Stephen Hill's Bloggie

February 2010 Linkathon

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 03:00:00 GMT

Michael Schumacher returns to an F1 cockpit as the first week of F1 testing got underway. I created and battled my own Verbatim Memory Card Monster. I've also been listening to music on The Sixty One. Some guy rips apart Avatar. Read this great article entitled Realism in UI Design. I was going to link to 45 really nice iPhone App websites, but I guess the webmaster at this site sucks at his job. Great article on automated backing up of MySQL. FREE ICON PACKS! I'm still waiting to buy this Attack of the Zombie Squirrel T-Shirt. And I bought and got addicted to some Angry Birds. Discovered that Starbucks has drive through's in the US. I learned about Unix Time and may even use it in future projects. Here's how to convert Unix Time into a .Net DateTime object. And here's also a handy online Unix Time Convertor. Apparently there is a page fold, and I agree. Nibbler told me that my website was 6.0 Good. Here's some tips for designing iPhone stylesheets. This is an excellent redux/redesign of Smashing Magazine - Now if they could just make the content a little more original too. My mate Seb told me about the Convert Center. Pencil looked interesting as a wire-framing tool but I've yet to use it - preferring HTML mock-ups instead. Someone released a Google Chrome extension that does Nothing! I learnt how to extend existing .Net classes. Anyone wanna try a simple maths puzzle? An Ampersand a day keeps... Time to utilize some more CSS3 properties. Handy browser script for downloading YouTube video's. You need either Google Chrome or Greasemonkey to use the script. Another excellent document on how the BBC are redesigning their web image. Pure CSS Imperial AT-AT Walker! and finally, here's a tutorial video on how to reduce camera shake in Adobe After Effects.

January 2010 Linkathon

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 12:00:00 GMT

The authors of "The Art of Scalability" wrote this excellent article, 11 Strategies to Rock your Startup's Scalability in 2010. Expedia get a New Logo. BeautifulPeople.com banned 5,000 fatties.

Warzone 2100

Sat, 02 Jan 2010 06:00:00 GMT

As it turns out, I'm a huge fan of RTS games. Although over the past 5 to 10 years I've mainly been playing FPS's such as Quake, Doom, Half-Life and Call of Duty. But there's something really rewarding about building and controlling your own army, and battling against others.

As far as I can remember, the first RTS game I bought was Age of Empires. A truly brilliant game which set the benchmark for many other games of it's type.

Next up was MechCommander. Slightly different from Age of Empires in that you didn't build any thing, you simply earned money for completing missions. But there was an art to building your mechs and choosing the correct driver which made the game enjoyable and challenging.

The last RTS I remember buying was StarCraft. Oh boy was StarCraft and truly great game by many standards and I'm looking forward to StarCraft II... when it's actually released.

I would gladly play any of the above games today. Sure their graphics might be a bit dated, but their gameplay was second to none. However, I recently came across a game called Warzone 2100, a game originally released in 1999 (and one I somehow missed) which was open sourced in 2004 and is now run by the Warzone 2100 Project. The game is similar to StarCraft in alot of respects and perhaps this is why I am finding it so enjoyable. There is a very good User Guide to help you along and if you need any help or feel like contributing to the project, there is a very active community who are willing to help.

I suggest that everyone at least tries this game out. You never know, you might enjoy it. But don't take my word for it. Here's some ingame footage you'll enjoy :)

2010 New Year Resolutions

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 01:00:00 GMT

Happy New Year! It's that time of year for making new year resolutions and this year I thought I would make some and try my darn hardest to keep to them. So here they are...

1. Loose over 5kg

2. Release FordMotorsport.co.uk

3. Release CouchDb.Net

4. Become a Linux Ninja

5. Do a Track Day

I also want to write on my blog even more. So I'm going to stop being afraid of writing small articles. I'm always reading/researching new things programming and web related, and I should pop these on my blog more often. I'm also going to keep to my word about redesigning this blog.

Again, Happy New Year Everyone!

FordMotorsport Community Update

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Time for a catch up on where we're at with the FordMotorsport Community. Basically progress had slowed to a stop over the summer/autumn months for one reason or another and now it's time to get the fire started again. So here's what I'm going to be focusing on over the next few months:

Search

Currently there's no way to search for posts, replies, comments, users or news so I will be developing a specific search site (search.fordmotorsport.co.uk) where you will be able to search for all the content on the site or just filter the search to a specific area.

Emoticons

I need to get Emoticons fully working. Their nearly there, they just need some tweaks.

User Signatures

User Signatures are a common feature of traditional forums and we too have opted to have them. I'm not sure I want to allow users to do everything under the sun with them. Not only will they add quite a bit of extra server load, but they will also make page loads slower for the users because of all the extra HTML and images. Weather we limit signatures to a couple of paragraphs of plain text + links is a possibility. I'm sure a decision will be made when I come to write the feature.

