David's Blog

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Sun, 20 May 2012 10:39:00 +0000

Having trouble upgrading your Nuget Package Manager? If you get the error described in Microsoft's explanation, their advice isn't enough. After uninstalling it from the control panel, it is still present (yup!) and still won't let you upgrade. "Zombie like it still exerts a malign influence even after death..."

Here's what you need Close down Visual Studio. Look for C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\Extensions\Microsoft Corporation\NuGet Package Manager
and you'll see the folder for the older Nuget version; something like 1.5.20902.9026. Just delete it. Now you can upgrade. Simples!

I need a new word! So here is aptoblique

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 11:11:00 +0000

In boardgames the phrase horizontally or vertically but not diagonally crops up frequently. As in "these pieces can move" or the "squares are connected. ", so I've taken the latin for connected asnd sideways aptus and oblique, portmanteau'd them and shortened them to aptoblique. So if two pieces can move aptobliquely they can move horizontally or vertically but not diagonally.

Has My PC A Virus?

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 17:14:00 +0000

I've seen this before (the Spooler servive has eaten 2 1/4GB of ram) and it's easily fixed by switching to Services tab and stopping then starting Spooler.

This only happens after I've printed something a few hours earlier. I'm running Microsoft Security Essentials and it's uptodate.

On the other hand it may be just a faulty driver for Windows 7 for my HP Laserjet 1018 with a pernicious time bomb memory leak. If you do know, please tell!

Out with the old

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 17:04:00 +0000

So it's bye bye to Portent.org, my five year old blog on interesting things. I'm not sure what will happen as I've sold it, the domain name and the twitter hashtag.

New in is fiction writing, an experimental fiction writing site for me to play and practise and gratis which is about free things. Software currently but this will probably change.

First Page Result on Google in 5 Days!

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 06:59:00 +0000

This is a genuine screen shot of the first page of results showing it in 2nd place.

Out of curiosity I searched for the phrase writers q & a on Google.com yesterday. (Tuesday November 10th 2010). This is the writers.im domain I had registered on Friday 5th November 2010 and setup Q2A over the weekend. Depending on which PC or iPhone I look on, it ranges from 1st to 9th (i.e. on the first page) out of 17 million.

Try it yourself- search on Google (or just click writers q and a).

Of course realistically it doesn't matter where it comes in search results if those results aren't what people are searching for. For instance if I search Google for writers then http://writers.im does not appear in the first ten pages. I wasn't expecting it to. I was just amazed that a new domain/website could get a very high search result in 5 days especially for a .im domain.

Writers.im - Any questions?

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 19:11:00 +0000

Continuing in a very creative mood, I've today setup Writers Q & A, a website for people to post questions and answers on writing and writers. The intention is to have something similar to the programmers Q & A website stackoverflow.com, but for writers.

Although I'm a part time technical writer on About.com, I've dabbled with fiction (and sci-fi) writing over the years and really want to develop it more; it's an itch i have to scratch but it's in my metaphorical back where I can't reach it. Writers.im is a small step towards that goal. I figure if I give a little I get a little! So it's completely free, no ads. It's an experiment which if it fails costs me very little.

I'm a bit Tied Up

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 08:24:00 +0000

Thanks to ShoeString Laces Ltd for a very fast turnround. I ordered two pairs of shoelaces on Thursday and they arrived today. If you need shoelaces, I recommended them. From a happy customer!

I write like Cory Doctorow

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 21:48:00 +0000

That is according to iwl.me. A free site, it let's you paste or type in a block of text and then analyses it to see whose writing style it closest resembles. I tried it twice, posting two different longish blocks from this blog. The first time I was like er Dan Brown ( I wish, Kerching!) The second time I got Cory Doctorow, a slightly less well known Sci-Fi author who is a nice guy; he has replied to some of my emails in the past. Oddly enough he didn't send me any money but that's likely because I didn't ask.

Who knows, he says "Tonight Mathew I could be Chekhov" if I adopt a new writing style. Or donning my programming hat, I could be Markov Chain whose elegant if idiotic and meaningless phrases have helped spammers bypass a million filters.

I write like
Cory Doctorow

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

iPhone 3G Battery Weirdness

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 08:42:00 +0000

Before getting an iPhone 4 I upgraded my 3G to IOS 4 and used it for several weeks and noticed that sometimes when charging it, the battery indicator didn't update, even after a couple of hours or all night. This seems to happen when charging from the mains.

It's either a bug with the IOS 4 software particular to 3G or there's something not right between chargers.

How to Correct the Indicator
(1) Reset the iPhone. i.e. hold both buttons down until the "slide to power off" swipe appears and then switch it off and restart.

or

(2) Plug it into a Computer with iTunes and charge it.

