BapTea

Broken Build?

2010-05-08T10:57:00.001+01:00

Snow Snow Snow

2009-02-02T13:11:00.001Z

While the UK crumbles (*cough*) under the weight of that fluffy white stuff, it’s been an interesting morning following everyone’s experiences of this mildly unusual weather on Twitter. Twitter let’s people contribute to a particular conversion by adding a keyword to their tweets. In this case, #uksnow shows you what’s happening.

One enterprising twitter user (Ben Marsh) created a mashup (link) which allowed twitter users to rate the snow in their area. Although cool (sorry!), this is also rather subjective (rate your snow out of 10) where average snow depths might have captured more interesting data for budding meteorologists to play with.

I took part by contributing my evening and morning shots of the local weather. Twitter was also helpful in finding out what was happening with South West Trains (whose website couldn’t handle this morning’s load).

Although twitter is obviously useful, I’m not sure how much we should trust a single company to manage the site if it became more essentially (XMPP FTW). Then again, most of us are already dependent on Google to make the web useful.

Mess around with Wifi and SkyHook

2008-10-15T00:07:00.001+01:00

I recently had some spare time (and inspiration) to mess around with the SkyHook API (which you would already know if you follow me on twitter!). SkyHook invested the time and money to drive around the USA and Europe to map the location of wireless access points by MAC address. Note the vast majority of wireless access points can be easily identified by anyone within range using software such as NetStumbler or inSSIDer. SkyHook have got both my access point at home and at Shelley’s parents in their database so it looks like they’ve done a pretty good job at coverage!

Making use of both the DotNet Managed Wifi library and the SkyHook API, I wrote a quick C# console application that identifiers the MAC address of local access points and queries the SkyHook API for a location. If a location is found then a KML file is saved and opened with the default handler (such as Google Earth).

If you want to have a play, the Visual Studio 2008 solution can be downloaded here. Be sure to let me know if you come up with any other interesting applications.

This little project also helped to prove how useful Stack Overflow is for getting answers to programming problems. I asked 1, 2, 3 questions that were all answered pretty quickly. Sometimes even if you know the answer it’s useful to ask the question incase someone has a better answer!

Photosynths from Scotland

2008-09-20T17:59:00.002+01:00

Dani and I created some more photosynths on a recent trip to the west coast of Scotland.

First up is St Columba's Chapel on the Mull of Kintrye:

Followed by a tour around Campbeltown Loch:

For Developers Everywhere...

2008-09-02T15:18:00.000+01:00

Video Here

Photosynth

2008-08-31T23:15:00.004+01:00

Prompted by Steveeeee's comment that this place is like a desert, I thought I better post something...

Microsoft released Photosynth to the public recently. Photosynth is photo stitching (see every post of mine tagged pan) but in 3D. Very Cool!

They haven't come out very well but be sure that next time I go somewhere photo-worthy there will be Photosynth mania.

Here you go... Click the "three dots" to switch between clusters.

Overclocking Core 2 Duo

2008-04-05T12:37:00.001+01:00

Did some experimenting with overclocking my computer today. It's running an Intel Core 2 Duo E6420 which runs at 2.1GHz by default (bus speed of 266MHz with x8 multiplier). Upped the bus speed to 299MHz and now it's running at 2.4GHz. My Windows Experience Index for my processor went from 5.1 to 5.3. Idle temperature is now ~50 degrees Celsius using the stock cooler. Hopefully it'll be stable when playing COD4 and COH!

These processors are very easy to overclock and squeeze a little extra performance out of them. Now if only we weren't saving to move house (not to mention some wedding I've got to go to) I could justify an upgrade to one of those nice Core 2 Quad Q6600s!

