Martin Woodward

As a professional programmer, the languages I code in during the day are very much dependant on the particular project I am working on.  Also as a programmer I have a very low threshold for repetitive or complex tasks - basically if I have to do something more than twice then I'll probably write a quick program to do it for me (sometimes taking longer than the repetitive task would have done, but I have a lot more fun along the way :-) ).  These little programs are throwaway pieces of code.  I'll probably never run them more than once - I'll almost certainly never come back to them and I'm certain that no-one else will see them.

I find it interesting what language people choose to write these little disposal programs with - I call it your "Pocket Knife Language".  Currently I would usually use C#, despite that fact that I code all day in Java.  I would normally use C# just because it is that much easier to access the bits of the operating system I normally run on (Windows) - but there are a huge number of libraries and methods in the .NET framework to do the heavy lifting for me.  Jumping between C# and Java is pretty easy for my brain to cope with.

But It's not always been like this for me.  I guess my first pocket knife language was probably Excel and then I quickly moved on to Visual Basic.  I stayed with VB for a while. At the time I was earning a living writing mainframe code - anything that requires you to write a 30 line program (in JCL) to just compile and run your code is not suitable for inclusion in anyone's coding pocket knife :-)  In my professional career I then moved into web development, it was around this time that Java started to appear on the scene and I moved into J2EE work and at some point, I'm not quite sure when, I started using Java as my pocket knife language.  I went through a brief spell when I was doing a lot of front end web development that I dispensed with IDE's and compilers completely and JavaScript and the DOM actually became my pocket knife of first choice.  However I quickly saw the light.  Once I started working on .NET projects professionally it didn't take me long to move to C# as my pocket knife language and it has stuck there for a few years now despite moving back to Java on the professional front.

I was having a chat at the weekend with a friend of mine who is currently doing some very clever and complex work down at a pretty low level which requires him to be coding in C++ all day long - however I found it interesting that he was using Java as his pocket knife language.  Other people I work with would use Perl or Python as theirs.

So, dear reader, what is your pocket knife language and why?

<rant>Sigh.  Apple are really starting to get on my nerves.  Not only is iTunes on Windows consistently very buggy, slow and foreign looking in the Windows OS - they are now trying to trick Windows users into installing Safari.  On this particular machine I have never installed Safari, and I never want to.  At first I thought the offering of Safari via Apple Update (as a default option) was just a mistake, I figured out how to tell the installer to ignore the update and moved on.  The second time I gave them the benefit of the doubt - but here they are again.  Today I got the following fantastic message from Apple Update.  "WhichDescription()" indeed.  Gives you a wonderful feeling that they've spent a lot of time on this one.  So from today - Apple update is now disabled on my machine and will stay that way until Apple trick me into switching it back on again.

This is incredibly bad form and reminds me of all the rubbish that Real software used to get up to when they were still relevant.  The worse thing is that it will condition people to disable updaters when we live in a time that I would prefer people kept their systems up to date and patched.  I know that people will have said this in other places and in better ways - but if Microsoft pulled this sort of trick, just imagine the reaction.  This kind of move feels like one of desperation or arrogance - possibly both.</rant>

Apologies for the rant - normally I keep this sort of thing off my blog but this one really annoyed me.

This morning while I was preparing for a customer demo that I'll be doing over LiveMeeting later today, my DSL connection stopped working.  I have a reasonably complicated home office network arrangement - but it is most often my VPN connection or my unmanaged gigabit switch that are the problem. This morning however, my DSL was down.  Not a surprise to a lot of people, but I am with Nildram and this sort of thing hardly ever happens (BTW - I cannot say enough good things about Nildram as a broadband provider).

Anyway, I was kinda connected (the LCP was allowed to come up - whatever that means, and the ADSL light was green on the router), but I wasn't able to get my IP address or anything.  I have a static IP for my DSL connection so that is a little unusual.  While the demo is over 10 hours away, it still focuses the mind a little - I may have to change my plans for the day and fall back to my "disaster recovery office" (the spare room in my mother-in-law's house) if I'm not going to be able to get connected to the LiveMeeting from my home office.

So I began to try and resolve the situation.  Hmm, I wonder what "LCP was allowed to come up" means? I thought to myself.  I know - I'll check Google.  D'oh.   Hmm - how do I gel hold of Nildram customer services? I know I'll look up the phone number on their website and give them a call.  D'oh.  In the end, I fired up the browser on my mobile phone because my brain just didn't seem to know what to do without an Internet connection to refer to.  I found the number of customer support (which is open 24x7) and started to dial (on my cell phone, after having first picked up my VoIP phone to wonder why there was no dial tone...).  The moment I did that the DSL connection popped back into life (spooky - are they that good?).  Panic over - I guess some maintenance or something was going on somewhere - it was 6.30 am and it only lasted 15 minutes or so - nothing worth worrying about really.

However, It did remind me of the stupid things I do when the electricity goes out - constantly forgetting that with the TV not working I cannot switch on a light and read either.  Do I really take always available internet for granted as much as I take always available electricity for granted now-a-days?  Very strange - I know, I'll blog about that...

I'm joining my good friend Brian Randell to do a session on Team Build 2008 at TechEd Developers in Barcelona on November 8th.  If you are at TechEd then please do come along - it is shaping up to be a fun talk.  If you can't make it to the talk, then I'll be loitering around the Team System Ask The Experts area during other times.  Feel free to drop me a line if you want to meet up.

TLA316 Code It and Ship It with Team Build 2008
Brian Randell , Martin Woodward

This session covers how to define an end-to-end build process using Team System and Team Build 2008. First you'll learn what's new and changed from Team Build 2005. You'll learn how to manage the build, do desktop builds, and how you can setup Team Build to work in a continuous integration environment. You'll then learn how to customize the build process to perform all your build steps including running unit tests, creating custom build actions, generating setup programs and deploying to staging servers. Finally, you'll get a crash course in the new managed API for working with Team Build 2008.

Thu Nov 8 09:00 - 10:15 Room 115

An odd smirk followed by "You come here a lot" is not what you want to hear when at the customs desk waiting to come into the US.  Immediately I expected the worst - an armed SWAT team absailing from the ceiling to lead me off into a quiet room for interrogation while the snapping sounds of latex gloves ricochet out of the distant bowels of the customs hall.

