BM Bloggers

Upgrade of our Blog server to Community Server 2007

2007-08-31T14:44:00Z

As any of you who are regular readers of BM-Bloggers may have noticed, our blog server structure had become a little confused over the years. We started BM-Bloggers as a single blog hosted using .Text, we then moved it to a multi blog server hosted on Community Server 2.0, then started adding other blogs and mirrors as the volume of posts from our development team grew. This ended up finally being hosted on CS2.1.

We have today upgraded our blog server from CS2.1 to CS2007 and taken the chance to restructure it slightly, making far better use of the aggregation features of CS.

This may mean that some of you will need to change RSS feeds URLs, but we hope we have minimized the number of people this effects. So the revised links are:

A list of all the blogs we host (the CS2007 home page) - http://blogs.blackmarble.co.uk/
The aggregate of all the post made by Black Marble staff in any blog we host (equiv. to the old BM Bloggers mirror) - http://blogs.blackmarble.co.uk/blogs/default.aspx?GroupID=2
This aggregate can also be accessed by our original blog link - http://blogs.blackmarble.co.uk/bm-bloggers
There is also an RSS feed for BM-Bloggers aggregate - http://blogs.blackmarble.co.uk/blogs/MainFeed.aspx?GroupID=2&Type=AllBlogs

I hope you all continue to find our blog postings interesting and useful, and we look forward to reading any comments.

Richard

Web site development: University of Bradford Part 1

2007-08-27T18:21:53Z

One of the last projects I was involved in before I left the University of Bradford to join Black Marble was a new design for the external web site of the institution. I'd pretty much finished the construction of the page layouts and styles before I left, but it's only now that the site is about to go live. I've threatened a few people with a series of posts on how the site is constructed and although I'm not there any more it seems topical. In this post I'll give some background, describe the project...(read more)

Can't debug into a MOSS Webpart

2007-08-24T12:10:22Z

I am doing some work at present where I need to debug into webparts hosted in a MOSS 2007 server. Never an easy set of debugging to get right. To try to ease the process I wrote a WinForm test application that just calls the webpart method with test parameters so I don't have to go through all the pages I normally would to get to the feature I need, or manually have to attach the debugger to the Sharepoint web process every time. I added this WinForm project to the same solution as my Sharepoint...(read more)

SQLBits Community Conference

2007-08-24T09:47:57Z

The proposed session list for SQLBits (to be held on the 6th Oct at Microsoft TVP) has been published. If you don't know, SQLBits is a free community conference in the style of DDD , but on just SQL related topics. Just like DDD all the speakers are volunteers and the attendees get to vote on the sessions they would like to see. So if you have any interested in SQL, or as Anders Hejlsberg said at a LINQ session I saw ' if you are a developer who uses data' , why not register and vote for what you...(read more)

EGG's Training Program for Cyber Criminals

2007-08-22T14:57:24Z

This morning as I was finishing breakfast with the children, I received a call which was an automated call from EGG ( a UK credit card provider ) stating that there had been unusual activity on my credit card. This in itself is not unsurprising as I have just come back from South Korea (see past posts) , the deeply deeply worrying part was the automated call then demanded Security information from me. Some of you may know that I regularly speak on Software and Application Security and more so on...(read more)

Should you go to Korea , Should you do the Imagine Cup

2007-08-16T11:57:31Z

The empathic answer to both of these is YES. Several people have commented that after reading my blog they felt that I did not have a great time in Korea with the Imagine Cup, nothing could be further from the truth. It was great , weird but great, I think any down fall in enjoyment ( and there wasn't much ) was entirely down to lack of preparation on my part and so I have included some thoughts on both the Imagine Cup and visiting Korea. Advice on the Imagine Cup for Mentors Prepare that the students...(read more)

Installing VS2008Beta2 from an ISO

2007-08-16T11:37:31Z

I tried to install Visual Studio Beta 2 from an ISO today using the Virtual CD Rom tool . This mounted the ISO fine as drive Z: but when I ran the setup.exe I got an error that it could not load the SITSetup.dll, even though this was in the ISO. I copied the contents of the ISO to my physical disk and reran the setup and all was OK, so the tip is mounted ISO don't always work as you expect....(read more)

