Monthly Archives: March 2006

Computers/Technology

Going Rojo

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One of the blogs I read regularly is TechCrunch which profiles and reviews new Web 2.0 products and companies. (If at this point you’re totally bemused as to what the difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 is, I’d recommend having a read through this Wikipedia article explaining the source of the term.)

One posting that caught my eye this weekend was about Rojo, which seemed to provide all of the news feed aggregation features that I was getting from Bloglines, plus a whole load of tagging and relevance features that would allow me to pick up on other interesting articles from around the blogsphere.

Anyway, sign-up was free, and it was pretty trivial to import my subscriptions from Bloglines by exporting them as an OPML file. From my usage so far it is a much nicer way to browse through my various feeds, plus the categorisation using tags allows me to group relevant feeds with ease. It even includes the chance to vote for an article, so if you think a particular posting is good, it will be boosted up – the BBC News Online discussion forums operate a similar system, which is great for filtering through the hundreds of responses they often get.

I certainly think that I’ll be sticking with Rojo for a while, and if you use an online aggregator to read a large number of blogs, I’d recommend giving the site a look.

Computers/Technology

NDoc and VBCommenter Gotcha’s

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One of the must have tools for any C# programmer has to be NDoc, which takes in all the meaningful XML comments you’ve added, and produces documentation in one of a number of common formats.

The big problem when going over to doing work in VB.Net, is that although the development environment can make use of the XML comment files, out of the box there is no way to produce them. Luckily, there is a handy little tool called VBCommenter, that provides the missing feature.

I grabbed a copy of VBCommenter when I started off with my current VB.Net project, and it’s worked pretty well, indeed with the add-in in place it has been pretty much the same as working with C#. That was until today.

This afternoon I had one of those afternoons where things fairly obviously weren’t working, but I was left scratching my head as to why. I’d added comments to an assembly, run the project through NDoc and it was resolutely not picking up my comments. Indeed on one particular class there was just a single method that was failing to appear. Looking at the XML files produced by VBCommenter I couldn’t spot any obvious problems in the sections of the file that were not being picked up. I even got to the point of reinstalling both NDoc and VBCommenter, all to no avail.

Typically the source of the problem turned out to be two quite trivial problems. The single method that was failing was caused by a problem in the what VBCommenter produces for arrays. The method in question was taking an array of strings as a parameter, which in C# would be declared as ‘System.String[]’, and in VB.Net is ‘System.String()’ – note the different brackets. VBCommenter wrote the VB.Net version to the XML file, whilst NDoc was looking for the C# version. The other problem was as a result of a change I had made last week. I had replaced a property with a method call, to solve a bug, and had temporarily commented out the property whilst I tested the new method. However, looking through the XML file produced I spotted that rather than ignore the commented out property, VBCommenter had written the lines out to the XML file, complete with comment characters. Simply removing the commented out method resulted in the documentation being produced as expected.

Interestingly when having found the problem I ran the file with the comment in it through XMLSpy it did come back as being a badly formed file – however NDoc will quite happily process it without raising any sort of complaint, or even dropping a hint that there might be a problem!

Cars

First Fill Up

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I’ve just filled up the car for the first time since changing jobs. Looking at the usage aside from the trip to Abingdon on Friday it has been three weeks of commuting every day, and the usual mix of local running around for domestic duties like shopping, Church and so on. When I was working for SSE, the similar mix of commuting and local domestic duties required a fill up every week. (Also worth considering that with the current price of fuel around here, a fill up usually costs over £40.) So looking at the result of the move in purely fuel costs, I’ve saved about two-thirds.

Of course, if you bear in mind that the new journey is only a tenth of the distance from home than SSE, you realise that the car is running considerably less efficiently than before, and this is reflected in the MPG figures that I got over the last three weeks. Usually, during the winter months with the winter blend diesel and colder temperatures the Golf does between 46 and 48 miles per gallon (it rises to between 48 and 50 miles per gallon in the summer), however over the past three weeks the Golf averaged 38 miles per gallon. It is worth bearing in mind when looking at that figure that it is still better than the Focus ever managed on the trips down to SSE, where it averaged around 34 miles per gallon…

Doctor Who

Finally, A Use for My Knowledge of Doctor Who

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On our way to John Lewis, we stopped off at what I know as the Friar Street Bookshop (although the sign now just says Blackwells) which for many years has been a Mecca for any sci-fi fans in Reading. When we arrived it was great to see that they had returned the store layout to having the sci-fi downstairs – it all having been moved upstairs when Blackwells, I guess hit hard by the two Waterstones that had opened in better positions, closed their other Reading branch and moved the whole operation to Friar Street.