When travelling for work, you get asked some interesting and always flummoxing questions on your way in to a country - one particular favorite appears to be "When did you last come to the United States", the other more boring question is "what is the purpose of your visit to the United States, Business? - what kind of business?".  After 8 hours sat on a plane cursing myself for choosing chicken over beef again - the questions at customs always seem to throw me.  So much so that as I stand in line for hours waiting to have questions fired at me by the seriously grumpy immigration official, I prepare answers to all the questions I have had before so that I don't freeze during my passport stamping/fingerprinting session.

However, this particular incident did not start well.  The person in front of me was obviously not familiar with customs procedures and had even more difficulty than me in coming up with plausible answers to strangely suprising questions.  Then I made matters worse because I waited to be called. Usually not waiting to be called is a shoutable offence. But in this particular case, unbeknown to me, I was expected to go forwards without being called.  In the end I got shouted at for my hesitation - not a good start.

Then came the swipe of the passport and some tapping at the computer followed by an evil smirk and the words "you come here a lot."  I was expecting a question - this was clearly a statement of fact.  The lack of a question mark left me in a spin - should I respond to a statement?  What was that visible (if fleeting) display of emotion all about? - I'd never seen such a brazen display of humanity at the customs booth before.  This was clearly an un-usual encounter and it clearly wasn't going to end well.

The official simply said "I did you the last 3 times".  He didn't bother asking any questions - he just stamped my passport, performed the fingerprinting/photo taking dance without another word (though when I knew to swap fingers and then look at the camera at the correct time it raised another smile).  He then sent me on my way.  As I look at my passport now I can see that of the 12 US entrance stamps in my couple-year-old passport, his writing is on 7 of them. 

However, the encounter left me stunned - this was almost a conversation (albeit a little one-sided).  As I left the customs hall I nearly thought of a clever response but by then the opportunity had been lost.

At least I have a new scenario to mull over for the next time I find myself waiting hours to get through customs.

At 4pm the floor of TechEd 2007 closed and I headed straight off to Cocoa Beach to find a spot to watch the Shuttle launch.  It was great driving along the roads, past all the people parked up on the side of the road. Obviously the traffic was pretty bad, but better than I expected.  We arrived just after 7pm and found a perfect spot on the beach in fantastic weather.  The sight and sounds of the actual launch were incredible, especially the belly rumbling thunder of the sonic boom and the cheers of joy from all the people massed onto the beach.  The most unexpected thing was the cloud left by the launch trail - a truly beautiful sight.  Photo's of the launch are up on Flikr and video available on YouTube.

Last night I had the privilege of being invited to a party hosted by the good folks running the Visual Studio Industry Partner program that Teamprise is a member of.  The venue was the perfect place to host a party for nerds - they hired out the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Center.  I have wanted to visit the space center since I was a child so this was a great moment for me. They even allowed us in to the IMAX theater to watch the Space Station movie in 3D, and all the soda and popcorn was also included - fantastic.  As well as looking at rockets, there is a nice little museum attached to the conference center.  Thanks to everyone at VSIP for organizing the event - especially Laura and Joe. I've posted a set of the photos if you are interested.

It's been a busy day today getting setup.  Started over at the Teamprise Booth getting the stand backdrop and the various machines set up (without any exploding this time which is a bonus).  Then headed back to the hotel for 5 minutes to drop off my TechEd bag with all the associated swag.  If you are interested, the bag is better quality than last years, but the pen is not as good - a compromise that works for me.  After dropping off the swag, I headed back into the conference center to attend the staff orientation, get the VSTS TLC machine set up with Orcas Beta 1 of Team Foundation Server finishing up at about 6pm - enough time to get changed for the TechEd Edition of Party with Palermo.

I enjoyed myself immensely - possibly a little too much judging by how I am feeling now.  The Team System folks all ended up in a big group catching up on the gossip - and they are always a bad influence on me ;-)

Tomorrow (well today now I guess) is the big keynote and then I'll be hanging around the Teamprise booth during the exhibition hours.  Drop by if you are around.

I don't travel as much as I used to, but there are some things about a hotel that caters to business travelers that they should get right.  Forget about your fancy shmancy decor and strange taps that take you 5 minutes to figure out how to turn on, I'm talking basics here.  Here is my list of things that a hotel should get right:-

1. Internet access that does not suck, and is free.  You'd think that paying $12.95 per day would give you a decent internet connection wouldn't you - well apparently not.
2. An iron and ironing board in your room.  If I've traveled halfway across the world, then the odds are that my shirts are going to need a little bit of a press in the morning.  I do not want to have to call down to housekeeping for an iron and ironing board to take 30 minutes to arrive when I am already late.  I have a funny anecdote about ironing shirts in hotels that I'll share with you sometime - feel free to ask me about it if you see me.
3. A good shower.  One that you has a gradual range of settings from hot to cold, trickle all the way up to water cannon.  Pressure and temperature controls should not be binary in operation.
4. An alarm clock. When I wake up in the middle of the night with jetlag, it would be great to be able to look up at a clock to tell the time without switching a light on.
5. Air conditioning.  Any air conditioning system that is used should not sound like a 777 taking off.
6. A light switch by the door.  This seems to be something that American hotels have trouble with in particular.  I'd light to flick a switch by the door that switches a majority of the lights on.  I don't want to go fumbling around in the dark to figure out how to switch on all the lamps individually - what is it with that twisty thing on American light fittings?
7. Plenty of spare plug sockets.  I want to be able to plug in my laptop and possibly charge my cell phone at the same time without having to move furniture.
8. Hangers in a wardrobe.  More than 2 hangers please.  Real hangers are the best, but if you have to use those weird anti-theft ones then fine - but I might steal those just to make a point.
9. Curtains that shut in the middle.  In the precious few hours I get in my room I would love a bit of sleep - blocking the light out would help me a lot.
10. Noise insulation.  If the couple in the room next door is having a noisy argument (or worse, the couple next door are having a noisy something else) then I really don't want to hear it - especially when I've met the elderly and somewhat large couple occupying the room and so am unable to block the disturbing mental images from my mind.

Note that there is nothing fancy here.  Yet you frequently find hotels that consider themselves a bit more upmarket often get the basics totally wrong.  I've tried to be restrained with the nice things that actually make me smile.  Things like big fluffy towels, proper duvets, nice decor, alarm clocks than include an iPod dock, and friendly and helpful staff - those would all be a bonus.

Sorry for the rant - I love the work I do and I am very privileged to get to travel around talking to people about interesting stuff, I'm just tired and grumpy (possibly because my current hotel scores 2.5/10 in this list ;-)

I am currently sat in sunny Newark having sped through immigration in record time (there wasn't a single person in front of me in the queue - the first time that has ever happened. For anyone that it interested, I've fallen back into my Chicken rut. 