BizUnit 3.0 Api

2008-03-18T00:17:00.004Z

Lately I've been working heavily with the BizUnit 3.0 beta for testing a number of different projects. In particular I'm consuming the new object model API in order to programmatically invoke tests using a variety of test sources. The purpose of this post is to provide an introduction to the new API and it's usage. Prior to 3.0, BizUnit needed to be invoked using XML such as the following (an example borrowed from the CodePlex site):

<TestStep assemblyPath="" typeName="Microsoft.Services.BizTalkApplicationFramework.BizUnit.FileValidateStep">
  <Timeout>3000</Timeout>
  <Directory>..\..\..\Rec_03\</Directory>
  <SearchPattern>TransactionId_*.xml</SearchPattern>
  <DeleteFile>true</DeleteFile>
 
  <ValidationStep assemblyPath="" typeName="Microsoft.Services.BizTalkApplicationFramework.BizUnit.XmlValidationStep">
      <XmlSchemaPath>..\..\..\TestData\PurchaseOrder.xsd</XmlSchemaPath>
      <XmlSchemaNameSpace>http://SendMail.PurchaseOrder</XmlSchemaNameSpace>
      <XPathList>
          <XPathValidation query=
              "/*[local-name()='PurchaseOrder' and namespace-uri()='http://SendMail.PurchaseOrder']
              /*[local-name()='PONumber' and namespace-uri()='']">PONumber_0</XPathValidation>
      </XPathList>
  </ValidationStep>  
</TestStep>

BizUnit could then be invoked with something like the following (where BizUnitAPI is the BizUnit class in the BizUnit namespace):

string myConfigFile = "c:\path\to\test.xml"; BizUnitAPI bizUnit = new BizUnitAPI(myConfigFile); bizUnit.RunTest();

This is great because we can easily generate XML to represent a set of Test Cases and Test Steps to run in series. However, this doesn't give you the control you might need. Enter the BizUnit.BizUnitOM namespace and it's new classes:

BizUnitTestCase : Encapsulates a set of test steps.
TestStepBuilder : Builds a test step instance.
ITestStepOM : Test step classes must implement this to work with the new API.

Our usage of the API can be written as follows:

Create a BizUnitTestCase.
For each step:
1. Create a TestStepBuilder.
2. Set each of the properties of the test step to ensure the step behaves as we want.
3. Add the TestStepBuilder to our test case.
Create a BizUnit instance using the BizUnitTestCase.
Run the test.

The following is a trivial example of creating a test case to delete all the TXT files in a specified path.

BizUnitTestCase testCase = new BizUnitTestCase("My First Test Case");

TestStepBuilder testStepBuilder = new TestStepBuilder("BizUnit.FileDeleteStep");

object[] args = new object[1] {@"c:\my\path\*.txt"};

testStepBuilder.SetProperty("FilesToDeletePath", args);

testCase.AddTestStep(testStepBuilder, TestStage.Execution);

BizUnitAPI bizUnit = new BizUnitAPI(testCase);

bizUnit.RunTest();

If the test step were to require multiple arguments to be set, then the SetProperty method can be called as many times is required. Also, a TestStepBuilder needs to be generated for each test step in our test case.

If the required implementation of ITestStepOM is not included with BizUnit, then the TestStepBuilder can be invoked to load an external assembly:

TestStepBuilder testStepBuilder = new TestStepBuilder("MyAssembly.MyTestStep", "c:\path\to\MyAssembly.dll");

Note that, out of the box, only certain property types are supported as test step properties. These are:

double
bool
short
int
long
string
IList<string>
IList<Pair>

Other types can be supported but they require a custom implementation of ITestStepParameterFormatter. The implementation of which I'll save for another post.

Any questions or comments? I recommend the CodePlex Discussions Page.

Keeping Track

2008-03-14T23:08:00.004Z

One of the problems of using a variety of online services is how do your friends keeping track of what you are doing. Facebook solves this, for people that haven't discovered RSS, in it's News Feed feature. However, I'd much rather read in the comfort of my familiar RSS reader than on Facebook. This is where FriendFeed comes in. FriendFeed aggregates the feeds from all the services you use. Short-form updates from Twitter, long form updates from your blog, favourite tracks from Last.FM, shared links on del.icio.us are all combined into a single feed. Users can choose to read the feed on FriendFeed.com or can subscribe to the aggregated feed in their RSS reader. As long as you keep your services in FriendFeed up-to-date, your friends will only ever need to subscribe to 1 feed for all of your online activity. Give it a try. You can find my feed here.

