I can confirm that putting a Corsair Flash Voyager USB Stick in 40C Mixed Cotton wash is not the best way to clean it of old data. A traditional format remains the best solution for dirty data. However, it does show these rubberized USB sticks are tough, two hours in a washing mean seems to have done no harm. Also the …

Black Marble has moved to bigger offices, don't worry we are in the same building so we are easy to find. The building management company has refurbished the conference center for us. The new offices are three times bigger than the old ones and wait for it , we are nearly full again :) Rik , Richard and Andy had a fun …

Still no Windows Mobile 6 update for my Orange SPV M3100, but they did release an update to WM5 recently. Installing said update turned out to be slightly trickier than I expected. I don't know if anybody else has experienced the same problem, but a word to the wise - don't try the update on Windows Vista! The first …

Went to a great session last night at the Yorkshire Extreme Programming Club, a intro to Test Driven Development using just Excel. The presentation was given by Clarke Ching, you can find out more about him and this presentation on his blog I just had not occurred to me that Excel is a great way to show TDD principles …

I have finished a mini 3 day tour of York , Hull and Manchester Universities with Ed Gibson Microsoft's Chief Security Advisor (CSA) for the UK. I was the opening act for Ed and provided the context for his talk, hopefully we will be revising the event in the Autumn for other universities as well as a Secure coding …

I have just watched an episode of "Lewis" with Caitlin and she was getting quite concerned that a murder hadn't occurred within the first few minutes and I started to speculate on the formula for occurrence of deaths in detective dramas. Having had some thought, the area around Midsummer seems to have a shocking body …

On Wednesday 19th of September I will be speaking at an evening event organised by Guy Smith-Ferrier of the .NET Developers Network in Bristol. The session will be on Microsoft Team Foundation Server. For full details have a look at http://www.dotnetdevnet.com/Meetings/tabid/54/EntryID/7/Default.aspx

Just got my reminder for NxtGen's FEST07 conference which is at Microsoft TVP on the 23rd of May. Unfortunately, due to a busy diary, I cannot make it to the event, but the speaker line up does look good. If you have never seen Rafal Lukawiecki speak, who has topped the polls at TechEd for the last 7 years, this is …

The problem We have had an insteresting problem, we have a Virtual Server 2007 R2 (Beta), this is accessed both internally on our company network and externally via a ISA 2006 on the Internet. This has been working fine with our XP PCs, but we saw problems when we tried to use Vista. When on our LAN, the Vista PC was …

We have been having fun installing SQL2005 Developer Edition on Vista PCs with Reporting Services, you need the SP2 for Vista, but installation of this kept stalling with authentication problems. Turns out this is the process to follow: Do a default Install SQL 2005 Dev. Edition Run the Reporting Service Configuration …