More than likely though it is related to the large number of people who claim to be dissatisfied with First Search Consultancy.

No doubt the sudden appearance of First Search Consultancy shooting up the rankings in Google for the term First Search Consultancy Scam is related to this too.

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They claimed that they were from Google and could get her site to the first page of Google for £99 per month.

Having dealt with this sort of thing before she responded that this sort of claim was a scam and that her site was already on the front page of Google. Additionally companies claiming to be Google were scammers.

The response from the Sales Drone That’s not right you can’t get on the first page of Google yourself you need to pay a company to do that

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Doing a compare between an old and new version of two versions of a piece of software.

This is the last minor release before the next major version number release.

The developer has decided to update his address in the copyright section of almost 300 files. I am now having to go through each of these to find any real changes.

Questions:
1. If you have an address change why do at 1.9.9.9 when you are currently testing 2.0.0.0?
2. Why not just say Copyright as per file /copyright.txt if you are making this change?
3. Why not release a version of the update with actual real changes instead of cosmetic details which is in a comment?

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Firstly I had forgotten to pick up the directions so couldn’t remember exactly what building it was in. I bumped into someone I recognised from the TechDay event in Edinburgh and having walked further passed the wrong directions I had been given we found the building. There was a slight confusion over badge as one of the many other Alan Grahams had registered too. Got a wee goodie bag which included a DevExpress t-shirt. There is a competition to win a Sony Flipcam for anyone wearing the t-shirt in a funny or unusal pose and tweeting it using #DDDScotPic. So far Gavin has the only entry so he’s a shoe in.

Session 1 HTML5 : The Language of the Cloud?

Craig Nicol gave a talk about HTML5. The takeaway for me was basically to wait until things have settled down a bit. All browsers implement different things so I would be driven mad doing anything yet in my spare time. The video demos were very cool though.

Session 2 T4 and how it can be used for code generation in Visual Studio 2008 / 2010

I was looking forward to this. We have a small number of classes using this in one of the projects at work but I haven’t even looked at it yet. The area I was interested in using it was generating enums from a database and this is pretty much what Rob Blackmore promoted it as being good at.

Session 3 Web standards are broken, and it’s getting worse

I went to this session by Sebastien Lambla to find it had turned in to a talk about OpenRasta. If I had known in advance I might have popped to Defensive Programming. As I was in second row and the largest room had a dozen (at most) people I decided to stay. Having not known anything about it beforehand I didn’t really take too much in and the small bit at the end about OpenWrap probably got me more interested.

Grok Talks

A really good grab bag of stuff. Colin MacKay on SQL Injection. Someone on Code Dojos. A talk on ways to learn. Seb on his OpenWrap promo. I can’t remember the other one. Something about loving users maybe?

Session 4 Get Started with Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) using Cucumber

This was a really thought provoking talk by Steve Sanderson on Behaviour Driven Development. He gave a bit of background on some of the problems with TDD and what BDD set out to solve. His demonstration of writing specs then tests to pass them was really interesting. We are using SWEA at work but it is so fragile and such a hassle to work with we had been thinking of switching to Selenium. Having seen this I want to play around a bit with SpecFlow. I think it might be more suitable.

Session 5 Enforcing Code ‘Beauty’ With StyleCop

Or as Guy Smith-Ferrier referred to it How to start a fight. I felt slightly out of place as when he asked who had used it one other person had for 6months. I said it was from before it was called StyleCop. I did get a TekPub 30 day trial for making some comments/questions during the session. It was an intro to but I managed to pick up some tips on working with Legacy code and had a further spur to dig out StyleCop happy templates for new files.

Afterwards I popped to Bar Republic to get an amazing pizza then grabbed the train home. Really enjoyable day. The only session I didn’t get what I had wanted was the one which had changed and if it had been as intended it was my preferred session of the day – so I look forward to seeing it next year! Having seen everyone tweeting all day I dug out my tablet but couldn’t get it to log into Twitter. That was a bit dissapointing so I’ll need to investigate what’s up with it.

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I mucked around with the samples throughout the book and think that Gennas Jewellery site is probably ok for layout and style. I will probably tweak it a bit – definitely try to do something with the logo section to be laid out a bit better.

