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leaving drinks

Civitas Populus — Sat, 16 Dec 2006 16:06:33 +0000

leaving drinks

Originally uploaded by Akashic.

Photo taken with my sony ericsson k880i.

Impressive camera for a mobile phone.

Manage your hotmail/live mail from Outlook

Civitas Populus — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 13:29:58 +0000

At last. You used to be able to do this with outlook express until MS switched off support about 3 years ago. Now it’s back as an Outlook plugin. Bascially you can have your hotmail account as a folder in Outlook.

Magic.

Download from MS

Posting from Windows Live Writer

Civitas Populus — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 22:10:35 +0000

Ok, lets see if this post makes on to the blog. Microsoft have released their blog posting tool, which appears fine so far, but it’s a client app??? There’s no reason why it can’t be a client app, but it kind of goes against the spirit of blogs.

Anyway, the reason to post… Joel Spolsky has an excellent blog on the business of writing software. He’s just written a collection of articles of different management styles, and defined what he judges to be the best way to manage techies developing software.

Part 1: Command and Control management
Part 2: Econ 101 management
Part 3: The Identity Management Method

Seeing the old version of a document when using a previous version of office

Civitas Populus — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 15:13:18 +0000

This is a small issue, but it comes up occasionally… doesn’t happen if you’re working with Office 2003, but a lot of people are not.

If you are working with Word XP, the following may happen. You click on a document name in a document library and view the contents. You decide that you’re going to edit the document. So, you close it down, and then use the “edit in Word” feature of the document libraries. You make your changes and save, and close.

Then, you reconsider your changes, perhaps you just want to re-check the document, so you open it up just by clicking the link to open it in read only view.

Most likely, you’ll see the version of the document from before your edits. I’ve had a few distraught phone calls from users who experience this. The edits have been saved however, whats happened is IE has opened the locally cached version of the document from your first viewing.

If you shut down all your browser windows, open a fresh browser, open the document, you’ll most likely see the correct latest version.

So, whats the fix? Well, as documents are delivered by owssvr.dll, there’s only so much you can do. In IIS, specially on the owssvr.dll file, I disabled the default caching rules and added ‘cache-control:no-cache’ to the http header. Problem fixed.

But, (and it’s a big one) do you really want to disable caching on all your lists, web part pages, and documents? Probably not. Owssvr.dll is responsable for all these pages. (check out your iis logs) I’ve not done detailed performance checking on this, but it can only increase the workload of the server. How significantly is difficult to say.

Perhaps there is a more subtle cache-control command I could add to the http header as ‘no-cache’ is a bit of a sledgehammer, but it’s worth checking how common an issue this is before making such a change.

Either way, I’m glad I found out why it was happening…

Kevin Smith interview

Civitas Populus — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 22:33:27 +0000

truth is stranger than fiction, way stranger…. but also very funny. Kevin tells how it is inside Hollywood

http://hedonistica.com/yt.php?path=http://www.youtube.com/v/vgYhLIThTvk

Mac vs PC

Civitas Populus — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 23:12:05 +0000

it’s still funny..

http://www.bestweekever.tv/2006/07/07/bwe-mac-ads/

Free mindmapping software that works

Civitas Populus — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 11:02:31 +0000

I’m sure most people out there are familiar with mind mapping, and perhaps even given it a go. Then you might have given up on an awkward interface, or been put off by the cost of full blown products.

I don’t use the mind mapping approach all the time, it’s not always appropiate. However when collecting user requirements, doing business analysis, or even abstract software design, I’d recommend trying out mind mapping. It’s a very effective way of starting a design, and getting a lot of ideas down with a very simple instintive structure.

There is now also a free tool that I find very easy to use. It also allows additional notes to be made against each node in your mind maps, and has lots of export formats.

Using the additional notes feature and clickable html diagram export I’ve actually been able to quickly produce functional spec’s that I can pass to end users.

A great time saver when used effectivly…

http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Shut down options in Win2003

Civitas Populus — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 14:08:08 +0000

rebooting win2003 is a pain enough without having to make up some reasons why. "Was it a hardware failure maybe?" Useful in Live, but as a developer it's a frustration.

So, run menu, gpedit.msc and disable the policies highlighted below.

Limit of concurrent downloads in Internet Explorer

Civitas Populus — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 13:57:39 +0000

You can't download more than 2 files at a time from the same domain name. Unless you follow the instructions in this article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/183110

LCID for the UK when working in Frontpage 2003

Civitas Populus — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 10:34:24 +0000

1033 may be the LCID for english, but it also carries with it the US mm/dd/yy date format. If you're working with frontpage developing a dataview web part and can't get the date to display as the UK dd/mm/yy, put 2057 in the locale parameter. 2057 is UK English.