New Software and Books

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 09:58:00 +0000

A big day for new software. I'm now running Office 2010 at home and in conjunction with a paid subscription iPhone/iPad App ($15 a year) called MobileNoter I can now synchonise Office 2010 OneNote notes with my iPhone/iPad. This looks very well done, it all worked smoothly (apart from the Wifi Access- I'm not sure why as my Windows Forewall is open and the iPhone picked up the Pc's name and the Bonjour service is running) but currently it won't synch over Wifi. It's not that important as it syncs over the Cloud service.

Apple still I think have a problem in recognising that people do want to do some work on the iPhone/iPad and that the methods for copying stuff to PCs/Macs in a word suck mega bigtime. Unless you have DropBox, you need to send emails or sync via iTunes. So other solutions like MobileNoter have stepped in but they shouldn't have to really...

Also my friends at Packt Publishing are sending me "Flash 10 Multiplayer Game Essentials" to review so that will appear on David Bolton in a week or two. As it's Flash, I couldn't really review it on my About C,C++ and C# column. Creating multi-player games is my current non-work interest (and writing for About)

ID Cards- Why Do We Need them?

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 12:32:00 +0000

I saw an article on the Home Office website about why we need them, the truth is we don't (or the National Identity Register either) so I wrote an article about Why we need ID cards - We don't. The idea is to try and knock the Home Office article off the top spot for the phrase why do we need id cards. Feel free to link to my article, if you do please include that phrase in the link.

This is the linking html you can use.

<a href="http://dhbolton.com/articles/why-we-need-id-cards.html" title="Link to Why we Ned ID cards - we don't">Why we need ID cards</a>

When in April 2009?

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Sat, 02 May 2009 08:14:00 +0000

I really like the Multiflex web templates designed by Pastor Gerhardt on http://www.1234.info/. I used one on the online property auction site http://getset2move.com, but looking at 1-2-3-4.info, I think they are a trifle optimistic about the date! (Highlighted in the red box April 31, 2009).

Much Better Spirit of Christmas!

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 16:56:00 +0000

Coming home on the Central Line today around 2.00 pm and this nice bloke was giving away Quality Street sweets on the tube. No catch, no charge, just a gesture of good will at Christmas.

I had a sweet and took his photo. Sir I salute you! Merry Christmas!

English- as she is Bespoken!

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 09:46:00 +0000

This at least made me chuckle, also in Canary Wharf. (Hey I work there!). The sentence in capitals on the white banner. "Allegra will be signing books bespokely"! She looks quite cute but I bet she is bespoken for...

Spirit of Christmas - Canary Wharf

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 09:41:00 +0000

This photo- taken of a Christmas tree* in the Canary wharf says everything you need to know about the UK in the 21st century. Bah Humbug!

*Every Christmas tree and hanging decorations in Canary Wharf has one of these. Nice eh, the bastardisation of a bauble with a CCTV message!

Sat here in a pub

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 17:53:00 +0000

Out tonight having a drink.

Mispellings in TV Adverts

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Sun, 25 May 2008 13:55:00 +0000

With a product name like Cillit Bang, (Silly Name!) I suppose it was to be expected but I saw an Ad today on Sky One (about 14:10 pm GMT+1) with a big bad spelling mistake. I wasn't even paying much attention but as it flashed past something must have registered so I rewound and paused it.. et voila.

The top photo was the full screen advert (as seen on a Sky+ Box) and the bottom is an expanded version of the bottom right part of the screen. "Stainless Steal!". Er chaps, you mean "Stainless Steel"?

Argos screw up a purchase reservation!

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 16:39:00 +0000

Yesterday my wife reserved three items on their website, to be collected within 48 hours from one of their stores in East London. She received an email confirming that the three items were reserved and would be held until the end of tomorrow.

Today we traipsed down to pick them up. 3.00 o'clock at Argos on a holiday Sunday- almost an entire outer circle of hell to itself. It took 5 minutes sat in the car park just to get a parking spot.

Anyway they screwed up. So much for three items reserved. They only had two. The other was 'Out of Stock' according to their staff. So here we have a no doubt expensive stock/booking system which gets it wrong.

Presumably at some point the branches stock figures were matched against reservations and the system should have realised that a reserved item would be out of stock? So why no notification, apology or anything?

I tried their phone line support. Getting through to a human was an achievement, however she might as well have not been there. Full marks to her for passing me to another number where the staff had long finished for the day. But a waste of my time (on an 0870 number- gee thanks Argos).