Anyway, I'm on my way to TechEd in Orlando.  This year I'll be working at the Team System TLC (Technical Learning Center) as well as hanging around the Teamprise booth (#1333 near the massage area apparently) - do pop by and say "Hi" if you are around or at any of the various parties etc.

Update: Woot!  I've just had an email telling me that I've been bumped to First for my Newark to Orlando segment.  Sweet.

Good news World's Smallest TFS Proxy fans.  At 11:10 this morning, the friendly man from Dell appeared at my door with a new motherboard flown in from Holland this morning.  With-in twenty minutes he had the motherboards swapped out and we plugged the SX270 in to hear that familiar whirr of the fans as it came back to life.

Now, I know that Dell customer support has been getting a lot of stick lately - but I have to say that I've been left seriously impressed.  Exactly 24-hours after reporting a problem with an old, out of warranty, machine I'd bought from their Dell Outlet store (which sells returned machines at a discount), I had a brand new motherboard and was back up an running.  Can't ask for more than that.

More importantly, the World's Smallest TFS Proxy Server lives again, hopefully to put in a few more years tireless service in my garage.

This morning we had a power cut which killed a particular tricky upgrade mid-way through trashing the machine I was attempting it on.  Luckily the machine in question was a VM Ware image and I had recent taken a backup snap-shot so I only lost a few hours work.

When the power returned I went out to the (now infamous) garage to switch on the machine I have running out there that acts as a VPN Gateway, TFS Proxy (the world's smallest) and Build Mirror which allows my network to seamlessly be part of the main Teamprise network. 

However it would not boot.  Being the technical minded English guy that I am, I unplugged the computer, went back inside and made myself a cup of tea in the hope that it would magically fix itself.

When I returned, I discovered that usually foolproof trick of simply ignoring the problem had let me down and it was going to be much messier than that.  I brought the machine into my office, opened it up and instantly saw the problem - a set of rather sick looking capacitors on my motherboard.

At this point, I figured I was just going to have to get a new machine.  Having recently got a fancy new workstation, I was not looking forward to breaking this news to my boss.  I hopped onto the Internet to see what the cheapest machine I could get was when I discovered that this was a reasonably well known problem with my Dell SX270 motherboard, and better yet Dell was doing an out-of-warranty repair program to fix them.

I gave Dell a call fully expecting to get the brush off, but after about 5 minutes talking to 3 people around the globe, I got through to a chap who has arranged for an engineer to come to the office tomorrow and replace the motherboard - free of charge.

This is a much abused and unloved machine that has been running more-or-less 24 hours a day since I bought it several years ago. Just as it was about to go to the great landfill in the sky, it sounds like it is going to get a new lease of life.  Sounds to good to be true - I'll let you know how the appointment with the Dell Engineer goes tomorrow.

On Saturday night I took a look out my kitchen window and was met with this view of the Moon and Venus.  I took a quick snap-shot with my very basic Casio Exilim 1050, but I'm sure you'll be able to find many more professional photos around the internet by now.

Sigh.  Why do I only experience travel delays when I am coming home and never on the outbound journey?  Last night, my first plane from New York to Belfast suffered a hydraulics failure.  Luckily they had a spare airplane lying around that they then got cleaned up, filled up with gas etc and let us on.  Amazingly after all the messing around in New York I landed only 3 hours late.  Just arrived home to find that my wife has gone out and locked me out the house, so I'm now sat in my garage feeling sorry for myself.

At least I have great WiFi reception out here in the garage - and to think I got mocked for rigging network sockets, UPS and a WAP out here.  Admittedly this wasn't the exact scenario I had in mind at the time I got the networking done, but still.

This is a follow-up to a post I made over a year ago.  I'm popping over to the US for a couple of days this week and I am currently sat in Newark airport with the New York skyline out one window, and Ikea out the other.  Since making that post, I must have been back to the US 7 or 8 times and flown on a few dozen flights with several different carriers.  On the flight over this morning, I finally broke with form and actually went for the beef option.  Crazy times :-)

While failing to get to sleep on the way over, I also listened to the Hitchhikers Guide to the Future series for the first times in a couple of years.  Considering this was broadcast in 2001, it amazing how much of this stuff has appeared as part of the Web 2.0 bubble - and how much of it is still yet to appear.  Anyway, even if you are not a fan of the (much missed) Douglas Adams, I encourage you to take a listen.

Right then, I promise that this is the last post I'll make on such an inane topic.  If I had a cat, I'd include some pictures of it just to get that out of my system.

I'm safely back from a fantastic week at the MVP Summit in Seattle / Redmond.  The week itself was very enjoyable and packed with tons of useful information - thanks to Noah and the VSTS team for being our hosts for the week.  While I knew several of my fellow Team System MVP's from previous brief meetings, I've come away from the week with several new friends.  For some photos of the event see Noah's and Willy blogs.

My journey home was nothing short of epic due to some weather difficulties in the New York area over St Patrick's day weekend.  It was one of those journeys that will go down in the Woodward Chronicles of Nightmare Travel Experiences (that always seem to happen on my way home - never on my way to an event).  Now that I have caught up on my sleep, the journey was actually quite funny and (believe it or not) a little bit life changing.  I've just had a phone call to let me know that my checked baggage is on a Taxi ride to my house at the moment as it took an independent route across the world to the one I chose but amazingly seems to have made it into the same country only a couple of days after I did.

Over the next few months I'm going to be doing a bit of traveling to the US again, and this offer could not have come at a better time - free TMobile access from my Windows Vista Laptop - sweet!  I'll post back when I have been through the sign-up process to see what validation it does of your Vista running status, I hope for their sakes that it is a little more than a User-Agent check...

Update: Sadly for them, they are simply doing a user-agent check. This offer may run out pretty quickly so sign up now if you can...

I'd been seeing this for a while now, the game of Blogtag has been running riot over the internet.  Blog memes are kinda like the blog equivalent of a chain letter or a pyramid marketing scheme but very slightly less dumb and hopefully have more positive consequences.  Goodness know what it does to the Google pagerank algorithm.  Anyway, last night I was tagged by Eric so here goes mine...

