Me
It's coming up to the 2 year mark since I resigned from my full time job and went into freelancing / owning my own businesses. After many years of working as an employee, a contractor and doing small bits of freelancing on the side I probably thought that switching to freelancing would be a bit easier than it ended up being, which is part of why I wanted to write a little about my experiences. There's plenty of material out there offering freelancers helpful tips or things to avoid - this post is similar to many of those, but it's...
Yesterday morning at around 6.30am my (second) P5N32-E SLI motherboard died. After 2 weeks of running without any issues, it had rebooted itself and reported a "BIOS Checksum Error" - at this point it tries to launch the ASUS EZ-Flash utility, and when that fails due to the user sleeping in another room it emits an insanely high pitched screeching noise. Nice feature. The problem sounded similar to this, except in my case playing about with RAM didn't fix it. Neither did booting from the support DVD and re-flashing the ROM BIOS. I was experiencing some randomness, mainly...
A bit of a follow up for anyone who's interested in running Live Writer on 64 bit Windows, and didn't read the comments to my previous post.
Charles' explanation as to why the current install doesn't work with 64 bit makes a lot more sense:
We're sorry about the fact that Writer stopped supporting 64 bit Windows. You're right that this is just temporary. Our installer had a little hiccup but it will be resolved in our next release.
Once again, our apologies!
So all you 64bit people can look forward to being back and writing with Live Writer...
First off, this post is not bought to you via Windows Live Writer! Why? Well..
Running a 64bit OS is an interesting experience. A lot of people will make casual comments along the lines of "pretty much everything should run fine". If you hear this phrase in casual social conversation, then chances are that:
You are a huge fucking geek
You are talking to someone who has never run a 64bit OS
Most 32bit apps are compatiable with a 64bit OS. However there are some things you take for granted, and sometimes compatiability can be an...
Anyone who reads my sites knows that I'm a sucker for dropping too much cash on computer kit. However, only people who know me well are aware that I have incredibly bad luck with hardware. Stuff just goes wrong more often than it should.
So when I was planning the latest upgrade, my good friend Spksh offered to take time out from documenting New Zealand's descent into 4GW mayhem and to build the system for me. He's one of those people who loves playing with hardware, and he's damn good at it.
With him building the rig, my hardware curse was bound to be...
And apparently a problem shared is a problem halved, or something like that. So here we go. This is the Das Keyboard version 1: It's modeled around the old school clunky IBM keyboards from long ago, with a couple of little differences. The keys are all individually weighted, so they take more or less force to press properly depending on the key which is supposed to be pressing it. That is to say that the keys which your little finger is going to hit are a bit heavier than the ones which are going to get pounded...
I've been looking at the Dell 3007fpw. Well, technically speaking I was looking at 2, but that's another story. There are a few screenshots out and about which make the mouth water: That's a 24" Dell on the right, with the 30" next to it. Damn. 2560*1600 isn't exactly the worlds most practical resolution if you don't have a high powered rig, especially for gaming - but the 3007fpw solves this by having a "2nd native mode" of 1280*800 allowing you to run demanding games in a slightly more sane mode. It's a nice touch, and it sounds...
The observant among you will notice that the site has changed. I'm no longer running on Domino, and hence I'm no longer running on Blogo. The site is now fully powered by ASP.NET, and is running the excellent Open Source Subtext. Thanks go out to Ferdy for all the time he's spent writing and maintaining Blogo - if you're in the market for an open source Domino blogging engine then check it out, it's well worth it.
Why Subtext? I can't really say. I played with a few .NET solutions out there, and decided that I really liked quite a few...
Most of the time on this site I write about coding, or moan about trains, but there's more to me than that - sometimes I like to play with hardware too!
That's not entirely true. No one likes to play with hardware, but they do generally like the results as long as all goes well. This week promises to be a bit of a hardware/networking week. I've just ripped out my twin SLI'ed 7800 GTs to replace them with a single Asus GeForce 8800 GTS, 320MB, DDR3, PCIe-16, TV out, DVI, HDTV, SLI ready etc. It's...
The last couple of months have been pretty busy, and the updates to this site have suffered as a result of that. When I'm not working I'm in the middle of migrating all of my personal data (including this site) off Domino. I've got most of the work done towards migrating over to SubText, but I'm having trouble finalising a site design. The fact that I'm pretty average when it comes to designing layouts is a bit of a hindrance. I'm finding SubText pretty nice to work with from a skinning perspective - however I'm pretty easily sold...
Full Me Archive
About me
My name is Ross Hawkins and I'm a Developer, Consultant and Writer based in Auckland,
New Zealand (pictured below!). My current work revolves around ASP.NET, C#, jQuery, Ajax,
SQL Server, and a mix of other Microsoft development technologies.
I also have about 14 years of experience with IBM Lotus Notes/Domino and associated technologies. While Notes/Domino
is no longer my primary focus I still like to dabble and keep my skills up to date.
I own and run 2 businesses - Hawkins Consulting Services,
and Ignition Development.
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Popular Content
Troubleshooting WebResource.axd
The .NET 2.0 framework changed the way clientside JavaScript is
delivered to the browser. Previously, ASP.NET 1.1 used the
aspnet_client directory whereas now 2.0 uses WebResource.axd.
Published on October 8, 2006
Microsoft AJAX Extensions: Sys.Debug is null or not an object
One of the breaking changes which was made with
the 1.0 release of the Microsoft Ajax Extensions was the renaming
of the 'Debug' class to 'Sys.Debug' for reasons of compatiability
with other frameworks. Breaking changes like this can often be a source of frustration..
Published on May 22, 2007
Simple ASP.NET Character Counter
A textbox character counter is a pretty simple piece of functionality, and there's a lot of different ways to apply one to your application. The following method is nice and simple, and can be done using only clientside JavaScript if required, or combined with server side code in order to create a more dynamic effect
Published on December 4, 2006
Adding Tooltips to Gridview Headers
As the title says, this is a very simple but dynamic way of achieving tooltip text on a header column. It's not overly flash, but it's lightweight and quick to implement.
Published on April 15, 2007
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