I have the idea in my head of what to do with the amount of content – move from 11 top level pages down to 6 and re-write most of the content there. The catalogue I am still not 100% on.

Just started reading Building Findable Websites so that I have a better idea of what to do with the content I write for it.

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I went last year and thought it was excellent so was looking forward to this year. Only one clash and one empty slot for my preferred items I voted for so a good result for me.

Right now my plans would be for:

1. HTML 5: The Language of the Cloud
2. T4 and How it Can Be Used for Code Generation in Visual Studio 2008/2010
3. Web Standards are Broken, and it’s Getting Worse OR Defensive Programming 101
4. Decide on day
5. Domain Specific Languages – What Are They and Why Should You Care?

I was wanting to dig into HTML 5 soon anyway. We use T4 for part of one project at work but I haven’t even looked at it. Web standards is obvious but I tend to code very defensively so am interested in the other option in that slot too. Any of the slots in 4 apart from Silverlight would be both of interest and something I wouldn’t normally look at. I had been interested reading Ayendes posts about Boo but know nothing about it so good chance to get an introduction into them.

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To celebrate, rather than record the usual show of about 1hour the hosts organised a 12 hour spectacular pulling together some of the brightest and most interesting people in the web industry. There were experts on coding and design, CSS and CMS, useability and social networking etc. There were also girls. OMG!!!!!

Suffice to say the mouth breathers in the shows chatroom went ballistic. These women couldn’t have been invited on because they were experts in their field, oh no. They were invited on because they were women. The fact they dared to be attractive women, intelligent women, confident women was just too much for them to bear.

IT is a bad enough field as it is for being male dominated. From university to workplaces the vast majority of people involved are male. If you want to question if this is self-perpetuating or not you only have to have seen some of the reports of comments being made by these people.

Two of the women involved in the show Sarah Parmenter and Rachel Andrew have written brilliant pieces laying into these Neanderthals which I would highly recommend reading.

Take small comfort from the thought that this morning most of those who disgraced themselves will be waking up and falling asleep alone, with only Warcraft to take their frustrations out onto.

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I had thought about throwing together a wee 3 page site or so in a variety of formats – XHTML1, 1.1, 2, HTML5 with liquid/fixed/fluid layout etc to try and clean off the rust.

Rather than just flail and read random bits I bought a decent looking book and intend to go through it working through the examples from everything from the most basic things to the most advanced.

No idea how long it will take but the experience should be worthwhile as I would then have a more realistic idea of what can be done in CSS to then re-look at Gennas site afresh.

Gennas site

When I first made Gennas site she wanted it small and with a well-defined number and variety of pages. If WordPress or a similar CMS had been readily available at the time I would have used it. As it was I had tried to manually create a kind of category/tagging system for the jewellery in static HTML. It seemed ok with 20items, at the current 200+ it is unmanageable.

I had had to manually add each page for each new item Genna added – which when making one-off pieces the majority of time is a lot of wasted effort compared to someone who makes 30 of something and adds it to a shop once. I gradually managed to show Genna how to do some HTML editing which is really good – she learned the basics of a skill in a field totally unrelated to what she does.

Unfortunately Notepad has no spell checker so it was easy for mistakes to creep in.

The other pages were added to the top level of the site over time and now number 11, most of which have sub pages.

When it came to add a shop I threw on an off the shelf package which I haven’t even taken the time to modify. When I realised the amount of time wasted maintaining a new page I threw on a blog which has been far better.

Both of these are great as Genna can write copy like in a word processor and I can switch tabs to code for clean-up/doing anything more complicated.

Near term work

What have I been doing lately

Adding her blog to directories etc.
Set up twitter account
Set up Facebook Group page
Linked blog to Facebook and Twitter so messages are automatically sent to each service.

So what has to be done in the near future:

Reduce duplicate content
Review each page for keywords and make sure we are not doing anything stupid which for a small amount of work would give way better performance in search engines.
Reduce top level pages – I have already identified some to go.
Review catalogue (Genna and I disagree over what to do, see below).
Give site a complete once over for code-validity and useability. Re-review in all browser strains and new ones since I last did it.
Design new WordPress template for blog.
Look at new template/add ins for shop.