1. I used to compete in county cross-country championships for my school
2. I once spent a summer working as "Temporary Brand Marketing Secretary" for Reebok UK, dealing with everything from letters from school kids wanting free posters to sponsored athletes wanting free shoes to directors of football clubs (wanting significantly more) through to making cups of tea and coffee and doing the typing of 5 demanding marketing managers
3. I am a qualified fork lift truck driver
4. I have a bachelors degree in Physics from the world renowned Physics Department of the University of Durham.  My final year research projects included measuring the proper motion of nearby stars using data from my own observations and data from the Hubble Space Telescope.  My final year was also spent designing and building a magnetic field imaging device - after building the hardware and controlling electronics, I wrote the controlling and imaging software in QuickBASIC because Windows 3.1 based development environments (such as Visual Basic) didn't have any good way of directly driving the parallel and serial interfaces of the computer at the time without delving into the device driver level which was (and still is) well beyond my programming skills.  In my spare time, I was the manager of the St Chad's College JCR Bar and also set up the initial versions of the college and JCR web sites that are still used to this day (but have been totally re-written thank goodness).
5. Despite appearances, I do not like pies.

On to the fun part - picking 5 more people to tag.  I choose Rob Caron, Lorenzo Barbieri, Rob Burke, Buck Hodges and James Manning.  Let's see how many of them actually read my blog.

Update:  I was later tagged by Jay Flowers, so I'll allow this post to act as a bridge between two branches of the same meme.  At some point I might map all the links out into a pretty "5 Things" picture, but if I do you'll know I've far too much time on my hands...

I'm back home from sunny Barcelona, and just wanted to post a quick note to thank all the folks who stopped by.  It was great to meet some old friends again, and also to make some new ones.

The week went very well after such an inauspicious start.  After my power-supply incident, I went out for some lovely tapas and drinks at the MVP dinner, however I must have caught something or eaten a dodgy prawn as I woke in the night and was violently ill.   I stumbled into the conference centre for a full day at the booth on only 2 hours sleep - sorry if you came to speak to me on Tuesday...

After that things went really well.  I noticed a huge difference in Team Foundation Server awareness from previous shows.  Conversations typically used to be like this:-

Person:  Oooh, a that's a nice shiney Mac - what's that doing at a Microsft show?
Me:  Have you heard of Team System?
Person: Eh?

Now it is more along the lines of:-

Person:  Oooh, that's a nice shiney Mac, what's it's Windows Vista Experience Index?
Me:  Have you heard of Team System?
Person: Duh, of course - we've been running TFS for a while now.

Needless to say, there were a lot more people immediately interested in not only our product but also some people who just wanted to see something they had heard about actually working in the flesh.  While the demo on Windows is always pretty interesting, with the resounding sentiment being "it looks just the same".  On the Mac, the same things just look too good to actually be true.  A year on, I still love talking to Team Foundation Server from the Mac, it just shouldn't work as well as it does - kinda feels naughty.  Fellow Team System MVP Lorenzo Barbieri did a great write-up from the conference floor on his impressions of the Mac client.

Anyway, back to work and we are all heads down putting the finishing touches to V2.0.  I'm looking forward to blogging some more about that soon :-)

I've been having one of those days today.  It's setup day at TechEd Developers and I'm down at the Teamprise Booth.  Still not really ready as the pedestal that we've got turned out to be far too big and we're swapping it for a couple of smaller ones.  Hopefully everything will be ok for 10.00 tomorrow when the exhibition floor opens to delegates.

The personal highlight of my day was when I plugged in the brand new demo computer, freshly shipped from the states.  There was a very loud bang with a nice puff of blue smoke coming from the back of the computer - leading me to see the big notice on the back of it saying "Read instructions before connecting to supply".  Turns out that the power supply wasn't auto switching and I should have removed a sticker on the back and switched to 230 VAC.  Dope. 

There then followed an interesting conversation with a guy at the local PC City in my extremely poor Spanish.  Mind you - turning up with a smoking power supply in my hand helped get the message across.

Anyway, power supply works a treat (reminder to self, this one is 230 VAC only so shouldn't be plugged in back in the states without a new power supply being installed)...

This morning I took the sort and pleasurable flight over from Belfast to Barcelona to join the Teamprise / SourceGear advance party ready to set up at the TechEd Developers conference in Barcelona.  As usual, the Teamprise marketing manager has done us proud and we're into a Hotel directly opposite the conference centre.  After the long bus rides of TechEd 2006 in Boston - the trip to work this week is going to be a breeze.  The mini-bar in the hotel is actually complimentary and they restock it if you leave your room - how cool is that ??

I'm pretty excited about this conference.  The traffic by the booth will probably not be as busy - Microsoft seem to be concentrating on Team System for Database Professionals this week so I don't expect we'll be showing up any keynotes this time (when your product has a Microsoft VP on stage demonstrating your product on Ubuntu Linux, it tends to get a few people dropping by :-) ).  However, I'm really looking forward to talking with folks about Teamprise and Team System.  We're based in stand B24 in the Visual Studio Partner zone of the exhibition hall (near the ask the experts section) - so do drop by.  I'll also be giving a demo on the stage in the partner zone at 14.45 on Wednesday, if you happen to be between sessions at the time then please drop by to lend some moral support.

I'm hoping to see some old Team System community faces, as well as putting some faces to some names. Not to mention the parties...

If you are coming along to TechEd Developers in Barcelona then drop by the booth and say "hola".  I'm going to be brave and load up the latest build of V2.0 onto the demo machines so you'll get an exclusive look at the latest and greatest version in what will be it's last public outing before we ship V2.0.

Apologies for being quiet the past couple of weeks.  I've been on vacation with my family and it was great.  This morning has been spent going though the emails I've missed and catching up on what's been happening while I was away (mainly all the TFS SP1 goodies - more on that later as I experiment with it).  Anyway, a piece of very nice news in my inbox is that I am now a Team System MVP. 

I have to say that I'm incredibly flattered.  Whenever anyone has asked me about it in the past, I've always given the same sort of answers as when you ask a politician if they want to lead the country - something I've secretly wanted but never really thought that I'd contributed enough to the community to receive.  However, to be recognized in this way is very nice - especially when you consider that my "day job" has me coding in Java....  One of the perks of the MVP award is a Team Suite MVP subscription, which means I'll be able to upgrade to the full Team Suite edition rather than the Developer Edition that comes with my work MSDN Subscription.

Anyway, just wanted to let you all know.  It is certainly a great encouragement to keep up the blog posts and to carry on posting at the MSDN forums.  As far as I am aware, I'm only the second MVP who lives in Northern Ireland and the first Team System MVP based in the UK or Ireland - which is nice.  Thanks to the folks who nominated me!

