Ian Nelson

Links for 2008-07-08 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0500

IT staff dream of a full night's sleep
Hey, I had six and a half hours sleep last night! I am an average techie!
BBC NEWS | World | Americas | Group seeks Bush sewage 'tribute'
Fitting tribute.
MF Bliki: IncrementalMigration
Google Open Source Blog: Protocol Buffers: Google's Data Interchange Format
Dealing with time in tests
Bug 4980
Read the comments...
Pete Swims

Little Things That Annoy Me #1

ian — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 14:00:00 GMT

The increase in TV volume during commercial breaks.

Is this just a UK thing or does it happen all over the globe? Ramping up the volume during the ad breaks doesn't make me sit up and take notice of your stupid product, it just sends me diving for the mute button.

Grrr..

Keeping In Touch, 2008-stylee

ian — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 13:19:00 GMT

You've gotta marvel at a world in which I can keep in touch with what's happening back at Chez Nelson by checking out an RSS feed of my wife's Facebook status:

Links for 2008-07-07 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Links for 2008-07-04 [del.icio.us]

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0500

The 11 Best Foods You Arent Eating
and amazingly, I was eating pumpkin seeds (sprinkled on porridge) as I was reading this article :-)
BBC NEWS | Wales | Police say UFO was just the Moon
BBC NEWS | Business | Pringles 'are not potato crisps'
rejoice!

Links for 2008-07-03 [del.icio.us]

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0500

YouTube - conner p

Links for 2008-06-30 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Links for 2008-06-26 [del.icio.us]

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0500

National Insurance Numbers (NINOs): Format and Security: What to do if you suspect or discover fraud
Wonderfully useless...

Remember The Milk

ian — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 06:17:00 GMT

In response to a blog post that I'd shared in Google Reader, Jez emailed me to ask:

Do you use RTM? It's always been one of those web apps that seem really useful, but I've never made the leap to actually using it in anger. I suppose you need to adopt it in tandem with the five-point GTD philosophy to get real benefit?

My response:

Yes, I do use RTM, and I love it. I've been looking for a decent way of managing my to-do lists effectively for years, and RTM really scratches that itch! I now have the web app permanently open in a Firefox tab, and use "MilkSync" to synchronize with my Pocket PC every half hour.

I'm not sure that you need to adopt a particular task-management philosophy in order to get benefit - RTM is flexible enough to allow you to work the way you want to. I started off pretty basic, with just three lists, one each for personal, business, and current client tasks. But recently (having read that article and re-read the relevant bits of GTD), I have begun using tags and locations and using these to get the benefit of some smart lists. So, I'm currently on the train to work, and I can look at my "@Train" list and see at a glance the stuff tagged with "na" (for "next actions") and a location of @Train - i.e the stuff that I can and should be doing from here!

The RTM website is clean, slick, and easy to use (especially if you make the effort to memorise the keyboard shortcuts), which means there is little friction involved in maintaining your tasks during the day, which of course is vital to making any system work.
One of the other sites that I'm logged into all day long is Gmail, and there's a really good Firefox extension (3.0-compatible) which integrates RTM into Gmail brilliantly - RTM can even automatically create a task when you star a mail.

What else? Did I mention the API, Blackberry support, Offline access (via Google Gears), iGoogle widget, Google Calendar integration, Atom feeds, Twitter integration, Google Maps integration.....? The list goes on - if you can think of a neat feature that you'd like to have in a web app circa 2008, chances are that RTM has it.

Give it a go, but don't blame me if you become dependent upon it!

For the record, I have no connections with Remember The Milk other than being a very happy user of their product. And thanks to Colin for originally bringing RTM to my attention.

Links for 2008-06-23 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Advanced GTD with Remember The Milk
In this post I’ll show you how to use RTM Lists, Tags, Smart Lists, and Locations to create a full-blown project and task management system based on David Allen’s Getting Things Done.

Fifteen Years of Web Browsing

ian — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 20:03:00 GMT

Hey! It's fifteen years today since Mosaic 1.0 was released!

I watched that globe spin and spin and spin for hours during my first year at university...!

On the Joys of Object-Relational Mapping

ian — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 19:15:52 GMT

My name is Ian Nelson. I'm a recovering SQL addict. It's been four weeks since my last stored procedure.

