Mobile Internet redux

This post was originally going to be about using a mobile phone (in my case, a TyTn II) as a modem over Bluetooth in OSX. To my somewhat untrained eye, it doesn't exactly seem in line with the rest of the Mac experience, but I could be missing something obvious. With my previous (Windows) laptop, I installed ActiveSync + Bluetooth drivers (which were missing initially - I'd disabled Bluetooth in the BIOS as I'd never needed it before) on the laptop and things seemed to work ok. There were a fair few steps required to get up and running...

posted @ Friday, October 31, 2008 12:06 AM | Feedback (0)

jQuery and ASP.NET

At the risk of adding too much to the echo chamber, Scott Guthrie's October 22nd post has some pretty useful resources for anyone looking to get better acquainted with the use of jQuery with ASP.NET (as well as other useful things of course, but I found the jQuery info particularly useful). Tags: JavaScript , ASP.NET

posted @ Thursday, October 30, 2008 8:47 AM | Feedback (0)

Silverlight 2 released

I was so busy last week that I managed to miss that the final version of Silverlight 2 was released. It's probably a suitable time to think out loud a little bit about Silverlight and it's future. I've been tinkering with Silverlight on and off since the initial 1.0 release and have a few projects I've been working on using various versions of the v2 betas. As a web developer I'm finding it great to work with, but for a long time I've had concerns about it's adoption by both developers and users (most importantly, corporate users who tend...

posted @ Monday, October 20, 2008 11:55 PM | Feedback (2)

Meaningful Code Quality Metrics

posted @ Friday, October 17, 2008 12:05 AM | Feedback (0)

Evernote for Developers

I've been using Evernote for a while now. I found myself using it a lot while I was travelling by train, as I'd sync between home, work and my laptop over my "3g" (actual 3g service may drop down to GPRS speeds without warning, thanks Vodafone NZ!), but I was never quite happy with the client software. The mac client looks nice (which reminds me I need to write about my mac), the Windows client is adequate (much improved recently, but still not amazing), and the Windows Mobile client is pretty mediocre. It's still a great service, but as...

posted @ Thursday, October 16, 2008 10:57 PM | Feedback (4)

Windows Live Wave 3 direct download links

After writing about the latest Live Writer beta having patchy 64bit support again, I came across this collection of direct download links. I've had the url sitting on my secondary PC for a week or so now waiting to get a chance to test it works, which I can happily confirm it does. Link: Direct Links for Windows Live Wave 3 Tags: Live Writer

posted @ Thursday, October 16, 2008 10:42 PM | Feedback (0)

Overriding the retail deployment setting

I'm thinking this is a long shot, but it's always worth asking the question. I'm using a shared hosting environment which has deployment retail="true" set in the system.config. I want to get debugging information for a site running on that server, but of course the deployment setting makes this impossible. Is there any way to override this? I realise that the deployment retail is not settable in web.config, and so any possible solution could be a bit hacky (as it's a shared environment I have no access to system files), but I only need it temporarily to do...

posted @ Thursday, October 16, 2008 10:36 PM | Feedback (0)

Good Xtra, bad Xtra!

The good is the recent upgrade of data caps across most (all?) of Xtra's plans at no extra (!) cost. It's nice to not have to worry about exceeding those silly limits again. The bad is the random midday disconnection, and the calls that evening to the offshore helpdesk, only to be told that my "modem" was unsupported so it wasn't her problem. How did we come to that conclusion? Her phone script only handled modems with 2 lights, "Are both lights lit up on your modem?". My attempts to explain that a Cisco 800 series router had a...

posted @ Thursday, October 16, 2008 10:31 PM | Feedback (0)

Don't do as Johnny don't does.

Originally from dotnet-snippets this lovely piece of code shows the power and danger of LINQ in one go: var files = from file in new DirectoryInfo(@"C:\").GetFiles()             where file.Name.StartsWith("_")             select file; Sure, you could use that piece of code to search for files… but don't. (Although surely it can't be long before someone adds deferred execution support for a filesystem? Maybe it's coming in WinFS Forever?) Tags: LINQ

posted @ Thursday, October 02, 2008 8:37 PM | Feedback (2)