Catalogue

Genna makes lots of one-off pieces. How do we best manage this. In the near past each item was given a new page inside a category (rings, bracelets etc). When pieces went to galleries each price had to be changed to Currently on display at X gallery etc.

With the addition of the shop this was easier as it would be marked as out of stock.

This posed an additional problem though. Add 20 rings, sell 18 and you have only two in stock. We solved this by paying a tiny amount for an add-in that hid out of stock items.

Brilliant, except now items that had sold no longer appeared on the site. This posed two more problems.
1. Someone buys an item and can’t then review it.
2. We spend ages building up a keyword of a type of item and then have no page to link to say none in stock, order one to be made for you.

It’s a pickle and once I have not had the time to sit down and think long and hard about. I think the best solution may be to write a blog piece about each new design then add into the shop so that it is there for historical purposes but am not 100% sure.

This is in the future though, I need to re-learn what I might have forgotten about HTML/CSS then after that work through the list, then learn enough PHP to modify her shop code.

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Woo.

Technorati claim code: WBJWEAQ95M8P

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For £149 per year she can have a site with a shop. A quick scan of their site shows that that package is £199 per year. The £149 one is aimed at people with no website at all. On the phone the Web Consultant (sales rep) also asked her what her website address was. Nice research there bub. A quick search for teh number they were calling very quickly shows that.

A quick browse round their site was quite telling. News from 2007 (we are a popular company, see this non-existant report that you would have to pay for anyway), a blog (link dead) and vacancies. The vacancies at these places is always interesting, multiple telesales positions, 1 web developer position. The web developer ad language is amateurish at best, not what you would expect from a really big web design company which has been going for years.

A search on the company finds almost no mention of them anywhere, not helped by their name being made of two common words.

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I added a thing to the blog which should integrate, testing it now.

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He was really, really funny. Lot’s of nerdy material, references but also stuff non-geeks could get related to his attempt to appear on Britain’s Got Talent (but not the drivel on this show).

I did a search and eventually found his MySpace page. So he loses geek cred for having that as his only online presence, obviously. Was highly amused by a review I found.

Read what this cock has to say.

I could just imagine similar.

As a feminist, mother in law and lesbian I did not appreciate the comedy of Roy Chubby Brown.

Or the like.

Guess what, comedian is targeting his audience by saying it will be lots of geek humour, if you don’t know who Captain Kirk is you probably shouldn’t go along as you will probably be sitting there with a glazed look on your face you numpty.

Rob mentioned overhearing some people looking at his flyers and saying meh, it’s probably about capes n’ shit.

So hopefully he will still be kicking around next year and I can see him again.

Before Rob I also saw two other comedians.

The first, an Australian was ok, he had some good material but a lot was related to lols England sucks at cricket compared to Australia etc. Not only has it been done to death before but no one really gives a shit about cricket in Scotland. His other material was enjoyable though with his sperm test tale being very funny.

The second of the pair was pretty good. His stage persona was just verging on being more enjoyable than funny but his material was really good. Excellent on stage, ditching the mic and just going without.

These were free shows so at the end the comics had a whip round to pay for extravagances like food, rent and the like.

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She wanted the palette changed to blues though so I made modifications. I couldn’t see any licence, but assuming it was GPL‘d I’ll put the modifications here.

I changed the following files:

Footer.php

Added text Colours modified by Alan Graham to show I had modified it.

Style.css

#left ul

border: 0px solid #00CCFF;
background-color : #00CCFF;

#left ul li.backLava

background-color:#0099FF;

#left ul li a:hover

background-color : #0099FF;

#sidebar ul

border: 0px solid #00CCFF;
background-color : #00CCFF;

#sidebar ul li.backLava

background-color:#0099FF;

#sidebar ul li a:hover

background-color : #0099FF;

#header

background-color: #00CCFF;

#footer

background-color: #00CCFF;

h3

color: #66CCFF;

h2 a:hover, h3 a:hover

color: #66CCFF;

.post

border-bottom: 1px solid #66CCFF;

#sidebar #searchform #s, #sidebar2 #searchform #s

border: 1px solid #66CCFF;

#searchform2 #s2

border: 1px solid #66CCFF;

select

border: 1px solid #66CCFF;

#commentform fieldset

border: 0px solid #66CCFF;

#commentform input

border: 1px solid #66CCFF;

#commentform textarea

border: 1px solid #66CCFF;

.commentlist

border-top: 0px solid #66CCFF;

.commentlist li, .commentlist li.alt

border-bottom: 0px solid #66CCFF;

blockquote

border: 1px dotted #66CCFF;

.day

color: #66CCFF;

ol.commentlist li

background:#00CCFF;

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Beta just now, posting purely to show here pingbacks.