We have some friends staying with us from out of town at the moment.  They are actually friends of my parents - the type of people that were always around when I was growing up and I called my Aunt and Uncle even though they are not blood-relatives.  Anyway, they have recently retired and have decided to buy a computer and get on the Internet.

Considering they have never really used a computer in their lives, it is really interesting to see how well they have got on.  Impressively, they have managed to download pictures from their digital camera onto their hard-drive and print them out.  Also, they have recently managed to transfer some songs from CD's onto an MP3 player which they brought with them on Holiday.

The discussion I found particularly interesting was a discussion they had between themselves about the annoying pop-up dialogs that come up every now and then.  Having heard many scare stories about viruses etc - they are concerned about *any* dialog box that pops up when they are working as they are scared that it is some nasty script kiddie trying to trick them into stealing their credit card numbers.  Most modal dialog boxes they ignore and try to get rid of as quickly as possible - avoiding the "OK" button unless they really know they want to do it.  Anyway, the conclusion that they had come to between themselves was:-

If it says "Upgrade" then you have to pay.  If it says "Update" then it is usually free and safe to accept.

An interesting (and often correct) assumption I thought.  Anyway, the whole day left me with a realization that I need to be more precise in the language used to convey messages to users - I'm also going to be sure to try to pick words that are easily translatable for folks who happen to be using a system in a language that is not their first.  It's fascinating to see the coping strategies that people adopt when using unfamiliar technology - but also frightening how far we have yet to go to make consumer electronics more friendly to the "normal" people that we would like to buy them.

Soon, we'll be going on holiday for the first time since my son was born.  This means that we had to apply for a passport for my 2 year-old, which was a fun process.  Anyway, the passport arrived this morning and much to my surprise it is a new biometric one, containing a little RFID Chip on the rear of the identification page.  This is the first time that I have seen a new biometric passport.  The notes that come along with it contain the following:-

"The chip stores a copy of your photo and the personal details printed on page 31.  There is no extra personal information in the machine-readable zone or one the chip.  The chip and antenna are sensitive electronic devices.  Please protect your passport and the chip from damage.  They must not be bent, torn or damaged in any way, or exposed to very high or very low temperatures, excess moisture, magnetic fields or microwaves."

I'll have to get one of these new passports soon.  I travel to the US a lot and it will make my life easier as I'll be able to carry on using the Visa Waiver program once they change the regulations concerning entry to the US to mandate use of biometric passports.  One thing is sure - I'll have to look after my new one a lot more, the current one is very bent and battered.

Apparently, if you pop in to your local passport office you can take a look at the data stored on the chip, which I might do when I get my own.  If nobody is making wallets for these new passports, then they should be.  There has to be a market in sturdy tin-foil lined wallets to keep the RFID chip from being broken and to stop the data being read until you want it to be...

Lately a shocking thing has happened.  People have started reading my blog.  While this probably isn’t surprising to you (the reader) it is highly surprising to me (the author).  I started blogging as a way to make it easier for me to find stuff in Google.  When something wasn’t immediately clear using the keywords I had tried I would blog about it making sure I used the appropriate keywords so that I would be able to find it again.  This also helps out other people and even now 70% of my site traffic comes from people using a search engine and landing on some random article.  The ones about generating excel files in C# and what to do if SourceSafe tells you your ss.ini file is not found seems to be consistently popular.  When other people started arriving at my site, I found this highly motivating and posted more.  Occasionally, a work colleague would stumble upon my blog as an answer to a work related question – another unexpected business benefit to blogging.

However, since I have been regularly posting about my experiences with Team Foundation Server, many more people have subscribed to my blog – so I can only assume that they are subscribing for TFS information.  I say this is an assumption because when I do drift off-topic those posts seem to get most response.

Recently, I’ve been feeling hesitant about posting certain things because I know they’ll show up in the RSS aggregators of people subscribed to my blog and I worry that I’ll be giving stuff they are not interested in.  To resolve this, I have created a few more feeds.  They are:-

• Martin Woodward Uncut.  The current RSS feed containing all my posts.  Expect to see the odd random gadget and personal post here (but no pictures of my cat or random confessions of love for my wife / family / cat / sheep that live in the field outside my window).
• Martin Woodward’s Teamprise Feed. Posts about Teamprise.  These also appear in the Teamprise developer blogs feed which I would encourage you to subscribe to if you are interested in our company as the people I work with are probably more interesting than me and definitely cleverer.
• Martin Woodward’s Off Topic Feed. Just the random stuff and non of this work-related rubbish.  Intended for friends who have a healthy dis-regard for my day job.
• Martin Woodward’s Microsoft Feed.  Posts about Visual Studio Team System, Team Foundation Server, .NET programming etc.  Everything Microsoft related.  If you arrived at my blog via the link http://www.woodwardweb.com/Vsts then this may be for you.
• Martin Woodward’s Java Feed. Stuff about work I do in the Java and Eclipse areas (including Teamprise).  I am currently coding in Java during the day so have a few articles here that I have been hesitant to post.  The conflict between these last two feeds is what has motivated me to offer different feeds.

OK.  There you have it.  I hope you stay with the main feed as I hope that stuff I find interesting is interesting to you – however if things are getting a bit annoying but you don’t want to loose out on Teamprise or Team Foundation Server related bits then you can just get the relevant posts.  I should add that I regularly tag posts with more than one category so if an article has both Java and Microsoft interest then it will appear in both feeds at the same time along with the Uncut feed.  You’ll also frequenltly see Teamprise information showing up in the Microsoft feed.  If anyone needs a feed to keep up with all of my feeds then let me know :-)

I recently did an interview for Port 25 (the website for Microsoft’s Open Source Lab).  If you would like to listen to the podcast then it is now available here.

The interview was recorded in a week when NTLM authentication was high on my mind (as you can tell).  However Ed has since done a fantastic job and led the work to implement the full NTLM stack based on details gleaned from the excellent book “Implementing CIFS, by Christopher R. Hertel”.  This book is not the “official” specification, but is very readable and is drawn from the work done by the Samba team.  As discussed in the podcast, one of the interesting things I learnt it that Microsoft’s Open Source Lab’s team have actually contributed some patches into the Samba group – which is a good thing.  Ed’s work has now been released in Version 1.1 of Teamprise – one of those new features that nobody will really notice, it *just works*.

Anyway, feel free to listen to the podcast.  While I have been a keen listener to podcasts since the beginning, this is the first time my voice has appeared in one (and I doubt I will make a habit of it).  However, hopefully you won’t find it as painful to listen to as I did.

