Those code generating stored procedures I wrote the other week work really well. I’ve just had to rearrange a database table, adding more fields to it. It took no time at all to get the new C# code created and running.

Coding database apps becomes that bit more fun when creating new database tables ceases to become an expensive time-consuming operation.

I own a number of computers and, like most people now have a network to connect them all together (except I was running networks back when coax-cable was the in thing to use). The system works quite nicely given it is made from junk parts. Since the estate agents didn’t visit today I used the time to sort out my server and tidy up its storage arrangements.

I think I’ve found a cheap way of backing up the large amounts of data that live on my server.

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Damn, my VMWare Fusion demo expires in three days. Looks like I’ll be without Windows on my Mac until I can afford to buy the full version. Despite being the shortest month of the year, this one has proven to be quite expensive for reasons I can’t quite work out. I think hiring the van and moving the sofa did it, I made use of the van to buy lots of large things that I’d have no other chance to move.

Looks like I’m living on beans for March

I’m running VMWare Fusion on my Macbook. In it is an instance of Windows XP. I have a Samba server on my network that is configured to be a domain controller. If I connect my Macbook to the wired network, VMWare Fusion will create a bridged network device and the XP instance gets its own IP address from my DHCP server.

Irritatingly, if I use the Airport wireless connection, the VMWare bridging doesn’t work. I get a message saying /dev/vmnet0 doesn’t exist. After a bit of reading and asking it seems this is because Airport cards don’t support promiscous mode, which is needed for VMWare’s bridging device.

So since the Windows instance then has to use NAT, it gets given an IP address for a tiny private network living in my Mac, which is totally unreachable from the outside world. Also it means any broadcast messages to discover network services won’t go out onto my real network. The main one being Windows saying “hello, is there a domain controller out there?”.

Took me ages to work out that putting the Samba server’s IP address into the WINS part of the XP instance’s network config solved that problem. I can now do a domain logon over a VMWare NAT connection that is using the Airport card in my Mac.

I still haven’t solved the issue where I need the domain controller to be reachable in order to log in at all. Since this is a laptop it’s a bit of a failure if I can’t log into it with the usual profile when not plugged into my network. I don’t want two profiles as this will cause a right mess of duplicate settings, and me having to configure everything twice. I also don’t want to point the local user’s profile at the cached copy of the network user’s local profile. Somehow my work laptop is configured to allow me to log into the domain, even when the PDC isn’t there.

I’ve just finished making my Linux machine work properly again, VMWare Player run XP on it, and then configured my Samba server to be a PDC. I now have roaming profiles and a real Windows Doman for all these Windows instances I have.

In theory it means I have one set of application settings, rather than having to copy data about manually. I know this does actually work because they do it at school - only they have real Windows servers. I just need to work out the offline profile for my Macbook’s Windows instance. Currently I can’t log on unless I log into the machine itself. Somehow my work laptop is able to log onto the domain even when offline.

Further prodding is required, but not now I need to go to bed.

For a while it’s been possible to browse the Google search using a mobile device by pointing a browser at the Google Mobile page. From then it’s the usual Google Search affair to do a web search.

I’ve just noticed, at the bottom of my iGoogle page a link to view it on my mobile phone. Hoping this would be some fantastic RSS/GMail/Calendar iGoogle style page for my phone I followed the necessary steps to add the link to my phone’s browser.

The page loaded quite quickly but wasn’t what I was assuming. Think of it more as a list of Google services, rather than iGoogle. It’s really handy though. You can access all your Google services through it - including Google Docs.

My mobile is an Orange SPV E650 running Windows Mobile 6, and includes the pocket versions of Excel and Word. Using mobile Google I was able to download and edit one of the spreadsheet documents I have stored in my Google docs. There was also an option to view it as HTML. I don’t know if editing can be done though.

I’m fairly sure this is a feature I won’t use that often, I usually have access to a proper PC for most of the time. However there have been the odd situations where being able to call up Google Maps or quickly check my mail (booking a hotel somewhere and forgetting its address, then needing a map to find it, being an example) have been really useful and saved loads of effort.

Went to Scunthorpe car boot sale today. It was really cold and windy and we arrived about 11am so most of the potential bargains had potentially gone. Still, it was fun walking around looking at the tables full of crap.

I bought some Terry Pratchett books, a milk jug and some dish cleaning sponges (the coloured sponges with green scratchy pads on). Amy bought an entire dinner set for £3 and some rolls of tape.

I then spent the rest of the day writing lesson plans while Amy installed Windows on a PC for someone.

This nugget of information comes from the Coding Horror blog:

Take a look in your Documents folder right now. Go ahead. Look. Do you see any files or folders in there that you personally did not create? If so, you’ve been victimized. Applications should never create or modify anything in your documents folder without your permission. And yet, sadly, it happens all the time. Applications, and more specifically, the programmers who wrote those applications, think it’s perfectly A-OK to carpet bomb your personal user space with their junk.

Where applications should store their data is a confusing situation for the programmer. Especially when Microsoft seem to like changing the “standard” between Windows revisions. I can kind of see why most applications stuff it all in “My Documents” - there’s a fairly simple way to ask Windows for the location of that and it doesn’t require checking what version of Windows you’re using.

Can we stop with the “My” prefix on everything? It destroys file sorting, looks a mess and is as irritating as the “i” prefix on every Apple product and the “k” prefix on anything remotely to do with KDE.

I’ve bought myself a scanner, with the vague hope of scanning in my important documents and paperwork. I have a filing cabinet full of quite useful information but no easy way to search it or work out what I’ve got. PC World sell a very cheap £20 scanner called the “PCL-3000“. Not expecting much I bought one to see what it was like…

I am pleasantly surprised! It works quite well, scanning in both colour and greyscale without any problems. The Windows scanning software is a bit crap but functional, the OCR software making a passable attempt at most printed text. I had little hope of it running in Linux though.

Again, I was pleasantly surprised! It is recognised by SANE as being a GT68xx based Mustek scanner and after copying the firmware file into the correct location, works perfectly well with The Gimp and anything else that talks to scanners. There’s even some OCR software which will scrape the text off pages, although it’s not quite at the level of the Windows software which recreates the documents with formatting and font sizes. There is a good scan-to-PDF program called gscan2pdf available though, which looks like a useful piece of software if you want to turn scanned images into text.

Two decent, cheap devices from PC World… this isn’t right!

This scanned image is of my old ZX Spectrum +3’s manual cover.

plus3manualcover.jpg

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When not writing eye-melting games for popular home consoles those crazy Llamasoft people like to try and out-geek the rest of us. To quote from the forum:

.. and finally, after LOT of work and a lot of week ends spent ..

The Llamasoft weather station is up.

As you may remember or not more than 1 year ago we got “caught” in
all this thing about weather satellite images, it all started because our
instructor at the Ham Club told us “once I managed to pick up a satellite
with my hand held scanner close to the window”.

Whereas most people are content to watch the weather reports on radio or TV, Giles and Jeff took it upon themselves to grab the images directly from the satellites orbiting the earth. And no, they didn’t just stick a mast on their roof, this setup is much more interesting, involving bringing ethernet to a tree and installing a webserver in a field. Maybe it’s some sort of rural broadband initiative to bring the Internet to farmyard animals, who knows.

Follow this link to read about how it was done, and then click here to see the images that they’ve pulled down. Beats the usual things involving webservers and kitchen appliances, anyway