Deadpool 2007

It's that time of the year again when I have to submit my list for the Deadpool game. If you're one of the celebrities on this list, don't panic. I haven't come close to winning in the several years it's been running. I always keep the same list except for any additions, a strategy that has been spectacularly unsuccessful. 

David Rockefeller, 1915, Very rich, very old

Denis Healey, 1917, Old Labour

Billy Graham, 1918, time to meet his maker

John Glenn, 1921, It could be one space mission too many

Hugh Hefner, 1926, Viagra overdose? 

Boris Yeltsin, 1931, A popular choice, with good reason

Larry Hagman, 1931, Already on his second liver

Alex Higgins, 1949, Snooker player with throat cancer, apparently

Shane MacGowan, 1957, Singer with a soon to be non-functioning liver

Holly Johnson, 1960, Frankie Goes To AIDS Clinic

Happy Christmas

Displaying a tick mark in HTML

This afternoon's challenge was to get a tick mark to appear in a HTML file. Not too taxing I thought. I'd already done it, using the HTML entity ✓. But this didn't properly in all browsers. I initially thought the problem was some kind of encoding problem but it seems that unfortunately it's one of those HTML things that works in 'modern' browsers but doesn't seem to work in IE6 (this ✓ should be a tick mark, if you're one of the lucky ones). Given that most people are still using IE6, it's not really an ideal solution.

So what to do? I thought I'd search for a fairy common font that had a tick mark available. WingDings does and although it's a Windows font, I thought it would be available on enough computers to suit my needs. Unfortunately, as this page shows, FireFox doesn't display WingDings fonts at all, even when they are installed on the computer. Most odd, although it seems that this is how browsers should work...

You may be asking why I didn't plump for the simplest solution, displaying an image? Unfortunately I'm generating a web page on the fly on the user's PC and I don't want to be generating extra images if I can avoid it. Life could get very complicated if they already have a file with the same name on their PC. I guess they wouldn't appreciate me overwriting it.

So my not very neat solution was to use a standard checkbox, <input type="checkbox" disabled checked>, . This wouldn't be too bad if I could apply some styling to it to make it look less like a checkbox, but CSS for a checkbox is ignored so I'm not very happy with the resulting output. If anybody knows of a better solution, let me know.

Addendum - Since quite a few people are finding this page, you might be interested in the follow-up posts, which have a potentially better soluton to this problem

Another way to get more hits to your site

I guess like most sites the Random Pub Finder gets most of its hit through Google searches. But a drunken chat with a friend led to another way to drive more traffic to the site. I've uploaded all the pub images to Flickr and added links to the reviews on the site. So far results have not been spectacular but it means we have deep links into some of our pages so their PageRank should improve. And who knows, it might work for you.

Setting a display from: address using CDONTS

Since it took me so long to find the answer to this problem I thought I'd post it here (and also so I don't need to look it up again). Not sure if this applicable to other ways of programmatically sending email but I guess it probably is. To show a friendly display name when setting the From: address of an email using CDONTS just use the following syntax -

(Test address)<test@test.com>

Testing, testing

Just testing out Windows Live Writer with the new version of Blogger... And it works, hurrah!

Reading embedded resources in C#

Reading embedded resources in .NET isn't particularly hard but since I always forget how to do it, I thought I'd write it down for my own benefit. 

First thing to do is set the Build Action property of the file you want to embed to 'Embedded Resource'. Next download my Resource Explorer from

http://www.doogal.co.uk/ResourceExplorer.php

After building the assembly, inspect it with this little utility to find out the name of the resource. If you're clever you can probably work out the resource name for yourself but I'm lazy and/or stupid (depends which day it is).

Finally, the code to read it is something like this.

Assembly assem = GetType().Assembly;   
using (Stream stream = assem.GetManifestResourceStream("resource name"))
{
  stream.Position = 0;
  // read data from stream

Visual Studio 2003 on Vista

OK, I should have known better. I'd read about the lack of support for Visual Studio 2003 on Vista, but then I read another article claiming all I needed to do was turn off UAC. I was planning on doing that anyway, since UAC seems like the biggest PITA of all time (and I seem to avoid any kind of virus/malware without it). So I went ahead and installed Vista. And Visual Studio 2003 falls over all the fecking time... I can't edit any of the code-behind files in one of my websites.

Fingers crossed Microsoft will release a version of VS2003 that actually works on Vista. If it means turning off UAC, I'm cool with that. Their excuse is that they want to use their scant(!) resources on the next version of Visual Studio. Even if I believe they haven't got the resources to get VS2003 to run on Vista, can't they slow down a bit? .NET 1.1 does most of the things I want to do pretty well, .NET 2.0 adds a few nice things, but nothing mind blowing, I don't even care about .NET 3.0 yet, so I care even less about the next version. The thing is I have a job to do and that job is to get working stuff to clients, they don't care what version of .NET I'm using and certainly don't want to be paying for me to upgrade to the latest and greatest version every other day... 

Currently listening to 'Nothing' by 'No-one' from the album 'My soundcard doesn't work on Vista'

Reflector insanity

I spent a couple of days at a conference last week, which was fun. What did I learn? A few things, but the weirdest thing I learned was about Reflector's crazy behaviour. Often when Reflector starts up it informs you there is a new update available. Generally I'll let it do its thing and download the update. But it turns out if you don't download the update when you exit Reflector it deletes itself from your hard disk...

Liking Vista, mostly

I've got no sound, Visual Studio 2003 is a bit unsure of its new environment, it took me an hour to fix up my source control installation due to Vista clobbering file permissions, UAC is crap (I have turned it off and turned off the warning telling me to turn it back on) and SonicWall VPN Client doesn't work but... Vista is actually pretty good. Search works quickly for the first time ever in Windows (and searches emails as well!), the new UI is actually quite beautiful (something that could never be said about the XP Fisher-Price look), IIS 7 is a damn fine upgrade (although it took a while to get my ASP.NET 1.1 apps up and running) and performance seems to be pretty much the same as XP, which is quite remarkable given all the visual additions and extra services that have been added.

No doubt the Mac did it better two years ago but the Mac doesn't have any apps I need. My Mac OSX box sits unloved in the corner with nothing to do...

Vista headaches

I'm a bit of a fool when it comes to new software, if I can get a copy of something cool for free I'll probably install it. So, since the company I work for now has an MSDN license I thought I'd give Vista a spin.

So I pretty much ignored the warnings the installer gave me about the problems I might have and went ahead and installed it. And the warnings were pretty much spot on. I now have no sound and I can't play videos. I have no idea why but I guess it's a driver problem. Hopefully Dell will fix the problem PDQ because sound is kind of important for me since I use Skype all the time...

Other than that Vista seems to work fine. I'm not sure at this point whether the upgrade was worth it, nothing has jumped out at me as an aboslutely must have feature.

FireFox and IE differences

Often when I'm reading up on support for particular HTML or CSS features, I'll see something along the lines of "Most modern browsers support this feature, Internet Explorer doesn't". A loose translation of this could be "if you use this feature it won't work for 80% of your users".

I do most of my testing in IE then go over to FireFox to make sure it looks OK and probably because of this it always seems to be the other way round, FireFox doesn't support a lot of stuff that IE does.

FireFox doesn't have a way to render text vertically. OK, there's no official way to do this, so IE has come up with it's own CSS attribute, but I'm kind of surprised that FireFox hasn't come up with some way of doing it, it seems like quite a common thing to want to do.

Another problem is hiding and showing rows in a table. FireFox kind of supports using 'display:block' but the row gets taller and taller with each hide and show. So I have to use 'display:table-row', which doesn't work in IE. Not sure which is standards-compliant but 'display:block' seems like the more consistent approach.    

XSLT not completely insane

I've played with XSLT before and never quite got to grips with it, but over the last few days I've finally got a basic understanding of what it's all about. It still seems like it was designed by somebody who was an XML/HTML addict and could only think in terms of tags when developing a programming language. Like the old saying goes, when the only tool you have is a hammer, every job looks like a nail. But the thing is if you have an XML document and you want to transform it to some other flavour of XML or HTML then XSLT is a fine choice. I'm still not sure if my XSLT is any good or not, I've not seen any coding standards for it anywhere. Should I be splitting things out into multiple templates? Should I be doing anything in particular to make my XSLT more maintainable? Dunnow. But I've got 1000 lines of it and it produces quite a nice HTML document so that's good enough for me at the moment.