I’ve just learnt something today from our resident tech-writer that I feel needs sharing. Apparently it is “old” to put two spaces after a full-stop (or “period” for you American’s out there).  See the following articles for evidence:-

• http://www.webword.com/reports/period.html
• http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/cmosfaq/cmosfaq.OneSpaceorTwo.html

When I learnt to type it was with a typewriter.  I was 5 and I used a lot of Tipex.  As readers of my blog will see – I’m not particularly gifted in the spelling / grammar / correct use of the apostrophe department. I quickly moved into the world of word-processors when we upgraded from the Vic-20 to my Commodore PLUS 4 and I never looked back. I found that if I typed up my homework assignments for school, not only was it quicker than hand-writing them (especially when doing multiple drafts), but I frequently got higher grades because the amazing presentation of those new-fangled dot-matrix printers would impress the teachers.

Today I earn my living by typing (all be it typing out code, with infrequent and badly spelt comments). I type over 8 hours a day, 5 days a week for money – not including all the typing I do for pleasure. From here on in, I’m going to try to stop doing a double space after the full-stop but it will take me some time to reverse over 25–years of conditioning.

The question that is really worrying me is what other typing faux-pas have I been committing for the past 25 years?  Actually, I’m also a little worried that I seem to have an obsession with office equipment.  I used to play with a type-writer as a child and I still enjoy browsing through stationary catalogues.  That’s not normal is it.

I’d planned on giving a blow by blow account of TechEd 2006, but it was so amazingly busy I just never got time.  I sat down at my laptop on Wednesday night and then woke up an hour later at the keyboard – so I figured I needed to sleep.  During the day, the Teamprise booth was unbelievably busy.  To all those folks that dropped by the booth to say “Hi” – thanks very much.  It was so nice to meet everyone and also nice to show off what we have been working so hard on.  I spend most of my time working out of my office in the UK so it was fantastic to be among so many bright people.  

This show, rather than having to educate people about Team Foundation Server most folks coming up to the booth already had a TFS instance up and running and were wanting to extend the usage of it across their enterprise.  I managed to catch a few sessions including an overview of the absolutely fantastic features in the “Data Dude” SKU. 

The best part of the conference was finally meeting face to face with all the people I’ve corresponded with of TFS related issues over the past year and also meeting up with old friends.  I can’t express how invigorating the whole week was and how excited I am about the next year.

Best swag of the week for me was the WinFX team who were giving away little flashlights with the WinFX logo.  The logo is now defunct as it will soon be .NET 3.0 – I guess they were trying to get rid of them so I picked up a couple.

Just noticed that Google Labs has launched Google Trends, a nice tool to graph the differences in search volumes over time.  Good way of making comparisons in to what people are looking for information about.  Anyone around at the start of podcasting will remember that if you searched in Google for the term “podcast”, it would ask “do you mean broadcast?”.  It is interesting to see that the scales are tipping in the other direction.  Is it also nice to see that “good” is always more popular than “evil”.

The weather is fantastic over Teamprise Europe HQ at the moment.  For the first time this year I’m sat wearing a short-sleeved shirt with my window open and I am not in the slightest bit cold.  Apart from the lovely weather outside my window distracting us, we’ve also had a small plane with some strange aerials hanging off it flying at ridiculously low altitudes.  I was wondering if Google Earth was finally going to have some decent overhead images of my area – but the plane was much too low for that.  After a brief search of the internet I tracked down the source of the acrobatics – turns out it is the Tellus project doing a survey of Northern Ireland.  Anyway – nice weather for flying.  Can you tell I’ve got some talks coming up?  Tomorrow I’ll be in Limerick and Gallway on Friday.

I am giving a talk tonight. As usual, I'm busy avoiding preparing for it. It is a rare day now-a-days that I put on a shirt and smart trousers but as I'm meeting folks I've never met before in a city I've never been to, I thought I'd better make an effort.

While polishing my shoes this morning it occurred to me that this was probably one of the few things that I do that my father and grandfather would have done in a similar way. Sure, you can get those cream things that paint your shoes black but you cannot beat a good old fashioned bit of spit, brush and polish to make them look nice.

My job is based over the internet (which was largely developed in my lifetime). The food I eat is very different to what my own parents eat and has far too many herbs and bits of "foreign muck" for my grandparents to have considered eating. Most of the clothes I wear are made out of materials recently invented and non of them are made in the country I live. I just drove over a hundred miles in a morning without thinking about it and I am now writing this blog post over wireless internet access from my laptop in my hotel room (that I booked and found directions to using the internet)

Polishing my shoes makes me smile as it is about the only thing I do that my father and grandfather would recognise about my life and it feels good to be doing something the proper old fashioned way.

Usually, I am very good at the 24 hour clock. It comes from a childhood of setting the VCR because my parents just could never figure it out. However I turned up for my 9.30 flight this evening, only to find I had read my tickets wrong and it was actually 19.30. Luckilly they were fully flexible tickets because I had to book them at the last minute, however it was the final flight of the day and so now I'll not be getting home until Saturday evening - missing the entire St Patrick's Day celebrations on Friday. What an Idiot I am - playing Check-In Chicken used to be one of my favourite games, but missing a flight home is never as much fun as missing the flight out. To improve my mood and help me sleep I've been investigating how to say Cheers in multiple languages. Sláinte!

Sky+ has been the saviour of our television viewing since it arrived shortly after my son did (not a coincidence).  For those non-UK citizens reading this blog Sky+ similar to the Tivo but more locked down as it comes from the main satellite TV company here.  Anyway, it’s great and has totally changed my viewing habits to the point that I very rarely watch live TV anymore – and watch adverts less often.  I keep meaning to upgrade the internal hard-drive but that would mean catching up on the viewing – which is just never going to happen.  I’ll probably just get the HD version a few months after it comes out which has had a hard-drive upgrade to cope with the additional storage capacity HD broadcasts take.

This morning (Valentine’s day) the post man delivered a little red envelope addressed to me looking awfully like a Valentine’s card – my wife admitted that had I not been working from home she would have spent the whole day stewing over it wanting to steam the thing open to see who was sending me love notes (a couple of weeks after I’ve returned from a long business trip).  I definitely would not have returned home to a romantic Valentines evening atmosphere.  Turns out it was an advert from Sky+ to try and “show your love” to your friends by recommending them for Sky+.  Not a bad piece of marketing as I was forced at dagger point to open it.