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I had heard great things about both Drupal and Joomla so figured they would be top of my list. Looked at the install for Drupal, looked simple enough. Tried to install on my machine and got no end of problems.

Hey let’s create an “install.php” but not make it do a complete install, sod that we want our users to learn loads of unix commands to set it up, too hard for the authors to script.

Fuck that noise.

WordPress and Cubecart being the two other applications I have installed both had this facility. I don’t mind editing a config file or anything but that was a step too far. When I install an application on Windows you follow the options and click appropriate sections. You don’t have to hand edit the registry. Why? Because you shouldn’t have to.

I then downloaded Joomla, waited and age for it to upload to server and then went to the directory. Redirected to installation directory where it checks my requirements. It tells me I have a problem, the help file with the handy screenshots tells me exactly what I need to do to fix it. It then checks again. It asks for FTP and MySQL usernames etc. Installs and is all set to go.

I have no idea yet if it does what I want it to do but unlike Drupal it has passed the first hurdle of making it possible for me to find that out. It could be that WordPress would do but I think the option to easily integrate forums etc is a good bonus. I have to have her shop in it too which will be another hurdle.

Lesson: you may have the greatest web application in the world but if you make users jump through hoops in order to test it you will get nowhere. If I cared enough to look into it I would have managed to set up Drupal, I just didn’t give enough of a shit to. My time is too valuable to me to waste learning how to do stuff your install should script for me. How you expect Joe Bloggs to do so is a mystery.

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So with the menu:

• Home – static
• Menu Top – static
  • Sub Menu – loads dynamically
• Another – static

Very frustrating. It would mean doing a search/replace every time a new top level menu item is added, very annoying. I can’t see why it would be happy to load the sub items but balk at the top level items.

The reason for experimentation is Gennas site. It started with a catalogue of around 40 pages and quickly grew to about 300 static pages. She then wanted some top level menu items added – argh. I figured if I can get this done I can change every page once and then update the external sitemap page when necessary. This is only a sop until I have the time and inclination to install a more appropriate site for what she is doing with it now. Spending spare hours here and there make an overhaul slightly difficult and drag over weeks though.

Edit:

The closest I could get was:

• Root – loads dynamically
  • Home – loads dynamically
  • Menu Top – loads dynamically
    • Sub Menu – loads dynamically
  • Another -loads dynamically

This of course means you only see “Root” on the page and the submenus when you select the menu. With the added bonus that it only works with JavaScript loaded. A colleague has it working on his Asp.Net site loaded into the MasterPage but plain HTML doesn’t have that luxury.

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Bah!

Edit: Although my copy/paste of WordPress installs did bust stuff it was actually the latest version and plugins which did. All sorted after much hair being torn out – and I can’t afford to do that much more!

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protected void CheckBulletHits()
{
// Check to see of any of the players bullets have
// impacted any of the enemies.
for (int i = 0; i < iMaxBullets; i++)
{
if (bullets[i].IsActive)
for (int x = 0; x < iTotalMaxEnemies; x++)
if (Enemies[x].IsActive)
if  (Intersects(bullets[i].BoundingBox, Enemies[x].CollisionBox))
{
DestroyEnemy(x);
RemoveBullet(x);
}
}
}

Curly braces exist for a reason. (also WordPress displays code blocks crap, had to nest them, time to look for a plugin). Edit – found.

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I did a review of most of the databases around and what I wanted to do with them. I spotted Firebird. Downloaded it and a GUI. A GUI with the only option to hand edit the SQL. I then downloaded two others, one of which had a trojan in it the other didn’t work. Ho hum.