Cannot create a new project in TFS - reporting services problem

2007-08-16T10:29:01Z

I tried to create a new TFS team project today and got an error that the TFS server could not access the SQL Reporting Services server. I then checked I could access http://myserver/reports and this also failed. On looking in the event log I saw a number of EventID 107 'cannot connect to the report server database' Now I was unsure what could have caused this, it was working last time I created a project! So check the update log on the server and found the only patches that had been applied since...(read more)

Imagine Cup Days 4 and 5

2007-08-10T16:42:52Z

Day 4 was well like a normal day , sleep (some) , food (mostly edible) . we saw some great presentations and had a normal day with out the need to work. Day 5 started early 8.00 and the Seedlings did 3 hours on the stand as did all of the other competitors, doing the rounds when there is no competition was great as everybody was relaxed and happy. Andy Sithers was Extra Super Exited to be with us a lot of people came around including some journalists from China ( Beijing Evening News and DigiTimes...(read more)

Korea (Imagine Cup) Days 3 - 78

2007-08-08T14:44:12Z

Today was a very bizarre experience. we set off at 8.00am (midnight UK time) in a thunderous downpour to see the sights. After several uncomfortable days in transit in the bus , we were issues a pastel colored umbrellas and fans! The first visit was to the national museum , much time was taken by the organizers to organizes themselves, reorganizes themselves , double check their organization skills and think about synergies the plan over future events, while we waited on the bus. When we did get...(read more)

Imagine Cup Coverage

2007-08-08T09:09:18Z

If you are reading Robert's blog you will know he is in Korea as the mentor of The Seedings , the UK entry for the Microsoft Imagine Cup. I have just seen that the is some video coverage on Microsoft's Channel8 (which seems to be a Channel9/10 spin off for the Imaging Cup). Enjoy..... Technorati Tags: Imagine Cup...(read more)

Getting HTC Phonepad to work on an Orange SPV M700

2007-08-07T15:58:00Z

Some time ago I upgraded my Orange mobile to an M700. It's a very nice phone indeed, and the ability to be able to use TomTom 6 on it as well saves me having to varry around yet another electronic device.

One thing about it did however annoy me - there was no equivalent of the T9 text input that I had on my old phone. I wasn't keen on getting the stylus out to tap away at the tiny keyboard shown on the screen when I wanted to write a text message. I tried getting a copy of HTC phonepad working on the phone, but to no avail.

After some research, I've managed to get it to work okay. Here's what I had to do:

Install 'G4 SIP Tweak.cab' - links to this are available in a number of places, try forum.xda-developers.com
Install 'HTC_SIPsettings.cab' - links to this are available in a number of places, try forum.xda-developers.com
Install Phonepad - again, there are plenty of links to the application out there

The phone needed a soft reset between installing each of these items.

Once installed, I can now switch between the standard keyboard and Phonepad as I like!

Korea (Imagine Cup) Day 2

2007-08-07T09:47:50Z

And onto Day 2 , the presentation was at 9.00am. it went very very well. Just after the presentation some of the Argentinean team came over for a chat During the chat a Mexican film crew came around and started talking about the UK and Argentina , in my deep subconscious all I could hear was one of my school teachers saying just before a school trip to Germany "DONT MENTION THE WAR, BOY" only to hear the word "Malvenas" from the film crew and feel a very tight feeling in my stomach. However the girl...(read more)

Korea (Imagine Cup) Day 1

2007-08-07T09:44:39Z

Well here we are Day 1 , it already feels like Thursday. Set up has gone well , everything is working on the initial pass. the booth looking nice and tidy then we filled the booth with some riff-raff and then the first presentation The presentation went will, the QandA was a bit hairy more due to tiredness than anything else Technorati tags: korea , imagine cup 2007 , uk , microsoft , imagine cup...(read more)

Korea (Imagine Cup) Day 0 - Addenda

2007-08-07T09:43:33Z

There small set of minor interesting points have happened today so there they are in no order Coke but not as we know it the cans are smaller ( 250Ml ) which is just wrong. Taste is well odd, but nice. General consumption of personal body weights in coke has continued. One of the nice finds is Grape Fanta - YUM The W has a rather spiffy wooden mirror ( a camera controlled set of rotating wooden blocks ). I wonder if I can get Richard to buy one for the office One of the nice features of the hotel...(read more)