Currently listening to Love Less by New Order from the album Technique

Well done Ken

Chelsea Tractors are going to be hit by another tax soon, as the London Congestion Charge will be increased to £25 for band G vehicles. Well done Ken!

Breaking news: No-one buys Borland's IDE tools

However they try to spin it, it's fairly obvious that Borland were unable to find a buyer for their IDE business. So my prediction was right. Is it good or bad news for Delphi and their other tools? It doesn't look great but at least they can hopefully stand on their own two feet and won't have their income sucked away to finance the ALM business.

Currently listening to The Only One by Billy Bragg from the album Workers Playtime

Crude awakening - Peak Oil

Found a couple of interesting videos about peak oil and some of the possible solutions

Part 1

Part 2

IE7 take-up

IE7 hasn't been released as part of Windows Update yet, but its usage is up to 6% of all IE users on the Random Pub Finder. Saying that, FireFox 2 is being used by 38% of all FireFox users. I reckon that is down to the techy nature of most FireFox users. Funnily enough 20% of our visitors are now using FireFox, which is pretty astounding. I'd guess we've had quite a few techy people visit recently due to the coverage we've had.

Build it and they will come

After five years, the Random Pub Finder has finally become an overnight success. Google seems to have started re-indexing pages, although there's still a random nature to its indexing. We were up to 300 pages indexed, now we're back down to about 150. But the main reason for the sudden surge in traffic has been appearing at Programmable Web. Thanks to that, we've been covered on a couple of other sites. We've never had so many hits.

Now I'm actually getting traffic here as well, thanks to this post. Seems I'm one of the top results on Google if you search for directmailchat. Clearly I'm not the only one suffering from this spam.

I am a sex god

I've been getting a lot of emails like this recently

Hi,
Hope I am not writing to wrong address. I am naice, pretty looaking girl. I am planning on visiting your town this month. Can we meet each other in person? Message me back at qzyv@directmailchat.info

Today was different, it came from somebody called Johnathan...

Makes you wonder how successful these kind of spams are, with a To: list of several people, a From: address that doesn't match the address they've asked me to reply to, a load of spelling mistakes and apparently coming from a girl with a boy's name.

Hurrah for Richmond Council

Richmond Council are introducing increased parking charges for high-polluting vehicles. This brought all the usual rubbish from the 4x4 drivers. Lets go through the points one by one.

4x4s are efficient

If your 4x4 is efficient then it won't be charged very highly. The charge is based on CO2 emissions, not car size.

I need a big car, I've got 4 kids

Presumably it was your decision to have 4 kids. Having kids is expensive, you have to feed and clothe them, house them. You wouldn't expect these to be subsidised would you? It's not like we have a shortage of kids on the planet.

Climate change is just a theory

Even though the vast majority of scientists agree that temperatures are rising and we are at least partly to blame, this line still gets trotted out. Can someone explain why I've still got bees flying round my garden at the end of October?  This isn't normal. But let's assume climate change isn't in fact happening. Cars produce pollution at a local level, are noisy and generally reduce quality of life, particularly in cities like London where there isn't enough space to accomodate them. Not only that, but fossil fuels will run out, some time. So it seems like a good idea to reduce our dependence on them.

It's undemocratic

The motoring dinosaur Jeremy Clarkson claimed the whole thing is undemocratic. How's that then? The council were voted for by the people of Richmond. If the residents don't like it, they can vote them out again.

What I like about this scheme is that it shows we can do something about climate change at the local level, we don't have to wait for the government or, even worse, the international community to do something. Since we live in the neighbouring borough and our council is also run by the Lib-Dems, I'm going to be lobbying them to introduce the same scheme.

Currently listening to Have A Day / Celebratory by The Polyphonic Spree from the album The Beginning Stages Of... [UK]