Anyone who watches the Simpsons or Ghostbusters (555 2368) is aware that numbers beginning with 555 in the states are usually fake. While looking for information about international dialing from the UK, I stumbled upon the official Ofcom list of fake numbers - UK number ranges reserved for drama purposes.

In most areas in the UK, a 496 number is fake - however there is an entirely fictitious area code of 01632 and even reserved number ranges for mobiles, premium rate and even freephone services. Who would have expected them to be so organised!

A quick check over at Wikipedia gives an interesting article on the use of Fictitious phone numbers including gems of information such as both 24 and Scrubs use numbers that go through to production staff. The Scrubs one is (apparently) answered by a voicemail message given by one of the cast in character.

Hmm, maybe I should ask that my extension at work get changed from 42 to 555...

If I were clever like Eric Sink or Bill Caputo, I'd be able to turn that catchy title in to a witty and insightful post about the software industry. But sadly for you, I'm not and (as witnessed in this blog) my writing skills are pretty awful. My headmaster once wrote in a school report "Martin has invented a whole new way of spelling the English language - sadly I don't think it will catch on".

Instead the phrase "Chicken or Beef" means that I am on my latest round of travels. As I write this message I have bagged 3 of the 8 flights I'm scheduled to be taking in the next 12 days, and I will no-doubt hear those familiar words many more times as I tuck into my microwaved airplane delight with the relish of a condemned man. To be fair the first 3 flights were quite un-eventful, I had a three seats all to myself on the way over the pond and got a nice little snooze, only to be woken by some turbulence. Well, it wasn't strictly the turbulence that woke me, but more the screaming of a women in the row next to mine. A little screaming I can handle, but the praying really started to freak me out so I got back to reading a book (which I read in a single day, and it's been a long time since I made time to read trashy fiction book in a day - it felt wonderfully self indulgent). However, judging by my employer’s history with air travel I’ll still have a look of pleasant surprise if my baggage and I end up at the correct destinations in one piece.

On the positive side, I get to spend a week with the smart folks at Teamprise HQ. I am looking forward to spending some time face to face with people I've been telecommuting with for the past few weeks. Also, on Saturday I'll be traveling over to VS Live in San Francisco. If you happen to be around, feel free to pop by the Teamprise stand and take a look at what we've been busy doing for the past few weeks / months. Using Teamprise from Linux or Mac OS X still gives me an excited rush of feeling I'm doing something very naughty that just shouldn't work as well as it does.

Right, I'm off to get some food and then some bad, jet-lag interrupted, sleep. You know, the next time I'm offered, I might go for the beef option. Why not - live life on the edge...

Well, despite the massive load that Google Analytics took, they have done me proud and are now happily tracking the data from 3 of the sites I look after that I'm most interested in. This blog, VSTSPlugins and VSTSEclipse.

First surprise was that my blog actually gets quite a few hits - significantly more than the other two sites. While we are only talking 100's in a day, it is still a lot more than I thought - and that doesn't include those people who read all my content using RSS. I only really write stuff here of interest to myself or when I don't find something in Google and have to work it out. Anyway, it's nice to have you. I might pay more attention to my spelling and grammar now that I know people are reading.

The next surprise was how distributed around the world people where (see a screenshot of the very nice GeoMap overlay feature). Previously I'd assumed that most of the traffic was folks I've worked with before. While I recognised many of the connecting domains, there are a good few I don't which is nice.

Finally, it was good to see a large firefox population for this blog (just over 30% with the rest of the lion's share going to IE). I also have a nice spread of OS's including Windows Vista, Mac, Linux, SunOS and the odd splattering of mobile devices.

Anyway, hopefully Google Analytics will open it's doors again soon for new users so others can benefit from the fantastic data and great UI that it provides. All for free as well - amazing.

Well, I'm back online in the new house - with a lovely new 2Mbps ADSL connection. Upstream is still 256Kbps but that is as good as I can get for now (unless I want to pay for extra lines and start bonding ADSL connections).

Alan Irwin has pointed me towards the Linksys WRT54G router as the firmware has been modified by a number of people including Sveasoft. Looks really interesting - especially as you can boost the WiFi power and also have sshd running on the router!!

This site may dissappear for some spells over the next few days. I'm currently in the process of moving house so it may take a while to get the old server located in my new garage. The good news is that I have some Cat5 cabling in the new house and a fancy 3Com router courtesy of Clark Sell. The bad news is that my broadband is not due to get installed until Friday. The good news about the bad news is that my line is getting upgraded from 512 kps to 2Mpbs! We'll soon see if it works...

Now I'm in the Apple Store in Chicago - sweet!!

Just a quick post from inside the MS Vistor Centre in Redmond. Just seen a Compaq Luggable I still have in my Dad's loft inside a museum exibit - that's bad. Anyway, I'm now heading back to the office, then back to Chicago at the weekend.

I'm about to go traveling, so I'm figuring out how to geocode my blog so that I can use the data to display where I happen to be when I post the blog entry. Mostly for my reference while I figure it out, here are the references I am using:-

• Geotagging Web Pages and RSS Feeds article by Andrew Turner
• WordKit Users Manual
• Multimap
• A2B

Joe has managed to get an article into the August edition Dr Dobbs Journal about our VSTSEclipse project. Good work fella! Now all we need to do is get it written...

Just reading Ben's blog. He has been playing with 2D Fractal Terrains (as you do).

Seeing the landscape Ben generated instantly brought back so many memories. A school friend of mine, called Robert Parsons, used a similar algorithm to generate 2D landscapes that look just like Ben's. Only, he had it running on his PSION Series 3 PDA and then used the backdrops for a wicked game called (I think) Bobman where you had two little men that battled each other firing weapons that had projectile like motion at each other. It was a bit like Worms long before worms was ever invented but much faster action and additive in two player mode against each other. I wasted many hours in the my Sixth Form common room playing the game.

He then went on to do a Mandelbrot generator for the PSION (which I think had a monochrome screen but if you messed with a lot of machine code you could get shades of gray emulated by quickly flashing the black on and off). His crowning achievement was to build a basic 3D engine for the PSION which he developed from reading some computer science books at the local university library that I found absolutely impenetrable. I was hoping he was going to port elite to the PSION but we lost touch and I have never spoken to him again.

I've tried googling and looking up Robert (Bob) Parsons a few times over the years and never tracked him down. He was the first hacker I met that I knew was better than me.

Not that I'm obsessed or anything, but in the latest Google index (Mar 31, 2005 03:19:55 GMT) I am now the Number 1 Martin Woodward on the internet! Now you can go to Google's homepage, type Martin Woodward and press the "I'm feeling lucky" button to go straight to my homepage. All I need is to now actually post something here that is remotely interesting rather than just going on about my pagerank all the time...