User Interface Design

2008-02-17T22:59:00.003Z

If you are going to ask me a question then give me the information I need to provide an answer.

Dublin Photos

2008-02-07T21:13:00.000Z

ITunes Tag Helper 0.0.0.3

2007-12-16T21:24:00.000Z

Version 0.0.0.3 (aiming low) of the ITunes Tag Helper is now available to download here. Two new features:

Remove files from the ITunes library which have been deleted from the HDD.
Add missing .mp3 files to the library from the HDD.

Usually disclaimer that this was built in a very short space of time and will probably crash on your system. It's only been run on Windows Vista and ITunes 7.5.0.20. Backup your ITunes library before running some random code against it.

ITunes Tag Helper 0.0.0.2

2007-11-27T22:29:00.000Z

While messing around trying to fix-up some song tags in ITunes at the weekend I threw (kinda literally) together a little project which makes use of the ITunes COM API - the ITunes Tag Helper. At the moment this pathetic little application has only 1 feature. It can look at the artist tag against all your tracks and if they are in the format QUEENS OF THE STONEAGE, will change them to Queens Of The Stoneage. Win32 binaries (version 0.0.0.2) can be downloaded here. The source code (available under GPL3) can be found as part of the Google Code Project. If you have any ideas for the project then feel free to drop me an E-mail or raise a Type-Enhancement issue over at Google Code. Usually disclaimer that this was built in a very short space of time and will probably crash on your system. It's only been run on Windows Vista and ITunes 7.5.0.20. Backup your ITunes library before running some random code against it.

London Photos

2007-11-01T00:12:00.000Z

Scratchin'

2007-10-21T11:18:00.000+01:00

Downloading now... :)

Orange Box Review

2007-10-19T22:39:00.000+01:00

Watch this video

Party likes it 198Something. Bionic Commando

2007-10-16T20:19:00.000+01:00

I was very happy to learn today that there will be a new Bionic Commando game. This was one of my favourite games on the C64 in which I couldn't get passed the second level. Yay for games Iain finds very hard.

Inbox Zero

2007-10-15T21:45:00.000+01:00

Anyone who gets a lot of E-mail should watch this video.

Panoriphic

2007-09-02T23:53:00.001+01:00

Warp

2007-06-22T00:10:00.001+01:00

I had to stop watching this after 60 seconds.

Microsoft Surface : Big Ass Table

2007-06-21T23:57:00.000+01:00

Rome

2007-06-01T18:45:00.001+01:00

Some photos from our recent trip to Rome.

Interview with Steven and Bill

2007-06-01T18:29:00.000+01:00

The following videos are a recent joint interview with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. If the embedded videos don't work then you can view the videos here.

Star Wars

2007-05-26T00:38:00.000+01:00

Starcraft 2 Gameplay Video

2007-05-19T10:33:00.000+01:00

Wii Music

2007-03-23T16:19:00.000Z

The Amazing Rolo :: Blog/Podcast More Wiimote generated music.

Web 2.0 Video

2007-02-12T22:18:00.000Z

Found via Dani, good video about web 2.0.

Running the DRM Gauntlet | Songbirdnest.com

2007-02-10T10:52:00.000Z

This is an interesting blog post from the Songbird (open source Media player based on Firefox) about struggling to support Microsoft's and Apple's DRM systems.

How does this work? We don't hack out the encryption keys or anything illegal. Songbird supports multiple playback cores so we simply use Apple's and Microsoft's own playback engines to do the decoding for us. We use VLC for playback of most file types, but now whenever you play a protected WMA or M4P file we swap in the Windows Media Player or QuickTime core. Sounds easy, right?

