Paul Kiddie

Toward the end of last year I was invited to present at New Relic's FutureStack conference in their Hacker Lounge track. I had a great time…

The other day I was looking for a Powershell one-liner to get the content of a URL and came across this superuser post , which suggested to…

A nice quick one this week. I spent a little bit of time trying to debug some Entity Framework queries, particularly the parameter values…

I recently needed to ensure that all single quotes in attribute and text nodes for a given XML document were escaped in a first pass before…

XSL transforms are one of those things I never get used to - I spend just enough time to get up to speed with the syntax, then revisit after…

I was recently debugging an issue with a WCF service I had written, where it appeared that POSTing data to the service returned a HTTP 40…

I recently got into MSDeploy in order to automate the deployment of web application packages to IIS. A great resource that got me most of…

Got burnt by a little gotcha today writing a sample Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) application. I was manually hooking up a WPF…

I recently had a problem where I wanted my WCF services to run under the context of a user with additional permissions over the standard…

A few months ago whilst writing up my thesis and doing some number crunching with Matlab, my machine died spectacularly, leaving the hard…

I was recently re-setting up my Windows 7 VPN server and forgot an essential step that led me to get 'Error 720: A Connection to the remote…

I've got a bunch of data in three columns (x,y,z) which I put into a cross tab and output as a surface and contour plot in Excel 2010. I…

As dry as the subject of PHP configuration is, I thought a blog entry was necessary as I’ve just spent a fair bit of time digging around to…

I've been having a bit of a play with Word 2010 since its release on MSDN to see if any improvements have been made in the area of reference…

I spent a little bit of time yesterday trying to code up a file progress bar for a project requiring large uploads. It seems the best (and…

A couple of weeks ago I picked up an Acer Revo on the cheap as a replacement for my old behemoth of a HTPC. The Revo is a "nettop" with…

Apologies for those of you trying to access my blog over the past couple of days: normal service has now resumed after getting severely let…

If you want to be able to include Visio drawings within your LyX documents, the process is relatively painless as you can export the drawing…

PDF’s generated with pdflatex , the pdf generator for LaTeX documents which is used by default in LyX, cannot be commented on directly…

When writing for publication, you may be offered a .cls file from the journal in question in which to format a TeX document to their…

I keep all my media in a central location on a network store but I want to be able to play it on my iphone when I’m away without network…

As an update to my “hello world” kernel module article, there is a much easier way to set up your Debian-based Linux (including Ubuntu) to…

Quagga is a suite of dynamic routing protocols for Unix based systems and is a fork of GNU Zebra , which seems to be discontinued. I…

Windows 7 Enterprise installs by default expect an Key Management Server (KMS) running on the local network by which to activate against…

I've just deployed a few visual changes to my blog which should help with the readability and usability of the material on here. Included is…

Saturday marked the 8th annual DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper conference at Microsoft’s Reading HQ in the UK. This is a community event…

I've just picked up an PAYG mobile broadband package from O2 with a HUAWEI Mobile Connect E160 USB stick. Expecting an effortless install I…

I've been a big fan of SyncToy since it's first release as a way to maintain backups of my important documents across several hard disks…

A few clients I've worked with in the past are Microsoft-centric having Server 2003 based dedicated servers but want to be able to host…

I recently created a perl script (lets call it 1.) to process a network trace and compute the number of bytes received for a given protocol…

I’ve recently been looking into virtualisation methods within Linux to find an optimal way of creating a network testbed of virtual machines…

I wanted to see if there was a Java equivalent of .NET's MessageBox class. Turns out there is but it's a little more hidden away as a…

iHackintosh has a great article showing how you can get Snow Leopard (the latest and greatest from Apple) running as a Virtual Machine…

Thought I would post this as I find I need it regularly. This is thanks to a great blog post over at http://perezj.blogspot.com/2008/1…

Quick tip: If you have replaced your network cards in Ubuntu 8.04, or in my case imaged a Ubuntu install across many PC's, and would like…

Part of my workflow when developing Wordpress based websites is to import a brand new Wordpress install into Subversion, then check it out…

I'm in the process of deploying a website which has recently been rebuilt in Wordpress to take advantage of the CMS back end and easy…