Update: I now appear to hold the number 1 and 2 slots. Sweet. I guess the indexes will take a day or two to settle down from this last indexing.

I just used some spare PayPal money to get myself a 3 month subscription to the SkypeIn Beta. Had trouble finding a free number in the area code of my choice (was going to go for a US number in Silicon Valley, but ended up going for a Chicago one because there were plenty left)

Anyway, feel free to spam my new SkypeIn voicemail box by calling (+1) 312-239-0607. You never know, I may be online at the time and surprise you by answering the call.

While I was looking, I found this blog post on available SkypeIn US area codes. The only UK area code available at the moment is Central London (0208).

Well, for some reason I seem to be back at my No. 2 spot in Google when you search for "Martin Woodward". I changes my blog templates a little bit. The Martin Woodward header at the top of every page is a bit of text that has a screen stylesheet applied that hides the text and displays the ": Martin Woodward" graphic instead. If you are using a text based browser then you don't see the image but get the text.

Now I had the text set to be a hyperlink back to the Woodwardweb homepage - but this seems like it tripped out the Google spam filter (as there were hidden text links contained within the site - a tactic sometimes used by search engine spammers trying to inflate their search engine rankings.).

So, I'm going to leave my templates static for a while and see if I stay at the No. 2 spot for a couple of google indexes. If so then it may well be this that has fixed it.

The bad news is that I noticed I had jumped to the number 2 slot because my comment spam levels just shot up. Obviously the comment spammers are using google to identify target sites. Looks like my move away from Moveable type is getting more and more urgent...

I've been meaning to post about this for a while. While driving into Belfast I spotted this bit of grafitti. In a city infamous for murials of a different kind, I think John may have appreciated the tribute.

Sorry about the lack of posts lately. Had lots on at work and then lots on at home when I eventually get there so been too busy to play and find things of interest.

Just for interest these are the podcasts that I listen to on my long commute. If anyone has any recomendations for me then let me know. Techie stuff or science type stuff is cool (anything that keeps me up to date with what is going on). Comedy would also be good.

• Slashdot Review
• .NET Rocks!
• Adam Curry Daily Source Code

Well. It had to happen. I seem to have disappeared from Google when you do a search for "Martin Woodward". My iPodder profile now shows up at the number 2 slot, but I've no idea how to edit this profile to include a link back to my page. I give up, I am destined to be ignored by Google and i am going to lie back and relish my anomicity instead. If you use MSN Search then I'm number two (depending on which country you do the search from of course), however nobody uses MSN Search so I should stay happily anonymous.

Update [16 Feb 2005]: So it looks like my mrwpro.com domain name has jumped in again at the number 3 slot. Don't know what the heck is going on. But I've given up caring right...

I was have a quick trawl through some of my logs, and found this funny set of search queries...

2004.12.17 11:08:42 167.127.107.11 Search: query for 'noisy and annoying' 
2004.12.17 11:08:51 167.127.107.11 Search: query for 'noisy annoying' 
2004.12.17 11:08:56 167.127.107.11 Search: query for 'noisy' 

Do you think somebody is trying to tell me something? I was described in my school reports as a "Highly vocal member of the group" and I never realised how bad this was until I married a teacher and got her to translate.

While I was looking at my logs, I also found somebody trying to search for "charva", "worzel gummage", British Airways flight information (on flight BA7862 - Edinburgh to Southampton) and someone else looking for information about "furby" so I guess I shouldn't read too much into it...

I’m currently doing a budget (January is always a long month, but this one will be particularly hard as my personal circumstances have changed rather a lot in the past year). I released that I had a new category to add to my usual food & drink, utilities, mortgage etc. I now have a separate section for “Information Subscriptions”. Into this goes items such as my broadband, Sky+, New Scientist and PC Plus Subscriptions (among others). I realized how much I spend a year on information (currently just under £1000), and how I consider such thinks important in my everyday life. It makes you realize what a different time we live in compared to just 20 years ago.

It's the 18th November and it's snowing!!! Really heaving. Looks cool - might go outside and build a snowman. Wouldn't mind but I have to drive across 3 countries tomorrow. Doh!

Fantastic news. Belfast is to host the 2005 World Toilet Summit, very near to where I work.

According to Cleanpoint.com:- Hosted by The British Toilet Association, the Summit is being supported by the Northern Ireland Tourist Board, Belfast City Council, the International Fund for Ireland and Belfast Visitor Convention Bureau, along with The World Toilet Organisation (WTO).

BTA Director Richard Chisnell told CHT: "We are busy planning a memorable four days for delegates"

Sounds to me like they plan to go on the p**s and talk crap...

After a sad delay, I'm now back online! We have moved to Ballycastle in Northern Ireland. Lot's of things going on, including starting a new job. Expect to see lots of posting about dotnet and c# soon!!!

Nightmare. Just done a search on Google for Martin Woodward and I no longer appear! My pagerank has just totally dissapeared! I still have a 5/10 ranking in the google toolbar but Martin Woodward no longer works - try for yourself. Could this be a result of my latest re-design? I'm absolutely gutted. If you know me, can you please put a link to my homepage like this:-

<A HREF="http://www.woodwardweb.com">Martin Woodward</A>


Update: I've found myself - on page 2. Nightmare... What has the web come to.

Update (1st October): At last, I have made it back onto the first page (even if I am the last entry). Only 9 more places to go and then I'll feel lucky

I've finally joined the broadband masses as my exchange has just been enabled and my nildram account has been activated.

Works a treat as well, which I was suprised about.

My order for broadband has just gone in to Nildram. Decided to go with them in the end as I wanted a static ip address with an email account and webspace etc. According to ADSL Guide they have been consistently rated as one of the fastest ISP's. I have also heard nothing but good things about their Customer Service. Just have to wait until after the 15th October for ADSL to be installed into my local exchange. Not that I mind the wait too much - after all I live in an area that cannot even get Freeview or even Channel 5.

Well, I have finally completed my site update. It is now using stylesheets for layout instead of tables. I'm also using Blogger to publish to the site. Hopefully this will mean that the site get's updated with content more often...

This is an entry from the toilet at work using GPRS via my mobile phone. Cool, blog while you log.

I'm trying Blogger for the first time to publish to my site. I design and build around content management systems all the time at work - about time I try some of my own medicene. I have to say, the functionality on Blogger is pretty good, considering the price (i.e. nowt).