Running the DRM Gauntlet | Songbirdnest.com

Wii Code

2007-02-06T21:05:00.000Z

Wii Me 4765 2327 0757 9490

Chris Long comments on Vista

2007-02-03T15:48:00.000Z

An article on the BBC News website caught my eye earlier. Chris Long gives a list of people who he thinks will be interested in the launch of Windows Vista.

I've made a list of the people that the launch was really of interest to. It's not a long one.
1 - people who are thinking of buying a new PC

2 - technology managers who have to install it in offices

3 - geeks
And that's about it.

I think he's missed one important person - anyone who ever uses a PC. The majority of people I know spend a lot of time working on a PC running Microsoft Windows. The launch of a new version of Windows (the first since October 2001!) which undoubtly will be adopted on the majority of desktops over the coming years is important technology news. Another point included is related to the DRM features of Vista.

plus it doesn't let you watch High Def video for which the copyright has been broken.

Windows Vista can not stop you watching High Def video for which the copyright is broken. The problem is that Windows Vista will reduce the quality of any protected media which does not follow a protected path. So if your amplifier / monitor don't have the minimum DRM capabilities, the quality of the audio or video will be degraded even if the hardware is more than capable of handing the higher quality. That DRM-less high end audio system might not sound good on Vista. That said, Chris makes a good point regarding the price of Vista in dollars being almost the same as the price of Vista in pounds. This despite the current 1:1.9 exchange rate. Vista is here. Everyone will eventually upgrade. In a few years time Microsoft will release another version of Windows. Apple will continue to gain market share.

Wiimote DJ

2007-02-01T00:29:00.001Z

Chris Morris

2007-02-01T00:24:00.001Z

And so it starts again

2007-01-16T23:46:00.000Z

Aha! The addiction resumes. After not playing since August, Azeroth beckons once again with the promise of new lands and greater glories. Below I present 3 screenshots from the Draenai home city - Exodar. Screenshot one features "niaiPaladin" - a fresh-faced Draenai Paladin exploring the new lands. We can be found on Outlands (Alliance) and Bloodfeather (Horde). (If the images are broken, it might be because the facebook / multiply / whatever importer hasn't picked up the images. See the original here).

Derren Brown - Suggestion

2006-12-31T13:41:00.000Z

Someone linked to this video on YouTube of Darren Brown and Simon Pegg. Quite long (7 minutes) but worth a watch.

Merry Christmas

2006-12-23T00:46:00.000Z

Merry Christmas.

Mail

2006-12-13T22:53:00.001Z

Battery

2006-12-12T23:23:00.001Z

Craigslist Meets the Capitalists

2006-12-12T23:20:00.000Z

Craigslist Meets the Capitalists

Wendy Davis of MediaPost describes the presentation as a “a culture clash of near-epic proportions.” She recounts how UBS analyst Ben Schachter wanted to know how Craigslist plans to maximize revenue. It doesn’t, Mr. Buckmaster replied (perhaps wondering how Mr. Schachter could possibly not already know this).

Global Rich List

2006-11-13T23:07:00.000Z

Apparently I am (and you too probably!) are in the top 5% richest people in the world. How rich are you (relatively)?

Xbox 360 vs PS2 : Sales

2006-11-11T10:00:00.000Z

Taken from Joystiq, the console sales figures for Japan last week are quite interesting reading.

* DS Lite: 113,097 (-28.73%) * PSP: 23,725 (-8.43%) * PS2: 20,982(-3.89%) * Xbox 360: 6,580 (+320.45%) * GBA SP: 1443 (-22.34%) * Game Boy Micro: 1,299 (-3.85%) * Gamecube: 647 (+0.47%) * DS Phat: 373 (+227.19%) * GBA: 20 (+33.33%) * Xbox: 0 (-100.00%)

Xbox 360 sales have trippled in the last week but are still less than the PS2.

Animation 2

2006-10-30T22:24:00.000Z

I mentioned in a previous post that a friend was working on a new film. Here is a short preview and what he has to say about it.

