21:40:00.000+01:00

And, indeed, hoopla. (This post intentionally left blank.)