User Wall

I want to write a wall/live-feed system which kinda mimics your user profile wall on Facebook. On here people would be able to publicly post messages to you but you'd also be able to see activity happening in response to your posts, replies and comments.

More administration tools for privileged users

We have develop a points system where users earn points for using the system, the more points they earn, the more moderator like controls they gain. These features need to be developed further and are ongoing.

RSS and Atom Feeds

We have no feeds and we need em'!

iPhone Version

I want to be able to access the site when not at a computer so I can keep up-to-date with what's going on. A stripped down, iPhone compatible version of the site is what is required so I can keep using the site on the move.

Blueprint CSS

I also want to rework the HTML and CSS to use the Blueprint CSS Framework which has a nice horizontal and vertical spacing guidelines which should make styling any new features much easier.

There's a lot to do. So I better get cracking!

Redesigning my Blog using CouchDB, Memcached and ASP.NET

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 10:00:00 GMT

First of all. I'm glad that I'm finally writing here again. The last time I posted what I would call a "Proper Post", was 9 months ago - Not Good! So I've set myself a little project which is to redesign my blog using a couple of cool new technologies.

So I've decided to write the application code which runs this blog with ASP.NET, CouchDB for the data storage and Memcached as a caching layer. Currently the blog uses ASP.NET, Internal Memory Cache and SQL Server Express 2005.

Some of you may be thinking, "Why don't you just install WordPress?", and you would be right, I should use WordPress, however. I wouldn't really learn anything new from using WordPress (which I have used before in other projects). I want to learn new technologies, think about new ways of doing things. Plus I'm a programmer and I like writing my own programs!

So, lets jump straight in and define the goals for my redesign project.

Goals

Use CouchDB as the data store.
Use Memcached to keep consistent data in memory.
Combine the administration and frontend together.
Allow posts to be written in MarkDown syntax.
The site must be iPhone compatible.
Use CSS3 and HTML5.

CouchDB

CouchDB looks like a very interesting non-relational key/value database where the "value" is a JSON object. There's a lot I could say about CouchDB but I think this introduction covers just about everything. The area I'm most interested in is using the JavaScript MapReduce functions to create structured views of the data.

In order the communicate with CouchDB, I am going to write my own C# class surprisingly called CouchDB .Net which will open a HTTP request to the CouchDB server and return a JSON object which can then be parsed by a JSON class for .Net. There isn't very much code at the moment but over the next couple of weeks I hope to have functional code which supports most of the features of CouchDB.

Memcached

Memcached is a very fast in-memory key/value pair data store. I will be using the .Net memcached client library to access the Memcached instance. This will cache database queries until the item is removed from the cache by code or expires. I will be implementing Memcached after the redesigned blog has gone live just so I can watch the performance of CouchDB.

Multi-function Frontend

Currently the blog is administered from a separate backend control panel which to some degree, makes writing the frontend code a lot easier. However, I like the idea of having everything in one place and in most web applications today, this is the case. I suppose it will work in a similar fashion to MediaWiki.

MarkDown

I don't want to use a WYSIWYG editor because as far as I'm concerned from past usage, they all suck! I also don't like writing pure HTML into a textarea because it's very hard to read. Instead I'm going to go down the Stack Overflow route and use MarkDown syntax which I can also added HTML to if required. This will also make writing and editing of blog posts on my iPhone much easier.

iPhone Compatibility

A couple of weeks ago I got my first iPhone with Orange and I now know the pain of accessing most websites through a phone. So I want people to be able to have the best possible experience when browsing my site through a mobile device, by which I only mean, the iPhone. Although I still hate Apple for their crappy and probably illegal No Refund Policy when buying content through iTunes.

CSS3 and HTML5

It's time to forget about Internet Explorer. CSS3 and HTML5 are the way forward and it's time to get using them. If you can't be bothered to use a decent browser, you only have yourself to blame.

So that's the plan. There will be a beta version available at beta.gatekiller.co.uk which will actually be the trunk version, so it should be buggy. Hopefully if all goes well, I may release the source code under the Bloggie Project which never really got anywhere.

Cheers
Stephen.

Top 30 'Top X List' Websites

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 09:30:00 GMT

What really get on my nerves, even more so than Joe Pasquale stupid song, are the often too popular sites that keep on producing their "Top X <Insert Current Web Design Trent> Lists". What happened to good old original Content is King?. So if you can't beat them, join them. Here is my Top 30 list of websites that quite often product Top X lists of crap...

