June 2003
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Victoria Park, The Crown, Matrix Reloaded
Skated in Victoria Park, lunch at The Crown, Matrix Reloaded and a pizza at Strada. Top day ;) We skated in Victoria Park this morning. It was pretty good. Lots of wide, quiet, paths with reasonable tarmac and nowhere near as busy as Hyde … -
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Matrix Reloaded & Animatrix
Finally got around to seeing Matrix Reloaded on Sunday night. Then picked up the Animatrix yesterday. Before I read any reviews or blogs on the subject I thought I’d spout off on my own… (Contains spoilers and future plot … -
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You don't want to do it like that....
During some simple refactoring today, a phase of ‘restricting access to data members’, I discovered an interesting little design ‘descision’. In the spirit of completely mixing up the business logic and the display … -
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Infect me
I’m not test infected yet. I’m almost there. I want to be there. But I’m not there yet. I just spent an hour and a half fixing a couple of bugs in the online game system I’m writing. It took longer than it should … -
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Stage complete. Time bonus...
This morning I wasted some time tracking down bugs in the multi-threaded online game engine that I’m writing for a client. Now I have tests. Tests are good. The bugs were little things, they always are. Most of the wasted time was … -
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Blog is 1month old!
Well, the site is 1 month old and I’m still rambling on. I think I have about 4 readers now too ;) -
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Final skate lesson
We had our last inline skating lesson tonight. Lots of recap on what we’ve done before, and lots of practice. The crossover turns are quite comfortable now in either direction, which is nice, and we did some simple slalom - note to … -
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A coming together...
A good week for the refactoring project. The release procedures that are now in place mean that we’ve been able to react quickly to new functionality requests whilst continuing the new development efforts. Ah the wonders of a source … -
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Evanescence
Miche did the spontaneous thing this week. After hearing “Bring me to Life” on the radio once she bought the Evanescence CD. Cool stuff. Very nice sound. Kind of All about Eve meets Skin from Skunk Anansie on vocals with a nice … -
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Got skates, let's go!
Spent the afternoon at Decathlon in Surrey Quays. Came away with a pair of Rollerblade Lightning 03’s - which are probably a little over the top considering my lack of skill ;) but they were the most comfortable and smoothest skates I … -
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I'm an exception, let me out of here...
We’re adding some new functionality to the refactoring project. Unfortunately the new functionality is located in the Heart of Darkness - the most twisty and poorly structured code in the whole system. Today I stumbled onto something … -
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VS.Net 2003
Why oh why couldn’t the new VS.Net solution file format have either been compatible with VS.Net 2002 or have a different file extension… I’m in the process up updating my socket server code to build with VS.Net 2003. The … -
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Developer buy in
The refactoring project rolls on and the code gets better. This week saw a marked change in attitute from some of the developers on the team… I was originally brought into this project because the lead developer was leaving and other … -
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Socket Server code updates
The latest release of the free version of my asynchronous, windows, IOCP based, socket server framework can now be obtained from here at ServerFramework.com. For some time I’ve been promising to update the socket server articles to … -
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Slacking
It’s a lovely day out there today… -
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The slacking worked
Had one of those days where I couldn’t get started. I guess it was probably something to do with the beer last night. It was Darren’s birthday and we went to Namco on the South Bank and played on the arcade machines, drank beer, … -
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Clean shutdown
No more zone just yet, wine’s just made me blabby. The testing I’ve just been doing with my server is real black box stuff. The build process fires off a script that kicks off the server and then runs the test harness which … -
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Weekend's hosed
Michelle’s on her way home, but she’ll be working all weekend drafting an agreement that needs client sign off by Monday morning. So that’s her hair appointment down the pan and the 30th birthday party we were going to … -
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MSDN Subscription blues
and reds and blacks and greens and, well, you get the idea. Every month when I get a shipment of disks I feel stupid. I just don’t get the way the MSDN Universal Sub is organised. I’d like a little hint card in each shipment … -
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More socket server code updates
The latest release of the free version of my asynchronous, windows, IOCP based, socket server framework can now be obtained from here at ServerFramework.com. I’ve updated the code for two more of the socket server articles. More … -
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Bluetooth blues
Obviously been one of those days… I was woken before 7 this morning as Miche rushed back to work - always a bad sign when people take a wash bag with them; she’s still not home… :( I was going to go back to sleep, but, … -
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Why do I do that
One of the good things about working on a code base of questionable quality is that you get a chance to review the way you work as well as they way the original authors worked. It’s my job is to improve the quality of the code and the … -
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New toy
My old laptop was a brick that didn’t run VS.Net fast enough for my liking, so I thought it was time for an upgrade. I went for the Sony Vaio PCG-Z1SP because of the weight, screen, wireless connectivity and the fact that I can slap … -