One of my reasons for leaving my cosy permanent job and entering the scary cut-throat world of freelancing was to get a broader exposure to different tools, technologies and methodologies, while remaining with my feet planted firmly in the .NET universe. So, when I got offered a position in a team who were using Subversion, Monorail, Ext.JS, NUnit, Oracle and NHibernate, I jumped at the opportunity.

Of those technologies, it's definitely NHibernate which has most dramatically changed my perspective on how enterprise solutions can (and should) be developed. For many years now, I've considered deep database (particularly SQL Server) skills to be one of my core proficiencies, and have merrily spent (wasted?) countless man hours writing dreary "plumbing" code, by the way of CRUD stored procedures and repetitive Data Access Layers in order to persist my CLR entities to the RDBMS.

Well, no longer, those days are over. I've seen the light and embraced the wonders of NHibernate. For those who are unfamiliar with it, NHibernate is an Object-Relational Mapper, and is a port of a Java utility, Hibernate. The premise is beautifully simple - by decorating your objects with attributes or, more neatly, by creating XML mapping files, you define the mappings between your .NET domain objects and their persisted representation on the database. Then NHibernate handles all the grunt work of saving your objects to and from the database.

Digging deeper, I discovered that NHibernate has been developed in such a way as to make it easy to embrace best practices in database access techniques. Several years ago I read through Fowler's seminal Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, and wondered how I would ever find time to develop solutions which made use of the cunning O-R behavioural patterns he described - Lazy Load, Unit of Work, Identity Map, Query Object, Repository, etc. I utterly failed to pick up on this paragraph on page 171:

"Remember that you don't have to build a full-featured database-mapping layer. It's a complicated beast to build, and there are products available that do this for you."

Products such as, yes, NHibernate. Or Wilson ORM, or more recently, the LINQ to SQL offering introduced by Microsoft in the .NET 3.5 Framework.

I'm glad that I have a solid grounding in SQL, and I still believe that other skills related to RDBMSs are useful in the enterprise (i.e. database design, normalisation and index tuning), but I'm pleased that I can now bring myself to relax, stop worrying, and leave an ORM to take care of generating the repetitive CRUD statements required for persisting my domain objects.

So, what have I been doing with all this "free time" that I now have available to me during a hard day at the code face? Well, I've been trying to create systems which are more robust and well-designed by making a concerted effort to embrace Test-Driven Development (for real, this time!) But that's a good topic for a future post...

A few useful NHibernate / ORM Resources:

NHibernate
Wilson ORM
LINQ to SQL
NHibernate Best Practices with ASP.NET - article by Billy McCafferty
My del.icio.us links tagged with NHibernate / ORM / LINQ
Dot Net Rocks - the ORM Smackdown Show
NHibernate In Action
LINQ In Action
Ayende's Blog
The NHibernate FAQ
Wikipedia - Object-Relational Mapping

Trying Twitter Again

ian — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 20:27:21 GMT

OK then. Scotts Watermasysk and Hanselman have convinced me to give Twitter another try.

My rationale goes something like this:

I often find myself with pithy things to share that are unworthy of a blog post. Currently, either I don't share them at all, or I email/IM then to a select few friends. I figure it would be much better to Twitter them, so that anybody who may be interested can pick up on them in the method of their choosing.
My favourite aspect of the Facebook phenomenon is the status update functionality, which is essentially what Twitter is, so I should embrace that. Anybody know how to get my Twitter updates to automatically synch' across to my FB status? Updated: Thanks to Gus Perez for letting me know about TwitterSync - just the job!
Since my first tentative foray into Twittering, it has come on leaps and bounds, with the @username protocol for sending replies, hashtags, and a wealth of clients. I'm loving twhirl, and the integration with Google Talk.
I can even add yet more task to Remember The Milk by sending a direct Tweet. How cool is that?

Now all I need is the customary legion of followers... :-) You'll find my tweets at http://twitter.com//ianfnelson

Not Quite Getting Things Done

ian — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 20:21:10 GMT

I currently have:

118 starred personal emails
8 starred business emails
85 active tasks in RTM
145 unread items in Google Reader
157 starred items in Google Reader

where do I start?