A spoof of the new 007 gun-barrel opening sequence, highlighting Daniel Craig (with his fair hair)making himself known. This is a stop montion animation using clay on a stikfa armiture. The sequence has been shot infront of a green screen to allow for the addition of the set afterwards through chroma key. Feel free to edit it and add sound, just let us know the end result... Plenty more to come, I have the entire set of starwars made on stikfas, the terminator, alien, batman etc...

Windows Media Player 11 - Missing Artists

2006-10-30T22:17:00.000Z

Microsoft have been pretty busy lately gearing up for the launch of Windows Vista:

I'm pretty impressed by the updates from Redmond, but apparently we aren't allowed to see a list of artists in playlists:

Animation

2006-10-26T21:39:00.000+01:00

Back in the day, a friend got inspired by the Wallace and Gromit films to make his own clay animations. These are the results... He's just finished university and is looking for his first job. In the meantime he's working on a new film. I'll try to post it when it's ready.

Kefalonia - Fire

2006-10-16T21:40:00.000+01:00

While on a holiday, a minor fire broke out close to our villa. The locals had a habbit of lighting fires in the evenings but this one got a little out of hand. At first we thought this was just someone clearing land for some type of building project. Then the planes and fire engines turned up.

Back from holiday

2006-10-13T11:06:00.001+01:00

We arrived back from our week away in Kefalonia last night. A good time was had by all. More pictures to follow.

Mysterious Text Message (Part 2)

2006-10-03T13:46:00.000+01:00

~~Charlotte~~ Lucy was born at 12:50 today. :-)

Mysterious Text Message

2006-10-03T08:07:00.000+01:00

I just received the following from my brother:

Bambino stalk on its way. Looks like landing today very likely. Will notify if any further info.

Weekend Away

2006-10-02T22:25:00.000+01:00

Shelley and I went away for the weekend with Shelley's parents and sister to the Cotswolds. We stayed in Park Cottage, Stow On The Wold. Highly recommended. We accidentally ordered a chinese from the following establishment. As the photograph shows, this isn't in Stow On The Wold... (opps!). We also walked past a Llama farm as illustrated beautifully by the following photograph. We visited the Corinium Museum in Cirencester which mostly features Roman artifacts such as the following mosiac.

The Orpheus Mosaic was found in 1825 and dates back to the 4th century AD. Orpheus was a character from a Greek myth who could play the lyre so beautifully that wild beasts were instantly tamed. The mosiac shows Orpheus charming the animals with his music.

We then got lost... The End. *BONUS PICTURE*

Flow

2006-09-25T23:28:00.000+01:00

Flow is the Playstation 3's answer to Geometry Wars on the X360. However, the gameplay in Flow is vastly dissimilar to what you find in Geometry Wars The following link is to a flash implementation of Flow. There is even an offline version for you to enjoy at home. http://intihuatani.usc.edu/cloud/flowing/ *edit* While we are talking about the PS3, spotted this HD video (Quicktime) over at Penny-Arcade.

VMWare not responding

2006-09-25T10:14:00.000+01:00

I mentioned in a previous post that I was installing VMWare on my workstation for use as a development environment. Unfortunately it developed a fault over the weekend and now everytime VMware loads the window looks like this and promptly maxes out the CPU. The only buttons that respond are the minimise, maximise and close buttons. Attempts to resize the window are fruitless. Trying to uninstall and reinstall the software made no difference. Even when deleting the installation directory and hunting down all the registry settings. I'll do some research into this on the VMWare website this week and see if it can be solved (without reinstalling the host OS).

Children of Men

2006-09-23T22:33:00.000+01:00

Shelley and I watched Children of Men at our local cinema this evening on my brother's recommendation. Shelley thought it was an OK film. I thought it was pretty awesome. Here's why:

Both Aphex Twin and Radiohead in the soundtrack.
Plenty of really long (as in time) shots with no cuts (that I noticed).
Reminders of 1984, Equilibrium, Half-Life 2.