Having tried to experiment I settled on Access and XML.

Before delving into the shell of code I have sitting there I figured it would be more worthwhile to make a couple of wee demo games to re-familiarise myself with the process. Downloaded Microsoft XNA and the RPG Starter Toolkit. I figure I can do a tutorial on a space shooter (the hello world of games), then a micro RPG with say one dungeon and a couple of baddies or something. I can then think of the best way to implement the wee isometric RPG. I haven’t looked at the RPG Starter kit yet so don’t know if I should also attempt something a wee bit more ambitious after the initial run.

I think Cliché Quest could be quite fun – making fun of most of the RPG tropes.

In other random code stuff, the best two snippets of code I have come across lately are as follows:
(Obfuscated but not changing what they did, and no they weren’t written by me).

void Foo()
{
    int a = 0;
    a = a + 0;
}

and

String Foo()
{
    StringBuilder theBuilder = new StringBuilder("a" + "b" + "c" + "d");
    return theBuilder.ToString();
}

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Now bear in mind none of these installers actually mentioned these as prerequisites in the installation process.

I started working on a little game about 2 years ago. I dug it out, spewed when I saw the state of the code and upgraded it to .Net 3.5. Once it was all updated in content and style I looked at it again and realised I should really split up into a data layer to properly use as a demo/project.

I realised I had removed SQL Server 2005 and the 2008 developer pack came with a trial rather than a full version. I remembered about Compact Edition which you are supposed to be able to ship with your code.

I go to install it and it fails as I don’t have Windows Installer 4.5 installed. So I go install that, and then Compact Edition.

Still can’t do anything, need the tools for it.

I go to install the tools and it barfs complaining I don’t have Powershell installed.

I find Powershell and install it.

I then proceed in the 10stage or so install, it seems happy enough.

Fill in all Database account details, carries on.

Boom – you need Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 installed.

This wasn’t pointed out earlier in the requirements section? I also thought I had it installed as it doesn’t appear in Windows Update.

I download the Service pack or should I say the installer for it. Run it and it complains as I have no space. I only have 2GB on drive C. Drive D has about 20GB free. It is also where I have Visual Studio installed. There is no option to change the download location.

What the hell is this crap.

After installing 4 things when installers barf it is still barfing and refusing to install. It shouldn’t be this hard to install a sodding database server. I tried looking for what other databases are usable in Visual Studio but had no luck yet. I was hoping to use Compact as it is usable by the database tools I am used to using in work and I wanted to experiment with Linq a bit.

In work I have the full service pack on a DVD, may have to copy that if I can’t find it online.

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Current software I am using include WordPress, OpenOffice, Linux (Tablet PC), Firefox (and Phoenix before that) and numerous other bits and bobs including at work.

It is one of my goals for the year to find time to contribute towards at least one open source project. I have been unable to donate hours so today donated $2 to Google SiteMap Generator. This plug in automatically generates a site map for you as frequently as you wish. Really useful and has saved me more than $2 in the time to manually generate one using Audit My PC or similar.

What Open Source software do you use and have you contributed anything back – from cash to code to bug reports?

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It was quite interesting. Some of the information I knew already. Some I did not. The stuff I already knew I have put into place on blogs/sites etc. The stuff I learned I plan to prioritise and work into sites in the near future. He pointed out some of the things squirrelled away in Googles Webmaster Tools. I had previously used it for adding site to directory and adding a sitemap. Some of the stuff I hadn’t noticed is very cool though.

Over the past few days I had already been working on Gennas Jewellery site so was in the right frame of mind for taking it all in. I hadn’t noticed where all her links were coming from though. Her main site is her name GennaDelaney.com. We also registered GennaDesign.com as that is the name she trades under. I just had that pointing at the same directory but that is where a huge amount of the inbound links are coming from. Being on the same server and having the same content it probably makes her look like a linkfarm. One of the top priorities is to sort that into a proper redirect. I tried last night and it failed to work properly.

I also realised something about ping servers so added a load to the blog and am away to publish the first post to loads of them. Lets see what happens.

Disclaimer: one of the things he talked about were valid mark up and his site does not have this (probably his blog theme to be fair, something I have wrestled with).

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