Two Great Blog Posts

ian — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 19:05:04 GMT

A couple of simply wonderful (techie) blog posts appeared in my Google Reader recently:

First Day of Contracting

ian — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 20:22:00 GMT

0822: I think I was a little over-cautious regarding my travel arrangements. I'm supposed to be pitching up at the office at 0930 for my first day, yet here I am already, killing time by having a coffee a few hundred yards away. In my defence, I blame the media, whipping us all into a frenzy with warnings of the worst storm in the winter, and disruption to travel, power, and communications - maybe this is true in the exposed regions of Cornwall, Devon and Wales, but here in Leeds city centre it's just another rainy Monday morning.

In preparation for this brief period of offline downtime, I finally installed Google Gears last night, so that I could read my Google Reader subscriptions offline. It's a very clever bit of technology, but there are some limitations:

No Images - lots of my favourite feeds, especially the ones that I'd like to read on a dreary Monday morning (I Can Has Cheezburger, Fail Blog, XKCD) are predominantly hotlinked images, which aren't downloaded by Gears for offline viewing.
Non-Full-Text Feeds - I've always found it really annoying when RSS feeds only show the first few sentences of a post, and expect me to navigate to the original site to read the full article, but when you're offline such feeds are almost useless.
Posts which comment on an online article without giving a summary - OK, I've probably been guilty of this myself, but it's amazing how many blog entries refer to other online content solely by linking, without giving any summary - e.g. "The Sunday Times has this piece today, under a headline that is eerily similar to the one its sister paper used about me a couple of years ago." Not being able to get online, I have no idea what either linked article refers to.

Other than those minor niggles, it's very slick. Still, I might try to chill instead on the train, and catch up on some iPod action.

0839: Music bought recently - Rockferry, the debut opus by hotly-tipped Welsh 23 year-old Duffy. Brilliant, utterly deserving of the praise that has been heaped on her. Nice and tight, just ten tracks, and so soulful. Also last week I bought the first Billy Bragg album in six years, Mr Love and Justice, which by contrast sounds rather unfocussed and lacking in hooks. Yes, the usual witty and acerbic lyrics are still there, but it's lacking a certain something - tunes, perhaps.

0842: I wish I felt more awake. Ben, our wonderful seven month-old boy, has a rotten cold at present which has really knocked the stuffing out of him, hence none of us got very much sleep last night. In an effort to cheer him up yesterday, we took him to The Deep in Hull (he loves watching the fish). Outside, my eye was caught by the appalling grammar in this advertisement:

For a few seconds I was really confused, and wondered if it might be some intentionally cunning marketing trickery. I ask you, how many people must have seen those words between the idea's conception and the eventual installation of the sign? Surely one of them must have had the presence of mind to think "hang on guys, this doesn't actually make sense.."

0847: Also on the subject of language, across the street from here I can see a salon which is advertising itself as a Hair Cuttery. I like that! I'm trying to think of other possibilities along a similar vein - perhaps a dentist could be a Teeth Fixery, an accountants could be a Figure Fiddlery, or a butcher could be an Animal Killery? Then again, perhaps not..

1250: Stupid Subway guy! I quite clearly said I wanted "everything except onions", so what has he given me on my Italian BMT? Nothing except onions! Honestly, what suit-wearing type would want a lunchtime sandwich stuffed to the brim with pongy onions? If I were American I'd take it back and complain.

1645: First day over. That was painless enough! Actually it was pretty easy compared to my days as an FTE. No phone calls from business types, no helpdesk calls from users, no need to plan my next career move or worrying about office politics. Just sitting and coding, using the skills that God gave me, and earning more cash into the bargain. I should have done this years ago.

1704: At the station, waiting for my train, listening to 1973 by James Blunt. Yes, I know it's James Blunt, but it's a melancholy song, and I love all melancholy songs. Plus, it reminds me of relaxing in a coffee shop in Bratislava with my wife and son.

1730: Listening to the Andromeda Heights LP by Prefab Sprout. Evidently there was a reason I hadn't obtained a copy of this sooner - not their finest hour, is it?

1807: Walking home from the train station, catching up on some recent albums. Enjoying Challengers by The New Pornographers. Myriad Harbour is great, undoubtedly the best thing I've heard all week! :-)

Not That SSIS..

ian — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 15:10:00 GMT

Hmm, this wasn't quite what I expected to find when searching Amazon for a book on SSIS.

Still, might as well add it to my DVD rental list... ;-)