So I have used their online email system to send an email that should glow white hot with ire (polite, no bad language but firm). Watch this space... I wonder if anyone in Argos land ever checks the web for good/bad customer feedback?

I made top ten for C++ Programming on Google!

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 07:45:00 +0000

Writing for About.com (see previous post) isn't done just for love; they do pay and that depends upon how many people visit the site. Which means I have to write stuff that people want to read and also apply a bit of SEO magic to make sure it's found for what people are actually searching for.

Well my C++ column (including C and C#) is now at #9 on the first page of google for c++ programming. Getting to #1 position will be a lot lot harder. In fact staying in the top ten won't be that easy!

Now I just have to work out how to get something that people on Digg and Reddit want to read...

Rock, Scissors and Paper Contest

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 08:05:00 +0000

My other hat is writing the About C, C++ and C# website for About.com- the New York Times owned website. I'm one of their 600 guides who write for them.

One of the interesting things I've been doing there is running the Rock, Scissors and Paper (RSP) contest- it's free and open to anyone and new players can join anytime between now and Christmas. It's not the easiest to let developers use all three languages to write bots to play RSP but I managed it.

Each week, every bot in the contest plays every other bot in a 100 hand match. All wins are totalled up and that determines the ranking.

What I did was develop a C# Winforms application that uses a dll for each bot. I've done the hard bit and provided a full skeleton dll for C, C++ and C# that anyone can download and flesh out; just fill in the function bodies, the move logic goes in the GetMove() function. I wrote a C# wrapper for the C and C++ bots which wraps the dll calls in a class- it looks like this:

   public class bot
         {
      public const int botnum = 1;
      const string dll = "c:\\ongoing\\dlls\\skeleton1.dll";

      [DllImport(dll,
      CallingConvention = CallingConvention.Cdecl)]
      public static extern string GetBotName(); // returns name of your Bot

      [DllImport(dll,
      CallingConvention = CallingConvention.Cdecl,CharSet=CharSet.Ansi)]
      public static extern char
         GetMove([MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.LPStr)]String S,
         [MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.LPStr)]String S2); // return move

.. others trimmed for shortness
      }

Note the marshalling attributes - the dlls use cdecl, it's ansi chars (8 bit as C# uses Unicode) and the strings are passed as lpstr. A string in C is just an array of 8 bit chars.

This function GetMove passes in the previous hands (in this match against one bot) so you can see what your bot played and what the opponent played. After each week I publish the results and a file containing all bots moves- eg this was the match between bot 1 and 5. 1 won 29 times, 5 won 33. Below this are the strings which I've trimmed to fit this.

1 v 5 29 33
1 SSSRSSSRSRRRSSRSRRRRRRRRR.....PPSPSRSS
5 PSSPRRSPSSPPRSPSSSPSSSSPP.....SSSRSSRP

You can see the full file this came from: Week 6 results It's just a text file, generated by the application.

So if you fancy entering- remember it's free just follow this link:
Rock, Scissors and Paper Contest

Hard Disk Woes

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 06:10:00 +0000

Over the years I must have bought maybe 15 hard disks of increasing capacity. Most have been very reliable (I did drop one in 1999 which slowly deteriorated over a 6 month period with increasing numbers of bad sectors). But two I have bought recently have acquired bad sectors in a short period of time.

One is an external 160 GB 2.5" disk. I bought this from Freecom whose disk enclosures are excellent- internally it was a Samsung disk. The first problem was my own stupidity. I left the cable plugged in to the enclosure USB socket (it was a micro USB) while it was moved and it snapped the socket off the interface motherboard. It was very tiny- 5 pins so couldn't be soldered back on.

I found an Irish firm Nexxons selling cheap 2.5" enclosures on Ebay and transplanted the disk from the elegant Freecom case (invalidating the Freecom warranty of course) into one of those. Freecom would have replaced the entire thing but I would have lost some recently unbacked up data. Their technical support are excellent but they told me they send the damaged stuff off to Germny so you have no chance of recovering data.

Three months later. I plug the disk in one day and Windows decides to ignore the disk! I always format them NTFS. Anyway, the NTFS structure had got corrupted and doing a chkdsk /f tidied things up. A useful tip- you know when you try to do check a disk for errors from Windows properties tools with the Automatically fix file system errors box ticked and it won't do it cos the disk is busy (and offers to do it on your next boot). Drop to dos, (start, run enter cmd and press enter). Then type in chkdsk e: /f (if e: is your drive). This will close processes down if it can and do it immediately.

