The Way I Think

It pays to buy on the Internet

martin.nospam@nospam.thewayithink.co.uk (thebeebs) — Sun, 17 May 2009 21:55:36 -1300

I went to Debenhams to look for a watch and saw this one:

Kenneith Cole £175

Before I bought it I thought I should check on the Internet to see if it would be cheaper. I was expecting to save £10… but in fact I’d save £95!!!

http://www.watchshopuk.com/mens-kenneth-cole-watch-kc3738-p99930325.html

Cool IDE Features

martin.nospam@nospam.thewayithink.co.uk (thebeebs) — Thu, 14 May 2009 04:17:12 -1300

Was watching this video and heard some cool things about new IDE development. Apparently 2010 IDE contains helpers for TDD, If you write a method that doesn’t exist, click a button and it’ll create it. Also the new debugger allows you to “step back” in history. Looking forward to 2010 Release Candidate.

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Charles/Luca-Bolognese-C-and-VBNET-Co-Evolution-The-Twain-Shall-Meet/

Android Phone update

martin.nospam@nospam.thewayithink.co.uk (thebeebs) — Thu, 07 May 2009 19:31:35 -1300

Below shows some of the new android features. I like how you can upload directly to youtube, I think that this will really improve the speed at which the world distribute funny cat videos.

http://www.android.com/releases/

My phone contract is up August and I’m starting to look around at which phone to buy, any recommendations are greatly appreciated.

If you buy Twitter you’re an Idiot

martin.nospam@nospam.thewayithink.co.uk (thebeebs) — Tue, 05 May 2009 02:48:47 -1300

Apple, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo… if any of you guys buy Twitter then you are idiots. Despite the fact that twitter is a great service doesn’t it seem sort of silly to spend billions of dollars on a product that would take, any software house worth their salt, less than a month to develop? Would it not make more sense to make your own then spend the rest of the cash on advertising?

It seems that software companies are buying up successful websites with a plan to monetise them by simply adding advertising.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to purchase websites that already make money - perhaps not through advertising - then look to expand their popularity?

I suppose what my argument boils down to is this, software companies should be taking products that have potential and developing to make them more popular rather than taking popular products and adding advertising. Call me old fashioned but I’d rather software companies invested in developing great products rather than monetising other peoples.

Apple you need to get to work on your OS because it’s still too hard for stupid people like me to use.
Google you should be concentrating on that browser you spent millions on developing that's not got more than 2% market share.
Microsoft you should be concentrating your money and effort on a successful windows 7 launch
and Yahoo well you should be sitting in front of a mirror slapping yourself because you should have taken the Microsoft deal last year when you had a decent stock price.

Rant over.

Myspace fight back

martin.nospam@nospam.thewayithink.co.uk (thebeebs) — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 21:09:08 -1300

Seems like Myspace are fighting back at Facebook and improving their system to try and replicate more of the Facebook features which have helped Facebook overtake the fledgling social network.

The new chat system that Myspace have implemented is technically more solid and better designed than the Facebook one, the only problem is I'm yet use it since all my friends have moved to Facebook. It will be interesting to see what Myspace do to regain ground lost to Facebook, as far as I'm concerned though they need to offer something over and above what Facebook have to offer. If I was in charge at Myspace I'd do a deal with one of the mobile phone companies and start offering free SMS messaging, that would have people returning in their droves!

Microsoft Accounting 2009

martin.nospam@nospam.thewayithink.co.uk (thebeebs) — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 21:17:38 -1300

I've been using Microsoft office accounting 2009 for about a month now... it's fantastic I've never used and easier accounting package, if you want to keep track of your personal finances or if you're running a small business you should give it a try, the express version is free: http://www.msofficeaccounting.co.uk/

Create quotes and invoices
Write checks, track expenses, and reconcile online bank accounts.
Track expenses and employee time
Manage payroll and taxes with ADP’s integrated payroll service
Store and organize all your customer, vendor, employee, and financial information in one place
List items on eBay
Track sales activity, and download and process orders
Email invoices and get paid faster with PayPal
Monitor your customers’ business credit in real-time through Equifax.
Follow the easy, step-by-step instructions in the Startup Wizard to get up and running quickly.
Access helpful demos, step-by-step guides, and other product information from the new Resource Center.
Import your existing financial data from other programs, such as Microsoft Office Excel, Microsoft Money, and Intuit QuickBooks.
Find the features you need quickly with the intuitive and familiar Microsoft Office interface.

IE8 Install

martin.nospam@nospam.thewayithink.co.uk (thebeebs) — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 21:02:02 -1300

The new IE 8 is out and it's gaining traction. Already it's more popular than both chrome and opera and ater the windows update run I imagine it'll be way above 5% by the end of the month.

I've have mixed feeling about the IE8 update, I can't understand why it requires a reboot, The firefox upgrade from 2 to 3 was so much smoother. On my work machine, a windows 2003 server, IE8 won't install after upgrading it simply closes as soon as I open it. Tried to uninstall and reinstall twice and still no joy. At mome on my windows vista box the experiance has been far less painfull, I accepted the windows update and the next day I got prompted to choose my search settings; simple.

Let me know your IE install experiances in the comments.

Firefox relies on IE8

martin.nospam@nospam.thewayithink.co.uk (thebeebs) — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 01:20:32 -1300

Interesting… Microsoft seem to think that firefox might rely on IE8. Now that's what I call an EGO!

I Luv Lambdas

martin.nospam@nospam.thewayithink.co.uk (thebeebs) — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 03:04:14 -1300

Lambdas sound like a type of curry, however the only similarity that these beauties have with Indian food are that they’re hot!

Day by day I’m finding lambdas more and more useful. I used to only use them when I was querying the entity framework but I'm finding that I'm constantly falling back on them as a concise and simple way to deal with generic collections.

Today I had a problem that I wanted to solve with out the need to generate too much code or create a custom collection.

All I wanted to know was if my products attribute collection had attributes who’s first Item was a provider with the Id of x.

Lambda enabled me to get this information out and loop through it with just a couple of lines of code.

foreach (IDataTransferAttributeItem attributeItem in product.Attributes.Where(a => a.Providers.First().Id == this.providerId))
                  {
                   // TODO: Do something with attributeItem
                  }

Naming Conventions Involution Repository

martin.nospam@nospam.thewayithink.co.uk (thebeebs) — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 02:58:56 -1300

Here are the naming convention screen shots from the meeting we had today.

Business Logic:

Data: