I’m moving soon! So, for various reasons, I am doing a whole load of painting-and-decorating to prepare to rent out my current flat. Today I was putting the final coat of enamel onto a radiator, and while doing this I was really noticing the remnants of old paint-drips that I had not quite sanded away in my preparation. Now, overall, I know the radiator will look a lot better tomorrow than it did a couple of days ago… but I still find those historic drips bothersome!
DIY, Paint-Drips, and Code Refactoring
July 14th, 2010Moving to Windows 7 x64 for Developers
April 5th, 2010I recently purchased and installed a new boot SSD, and rather than worry about copying my installation, I decided to get Windows 7; and further; to move to 64 bit. I had actually previously purchased a 64 bit version of Vista, but been baffled by an issue with lack of support for VPN 64-bit software by Cisco, so I ended up overwriting it with a 32 bit install.
More Keys is More Secure. Right?
March 27th, 2010
Last week, we had a heated discussion at work about encryption. We want to encrypt some data in our database, and I proposed that we go with a single private-key encryption mechanism (ignore which exact one for the moment), and my colleagues were pretty-much unanimously suggesting a ‘key per row’ approach. In this post I am going to attempt to explain the rough background, and why I felt their mechanism might not be best.
Data Model Changes and Replication
March 13th, 2010
Just a little reminder note today on the simplest way to make data-model changes in SQL Server 2005 when the database is replicated via transactional replication. This is from my own personal experience of replication and very-much muddling my way through learning how to use it effectively. Otherwise, this posts presumes you are familiar with Replication Monitor and so on.
Boolean Expressions
March 5th, 2010The C# code-base I work on has hundreds of places where I have felt a boolean expression could have been used to simplify the code substantially.
Achieving Faster ADSL Speeds…
February 7th, 2010
…or “How to improve your appalling ADSL speeds to what they told you you’d get speeds”
…or “How I split my ADSL and telephone signals and shoved them down a Cat5e cable”.
Phantom Code
February 6th, 2010
I’ve just worked on a little support problem that was quite interesting - although not in a good way - as unfortunately it demonstrates failures at so many stages of the specification and development process that I am quite disappointed to be associated with it. Associated, but not the cause of it, to be clear 
Why’s Ruby Guide Update
August 31st, 2009I’ve just updated Why’s Ruby Guide pdf to include Chapter 7’s images; go to the specific page with updates. Thanks to Andy Matuschak for pointing this out to me, and giving me a link to where the documents are still available on the internet
The Rounding Race - Rounding DateTimes to Dates at Midnight
August 31st, 2009
Yesterday I covered the implementation details of DateTime and SmallDateTime datatypes in SQL Server 2005. I approached the issue of testing dates to see if they fell on a particular date… but then stopped-short of some fairly useful (but arcane) stuff about rounding dates.
One Second to Midnight - DateTimes in Sql Server 2005
August 30th, 2009
Today I am enthused to write about the DateTime and SmallDateTime datatypes in SQL Server 2005 (and possibly this also applies to 2008, although that has additional date and time types). I am driven to write this because I have seen a number of issues relating to their use in queries and one in particular that is a real annoyance to me - even if I have to admit that it is completely and utterly pedantic (most of the time).