Last time we created a Netfilter kernel module which simply dropped all packets which gave the structure and functions that need to be…

I'm a huge fan of the docking feature in Windows 7 that allows you to dock windows to the left or right half of the screen, or to fill the…

This is the second part of the series in creating a NetFilter module for Ubuntu 8.04 (running linux kernel 2.6.24-23). In it I’ll write a…

Yesterday was the IT Pro ‘new efficiency’ launch for Windows 7, Server 2008 R2 and Exchange 2010 held in Club Wembley in Wembley Stadium…

This is part one of my series on creating a Netfilter module in order to implement a routing protocol in Linux. I've broken down the…

As part of a network testbed I'm working on I need to manage network interfaces and dedicate a network interface to a Linux container. Now…

Today I've been trying to generate an e-mail signature in Outlook 2007 which renders well in Google Mail also, with some success. The…

I'll be taking part in the Cancer Research Run10k event this coming weekend in Sutton Park, Birmingham . I'll be tracking the run using my…

Google Maps is fully integrated with the Google Ajax loader, which provides a convenient way to access a number of the Google APIs. The…

I just had the fright of my life when opening one of my thesis chapters this morning, to which I got presented with the message: I pressed…

For those of you who don't know, Jabref is an open-source, Java based reference manager that allows you to import citations from a number…

Made a bit of a boo-boo today... I used the Subclipse plugin regularly within Eclipse to manage my code checkins on my SVN repositories, but…

I spent a disproportionate amount of time today trying to get my head round some Java regular expression code that would match against…

I've just released a small tool on CodePlex that lets you convert from a TeX bibliography (such as that done in JabRef) into an XML file…

I recently needed to do some processing of some data in a text file within matlab where I needed to break up a given string based upon a…

I’ve been trying to perfect my HTPC setup recently, the latest addition being a Logitech Harmony 555 remote which lets me control all my…

I've just recently signed up with a new web host (Weycrest) to take over the hosting of my blog, and they utilise the Plesk control panel…

This follows on from an earlier post, Speech Recognition and the System.Speech namespace , where I was trying to find out roughly what the…

It was so on the cards but it looks like we'll all be able to get a bit of Windows 7 action tomorrow (9/01), with a public beta for what…

In years gone by, to add a collection of items to a collection control, I've gone through the long winded way of calling Items.Add on a…

I had a problem recently where I wanted to find out, very roughly, the topic of a set of un-annotated lectures. I needed a recognition…

Recently a client asked me to implement paging on the administrators side of a CV/online application submission system. This essentially…

I came across a situation recently where I needed to use an object as a key for as hashmap. According to this Java post all you need to do…

Sometimes its necessary to use an older JDK for compiling legacy Java applications. One of these is Jist/SWANS, a discrete event simulator…

On at least one device (a BlueSmirf), using the following construct in J2ME agent.searchServices(new int[] {0×100}, new UUID[]{new UUID…

I've been using the following: stringItem = new StringItem(null,null, Item.PLAIN); to indicate a placeholder for a string in a form on a J…

I've recently been doing some website UI work using the ASP.NET AJAX extensions in which I had a ScriptManager instance and controls that…

I spent a some time recently getting DotNetNuke installed on a Server 2003 box, with help from a variety of sources. So I thought I'd bring…

I've been looking for something that can aid me in converting doc files and other formats to html, or some internal representation that I…

Registration for the UK iteration of the MIX conference which was held in Las Vegas earlier this year has just opened . There is a…

Here is a great blog post on how to install the DotNetNuke source on a Vista machine and get it up and running through an assumed Visual…

It seems there are some issues in installing Moodle 1.8 on a Vista machine. Using the documentation available from the Moodle wiki I…

Last weekend myself and a few other Student Partners, Representatives, MVPs and the academic team from Microsoft went to the Metallica gig…

I've just recently come across a bit of software called WebGuide  which gives your Media Center box some great functionality. I've always…

This year has been a great year for developers with the general release of the .NET Framework 3.0 that provides a new set of APIs to produce…

Like a lot of students, I think access to information at the fastest speed possible is incredibly important. With the arrival of Microsoft…