The director, Alfonso Cuarón, was also responsible for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban but please don't let that put you off. Here is an extract from a negative review by Boyd van Hoeij of EUROPEANFILMS.NET.

"An ugly mix of contemporary issues is hacked to unrecognizable bits in this tame, at times insipid thriller trying to impress with impossibly generic analogies to our own time."

Highly recommend you go see this film. Next stop... The Fountain.

The Eraserhead Warp Record Memorial Mix

2006-09-23T16:22:00.000+01:00

The following is a 49 minute best of Warp mix by Eraserhead. It comes highly recommended.

Mourning the death and celebrating the life of a once great label

The Eraserhead Warp Record Memorial Mix

Evening Pan

2006-09-23T00:48:00.000+01:00

Installing VMWare to put together a PHP / IIS / MS-SQL 2000 (Desktop Edition) virtual machine. Developers, Developers, Developers (Developers, Developers,...)... Link : Count to 10 on 1 hand (counting 0 as 1)

Station Pan

2006-09-19T23:25:00.001+01:00

Walk along the river

2006-09-17T21:31:00.000+01:00

Dani visited this weekend. He's making the most of his time before starting his new job on Thursday. We met on Saturday to go shopping for presents for Shelley in Reading. Reading, although it isn't *that* bad, can be summarised by the following pan - taken on the roof of the town's Oracle shopping centre car park. Dani came back to ours and watched Hustle and Flow - a film about life in the ghetto ("Everybody gotta have a dream"). On Sunday, we all went for a walk along the Thames and took 700(!) megabytes worth of photographs including the pan below. Tomorrow it's back to work. It's the "early" shift for me so have to be in just before 7am. This means leaving the house at 06:30. I'm currently in the middle of moving jobs from Technical Support to Software Development (at the same company) and so will do Technical Support until 09:00 and development for the rest of the day. So it's time for bed now if I'm going to wake up in time.

Most boring post ever 2

2006-09-09T14:25:00.000+01:00

In competion for the last "most boring post ever", we have the above photograph. This shows some patches we found on the wall in our bedroom behind a freestanding wardrobe. Not sure what this is, but I'm sure we will all be eagerly awaiting the next exciting installment as we explore the strange patches on the wall.

V Festival 2006 - Radiohead

2006-09-09T13:00:00.000+01:00

We went to the V festival 2006 in Staffordshire and saw a couple of bands including Radiohead. The attached video (with poor audio quality) is an extract from Paranoid Android showing some mashup lighting effects.

Most boring post ever

2006-09-09T00:21:00.000+01:00

Oven broke. Dad came to look at it. Found damage (see above). Replaced element. The End.

Prestatyn 2

2006-09-05T23:42:00.001+01:00

Second photograph taken in Prestatyn. The previous photo was a 1d stitch. This is a 2d stitch.

Prestatyn

2006-09-04T20:15:00.001+01:00

Photo taken in Prestatyn and put together using Autostitch.

I don't like fileplanet.

2006-08-16T19:49:00.000+01:00

Fileplanet is rubbish. You have to queue up to download files and half the time the queue screws up and you have to start again (or find somewhere else to download the file from). In the past 7 days I have completely changed my mind about fileplanet. The reason? Download Manager. This little application makes downloading stuff from fileplanet ultra-easy. The only downside... it still has queues. Please Gamespy, see the light, BITTORRENT!

Where did I put that photo?

2006-08-16T19:46:00.000+01:00

Official Google Blog: A better way to organize photos? I'm a big fan of Picasa. My favourite feature is the (slightly buggy at present) Geotagging integration with Google Earth. The link is to an official Google blog post where they envisage a world where photographs are automatically tagged based on their contents. For example, all the photos on my hard disk which feature my parents will be automagically tagged appropriately. Google have, like all companies with that much money, bought a company with the technology to make this a reality. Awesome.

PORTAL Trailer

2006-08-15T19:06:00.000+01:00

Trailer for a new game from Valve to be released on Steam with Half-Life 2 : Episode 2. "Thinking outside the box".