So I did that and d'oh 4K bad sectors. But it worked so i backed stuff up, bought a 500Gb brick (Lacie) from Dabs and copied stuff onto that. A week later, same problem with the 160GB. Now it was 8K bad sectors. In fact it was worse because I used a spare PC and left it trying to access my disk which took it 30 mins. I checked out Samsung- 36 month warranty on hard disks, and mine was oh 6 months old. All UK Samsung disk returns are done by http://www.rexo.co.uk/ who have a pretty good returns website. One week after sending the faulty disk off, a brand new one came back. Kudos to Rexo for excellent service (and likewise to Freecom).

But the saga isn't over yet. Somehow I'd managed to buy the biometric 500GB drive not just an ordinary disk. It has a pretty good fingerprint reader, though it is very fussy about positioning fingers. It usually takes three or four attempts before it works but it is reliable enough to trust. I don't need this level of security though.

So the other day I was copying some files onto the replacement 160GB from the 500GB when... bad block! Chkdsk didn't find any bad sectors but the file was still uncopyable and the folder it was in could not be deleted. I got everything else off and did a full 4 hour format. 4K bad sectors. This on a disk that I'd bought just ten days earlier and had definitely not dropped...Dabs have a very good returns system so it's now waiting to be collected. I suspect Dabs might have trouble testing the drive as they don't have my fingers!

4Kb out of 500 GB is minuscule but hard disks are generally so reliable that it indicates some kind of fault which will only get worse. Once you get a dodgy sector, seriously think about replacing the disk or you risk losing it and everything on it.

20 MPH Zone Madness - Congestion Charge Tactics?

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 20:38:00 +0000

Waltham Forest Council have been bribed by Transport For London to induce vehicular atherosclerosis in the transport system in East London and they are now targetting my area. My suspicions are that by sealing off side streets, adding 20 MPH zones and putting speedbumps everywhere they force traffic onto the main roads and congest them. All this is done in the name of stopping speeding and making the place safer. It's a regular speedtrack.

On my road we get the odd loony who does 60 or 70 at 2.00 am in the morning - this where the road is barely wide enough for two cars to pass without exchanging fluids. One bloke lost control and clipped 4 cars before crunching to a halt. That was about 4 years ago. The main speeding that happens round here is on the main road at 5.00 am in the morning. I see cars doing 50-60 MPH. It won't stop that happening.

Then of course TFL will claim (this is my belief- no proof) that because traffic is slow on the main road the area (East London) needs a Congestion Charge - you can see this was decided a few years ago.

So what good do speedbumps do? None except force cars to slow down. They are however very bad for the environment with increased noise and air pollution and vibration shock. See for yourself. Barnet reduced accidents in the year after it removed their speedbumps.

The fact is that speedbumps appear to cost lives- up to 500 in London. I quote this from Paul Smith, a retired engineer who campaigns to improve road safety on his website SafeSpeed. It's a Word Doc.

"In London in 1981, 274 pedestrians died in road accidents. By 2002 the annual toll had dropped to 107. This covers the main period of hump introduction in the London area. Even if we assume that the entire benefit of 167 lives was due to road humps (and clearly there are other factors) the 500 lives lost annually in ambulances claimed by the London Ambulance Service is three times greater. "

So speedbumps do not save lives- they cost them by slowing down emergency services by approximately 10 seconds per bump. Those seconds make all the difference.

So from now on, as far as I am concerned TFL are to be called "Congest for London".

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 20:31:00 +0000

After several months with Pivotlog as my blogging software, I defected to WordPress. My hands were a bit tied because the people who provide the shared server were complaining that it was running excessively high CPU figures- around 52%. So three hours with WordPress then I found the import from Pivotlog addin and it was a very smooth transition.

Pivotlog was possibly always going to be a potential time bomb because it used flat files whereas Wordpress uses MySQL.

Programming contests

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 06:15:00 +0000

I write for About.com on C, C++ and C# programming and have been running a Programming Challenge.

You find lots of these challenges and contests on the web so I collected a list of ten that seem to be live and put them in a article Ten Programming Contests. One thing I've noticed is just how many Chinese and Eastern European developers are entering these. Maybe it's a cultural thing or maybe this is where the future lies. If I do a Google Trends search for C++/C#, these are then top ten countries in order using google.

India, Pakistan, South Africa, Israel, Singapore, Viet Nam, Ukraine, Russia, Czech Republic, Denmark.

Of course maybe the richer countries like the USA, Canada, UK, France, Germany can afford the manuals and have less need to search... but interesting.

London Underground does Goatse!

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 07:46:00 +0000

A goatse is a rude thing indeed. I am not going to tell you what it is but if you look on Wikipedia, you'll find out. Anyway I spotted one the other day on Leyton tube!