Goodbye MG ZR 105

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 01:45:00 GMT

On Monday the 9th March 2009 at approximately 8:30am, my fiancée's car was hit by another car while she was pulling out of a side road onto a main road. Thankfully, she was unharmed, although a little shocked about the incident. Anyway, these are the photographs of the damage the was done to the car that has now been written off by the insurance company...

Goodbye, may you rest in peace.

Send Emails with .NET and Gmail

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 12:45:00 GMT

I'm currently working on a new website called, Ford Motorsport, and I wanted the website to send emails to users when they sign up and do certain actions through the site, as one would expect from a community website.

I was originally using System.Web.Mail to send out emails but I recently found out that it was replaced in .Net 2.0 with System.Net.Mail and we're now on version 3.5. Yikes! I've chosen to use Gmail's SMPT service for now while the site is growing which will give me time to find a more suitable SMPT provider. Gmail's SMPT service requires an SSL connection over port 587 with authentication, which is much easier todo using the new namespace and classes.

So here's a snippet of code which will send a Transformers themed email using Gmail's SMPT service. You will need to import the System.Net and System.Net.Mail namespaces.

// You need to instantiate a new MailMessage class
MailMessage oMail = new MailMessage();

// Set the To email address
oMail.To.Add(new MailAddress("oprime@autobots.com", "Optimus Prime"));

// Set the From email address
oMail.From = new MailAddress("switwicky@gmail.com", "Sam Witwicky");

// Set the Subject
oMail.Subject = "Test Email Through Gmail SMTP";

// You want to allow HTML content and then specify it
oMail.IsBodyHtml = true;
oMail.Body = "<p>Hi Prime,</p><p>Just sending you a test email from ASP.NET via Gmail.</p><p>Cheers Spark</p>";

// This is where you specify the SMTP server and we need to enable SSL on Port 587
SmtpClient Smtp = new SmtpClient("smtp.gmail.com", 587);
Smtp.EnableSsl = true;

// You need to specify your gmail or googlemail email address and password
Smtp.Credentials = new NetworkCredential("switwicky@gmail.com", "LadiesMan217");

// Finally, the following method sends the email
Smtp.Send(oMail);

I hope the above code snippet it useful :)

Using MySQL with ASP.Net

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 01:15:00 GMT

For the first six months of 2009 I have started a European Union funded project to create a website for local livestock farmers to publish information relevant to them. It's quite a simple website with a few interactive features and there will be a database behind the scenes storing all the information on the site.

My programming language of choice is ASP.Net C# and naturally I would choose Microsoft SQL Server as the backend database, which we had to buy. When I got a quote for a single CPU license, I was amazed at the price... just over £5,000! Obviously I can't afford that for my own projects and SQL Express has some limitations I cannot live with.

I needed an inexpensive or free alternative solution for my new project which was flexible enough for our short and long term needs. In short, we decided to use MySQL and although there are "better" open source databases, MySQL is more than capable and is well supported by the community.

I've never used MySQL with ASP.Net, only with the LAMP stack, and so I had to research how to access the database from my code. Conveniently, the MySQL community have written an ADO.Net driver for the .Net framework. Simple download and add the DLL to your project and a new MySql.Data.MySqlClient namespace will become available.

The good news is they have kept all the same method and property names, all that has changed is the class names, making converting your existing code easier. So lets get down to some examples... Here's how to execute a select statement using the built-in SqlClient class:

String sSQL = "Select Top 1 * From Posts ";
sSQL += "Where PO_Date > GetDate()-7 ";

SqlCommand cSQL = new SqlCommand(sSQL);
SqlConnection cConnection = _
new SqlConnection("server=local;database=Blog;uid=X;password=X");
cSQL.Connection = cConnection;

SqlDataAdapter oDataAdapter = new SqlDataAdapter(cSQL);
DataTable oDataTable = new DataTable();
oDataAdapter.Fill(oDataTable);

And here's how to do the same statement using the MySqlClient namespace.
I have highlighted the code that has changed.

String sSQL = "Select * From Posts ";
sSQL += "Where PO_Date > Now()-7 ";
sSQL += "Limit 1; ";

MySqlCommand cSQL = new MySqlCommand(sSQL);
MySqlConnection cConnection = _
new MySqlConnection("server=local;database=Blog;uid=X;password=X");
cSQL.Connection = cConnection;

MySqlDataAdapter oDataAdapter = new MySqlDataAdapter(cSQL);
DataTable oDataTable = new DataTable();
oDataAdapter.Fill(oDataTable);

As you can see, the class names have changed and some parts of the SQL statement have changed also to take into account some of the differences between the databases. To be honest, the differences between the database languages will take you the most time to learn. The changes in class names can be sorted with a quick find and replace.

So go away and get MySQL installed on a Linux or Windows box and start enjoying an open source database... It really is that simple and to help you in other areas not covered in this post, here are some useful resources.