leaving drinks
December 16, 2006 at 5:06 pm | Posted in Uncategorized | 1 CommentPhoto taken with my sony ericsson k880i.
Impressive camera for a mobile phone.
Manage your hotmail/live mail from Outlook
November 12, 2006 at 2:29 pm | Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a commentAt 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.
Posting from Windows Live Writer
August 15, 2006 at 11:10 pm | Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a commentOk, 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
August 10, 2006 at 4:13 pm | Posted in SharePoint, SharePoint 2003 | Leave a commentThis 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
July 21, 2006 at 11:33 pm | Posted in Fun | Leave a commenttruth 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
Free mindmapping software that works
June 27, 2006 at 12:02 pm | Posted in Creative, Dev tools | Leave a commentI’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…
Shut down options in Win2003
June 24, 2006 at 3:08 pm | Posted in Dev tools | Leave a commentrebooting 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
June 24, 2006 at 2:57 pm | Posted in Dev tools | Leave a commentYou 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
June 14, 2006 at 11:34 am | Posted in SharePoint, SharePoint 2003, SharePoint 2007 | Leave a comment1033 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.
Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.
Entries and comments feeds.