Anyway, I often pop in there to browse when I am in town, and this time, thanks to the generosity of my colleagues at SSE I had some tokens to spend!(Plus I thought it would be good to put the tokens towards something fun, rather than computer books…) The shop is arranged very much by programme and film, so all the Doctor Who merchandise including books, CD’s, videos, DVD’s, magazines and even the radio controlled Dalek is together. Since I was in the market for books this time, I headed towards the book section to browse through, however next to me were the selection of classic series DVD’s with a young boy and his mother browsing through.

It was pretty obvious from the conversation that the boy had been turned into a big Doctor Who fan thanks to the success of the new series, and was now working his way through the classic series. However, I got the feeling that she hadn’t been the most avid viewer of the show, and was now starting to flounder when faced with her son wanting advice on which was the best DVD to get. So, as I was there browsing through the books, I offered her a bit of help when they were looking at “Lost In Timeâ€? – the recent collection of ‘orphan’ episodes, where the BBC had got rid of the rest of the stories – which I suggested her son probably would find frustrating as the stories weren’t complete. I steered her more towards the more recent stories, mainly because the pacing of the older episodes is definitely on the slow side for a modern audience, so in the end they went away with “The Green Deathâ€? as that was one she remembered as a child, and “Resurrection Of The Daleksâ€? and “Revelation of the Daleksâ€? as the boy liked the Daleks, and Davros stories. Sadly they didn’t go for “Remembrance Of The Daleksâ€? which I reckon is a generally better and more enjoyable story than the other two, as Davros doesn’t appear until the very end.

Anyway, when they’d gone, the mother having thanked me for my help, Beth said to me: “Finally, a use for your encyclopaedic knowledge of Doctor Whoâ€?!

Incidentally, for those of you wondering what I spent the tokens on, I bought a bit of nostalgia, in the form of two sets of collected Doctor Who comic strips taken from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine back in the eighties – “Doctor Who: The Iron Legion: v. 1â€? and “Dr. Who: The Tides of Timeâ€? – and also a big glossy book covering the whole history of the series, right up to the present called “â€?Doctor Who“: The Legend Continuesâ€?.

General

Buying Electricals from John Lewis

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Back in January, Which, the UK Consumer Association published a customer satisfaction survey looking at high street retailers in the grocery, clothing and electrical sectors. The results of the survey were also reported on Watchdog on the BBC.

The results were interesting, particularly in the electrical sector, where established big names such as PC World, Comet, Dixons and Powerhouse were soundly beaten by local specialists and John Lewis. Indeed the big names were even beaten by Asda and Tesco. Indeed in the categories of Product, Customer Service and In-Store Experience, John Lewis is significantly ahead of everybody else. Although we’ve not bought electrical goods from them in the past, Mum and Dad got their last Mac from them, indeed if you’re not close to an Apple Store or specialist Apple dealer, I’d always recommend getting a Mac from them as in my experience the salesmen, unlike PC World, know what they are talking about when it comes to the Mac.

Anyway, for the first time since the survey, we were looking to buy something electrical – in this case something to record speaking for both Beth’s classes at school, and also to provide evidence for her upcoming portfolio training. She’d initially been thinking of getting some sort of MP3 player with a recording facility, although she really had no use for an MP3 player. However, since it has struck me that with most MP3 players the voice recording is an add-on, it would make more sense to look at a proper voice recorder, where it has actually been built for the purpose. This seemed to be backed by a number of the guides to producing podcasts that recommended having a good digital voice recorder, and a number of them pointed us towards various units in the Olympus Range. From a trawl around the internet I found that John Lewis stocked the whole range, so since Beth wasn’t totally sure, we decided to go into Reading and take a look. Looking at the features we required, we knew the requirements for what it needed to record, plus it needed to be able to connect to both a PC, and to the Mac for transferring the recordings.

So off we went to Reading. I’d already established roughly the model I though we needed, and the helpful salesman listened to what we needed, and showed us the relevant model. At no time did he attempt to sell us a flashier model in the range, nor did we get someone attempting to sell us an extended warranty either. In fact it was an all round good experience. The computer department had both PC and Mac models, and knowledgeable salesmen – indeed it was noticeable that whilst most of the staff on a Saturday at PC World tend to make me feel old, there was much more of a mix of ages at John Lewis, and certainly from what I overheard of some of the other conversations with people looking at computers, pretty knowledgeable. I have to say that at times when I pop in to PC World I really feel tempted to intervene when I hear some of the things the salesmen say to the customers – no such problems here.

Certainly, after that experience we’ll be going along to John Lewis again next time we need something electrical.