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The colours thing bites
A while back I found what might politely be called “a mixing of business logic with display logic” issue in the refactoring project. Yesterday it bit me… So we have an object that has a set of named properties. These … -
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Password policies
Someone in an organisation decides that people’s passwords aren’t secure enough. They implement a policy so that people are forced to change their passwords on a regular basis. People find that changing passwords is a pain so … -
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Stuff
The refactoring project rolls on. This week was mainly taken up with managing a seemingly infinite number of minor releases. We decide to appear “responsive” by reacting to recently reported, low priority, issues quickly whilst … -
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Real Greek
Went to a really cool local restaurant tonight. It’s Greek Jim but not as we know it. We’ve been to The Real Greek in Hoxton several times before. Tonight we did the meze stuff in the bar area. The bar’s really cool. A … -
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New toy == good
The new laptop is way cool. All the stuff is now installed and it compiles nice and fast… The batteries last well, even when the screen is bright and the disk is quiet. I can sit on the sofa and code without being told off for … -
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Working for Microsoft
Andy Hopper has written about what makes the thought of working for Microsoft appealing to a geek. “It’s presented as a tough place to work even if you’re a wizard coder. It’s also described as a meritocracy - … -
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Bluetooth sockets
This morning I decided to investigate the Windows XP SP1 Bluetooth support. I played with the BluetoothXXXX and quickly became disapointed. I then moved on to looking at how to access the Bluetooth hardware using Winsock and decided that is … -
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Sunny day in Kensington Gardens
We skated on The Broad Walk in Kensington Gardens on Saturday morning. Lovely place. Much nicer than “The Beach” in Hyde Park. Much quieter, wider, smoother and with a nice little hill… -
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80 00 1A 00 0F D7
My dabbling with Bluetooth continues. Using WSASetService it’s pretty easy to get your device to advertise a standard Bluetooth service on one of its sockets. Simply create your socket with the Bluetooth address family, bind and … -
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It's important who's driving
I’m a firm believer that software rots unless you’re very careful; and like apples, once one piece starts to go bad the rest quickly follows. The Pragmatic Programmers talk about Software Entropy and The Broken Window Theory … -
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Timezone...
Just realised that my MT setup was wrong and that all my stuff is being posted with a timestamp of an hour in the future. Just fixed it, I wonder what will happen now… Hmm, nothing, so I’ve edited the timestamps on … -
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Analysing my analysis
In my usual “don’t read the manual” style I crufted together a simple OBEX decoder, fudged a response to the connect message and watched my iPAQ send the first chunk of the file I’m using as my test. Now I’ll … -
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Giving it away
I give a lot of source code away on the web. I have done for several years. Often when I tell people about this they try to convince me that I should be selling the code rather than giving it away. They don’t need my code and are way … -
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Analysing my blogging
I see a trend here… So, I blogged, I ate, I had a little wine. And started thinking… Why did I write the last entry today? I’ve had it in my stack of ‘blog this’ emails that I send to myself for ages. I wrote … -
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Switching to CVS
For my sins, I’ve used Source Safe for version control on quite a lot of my projects in the past few years. It’s got its faults but, well, the price is right… Now that I have a laptop that I can actually work on … -
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Full bodied, or not?
So, I have the standard MT rss 1.0 syndication feed that I hacked to include the full body of each entry and I have the all new, funky, MT rss 2.0 feed that I have left as is and which doesn’t include the full body of the … -
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That test driven development thing might just work
So, we have currency based limits and they’re in millions. Us: “Are they always going to be in millions for all ccys?” Them: “Yup.” Coded, tested, delivered. Them: “can we have the JPY limits in … -
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OBEX and ISO8583
OBEX is a nice little protocol and reminds me a bit of a massively simplified version of ISO8583. It’s a pity about the warts on Connect… The OBEX spec defines objects (messages) in terms of a fixed opCode, followed by a 2 byte … -
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Top tip
For those of us still working with VC 6… This page about all the clever things you can do in the debugger watch window is pretty cool. I knew all about s and su and hr but I didn’t know about m, that one’s way cool. Hmm, … -
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Wise words
“The most successful method of programming is to begin a program as simply as possible, test it, and then add to the program until it performs the required job.” – The PDP-8/e Small Computer Handbook (DEC, 1972) - Chapter … -
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Pinging down NetMeeting data channels
Back in 1999 Darren came up with a cunning plan to make lots of money. The plan was ‘device control over the internet’… In summary, we didn’t. Ideally this plan required an audio/visual link as well as a device … -
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Changing the vinegar
A while ago I likened writing articles about code with pickling it to preserve it… It seems the last few days have been spent changing the vinegar… I’m moving most of my source to CVS. This was easy for the code that I …
