Robert's Thoughts 2.0

For about 2 years now I’ve had in my mind that becoming a Microsoft Certified developer would be a good thing to do both for my CV, and also for the fact that it’s a great chance to look at aspects of the vast .NET Framework that on a day to day basis I would probably never get the chance to investigate.

So, I’ve finally started with the mandatory first exam on my journey to become a Microsoft Certified Professional Developer (MCPD), the 70-536 exam, Application Development Foundation.

Various people have said to me that the official Microsoft exam kits are no good, are full of inaccuracies and are heavily bloated for what you need to learn for the exam. Great.

Well, I don’t think I’m in a position to decide if that’s true so I'm putting my faith in Tony Northrup the author of the official 70-536 study guide, please don’t let me down Tony!

It’s going to be a long, hard slog. I’ve not had to study for an exam since graduating university 3 years ago so getting back into a strict routine is a challenge but it’s going well so far.

I have to say, the subject matter is a little dry in the early chapters. The section about regular expressions in particular is especially gruelling and is one that I think I’ll have to return to in order to keep a good momentum going.

Fingers crossed that in around 2 months I’ll be a ready to sit my exam, pass it and be a better developer for it, then it’s onwards for the hopefully more interesting exams that lead to MCPD status, which for me will be a real achievement.

I’ll try to post any tips about studying for the exams here when I find them.

Well, FOWA Edinburgh has been and gone, and very good it was as well, lots to take in over the whole day, the presentations just kept coming!

I have to say the event was extremely well run, and Sun were very generous to provide lunch and as much average tasting coffee as you could handle!

The morning started with a presentation from Microsoft about Azure, their cloud computing offering which is currently in beta and should get a full release at PDC 2009 towards the end of the year.

For me, this was especially interesting due to its close integration with Visual Studio. It’s just a case of creating a new cloud service project and off you go. I’ll need to delve a bit deeper into it to see the benefits it could offer myself and the company I work for. SQL Data Services was of particular interest to me.

I have to say though that Azure was blown away by Amazons Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2), which seems way more mature than Azure.

The control panel looked excellent and the ease of setting up a new virtual server in Amazon’s cloud was very, very appealing! They have something like 200+ different server images on the UK service just now, all types of operating systems available after a few clicks, awesome!

In general with cloud computing I’m still trying to get my head round it. How we can try to harness its power where I work? It would obviously be a massive change in how we manage our network infrastructure and hosting abilities and I’m not too sure how the costs would compare, but the apparent ease of scaling look very impressive in theory.

My main worry (and something which I’m sure I’ll lose over time) is the feeling that you’re not really in control of your server, you can’t touch it or see it! Having said that I already use a virtual server to host a few websites (including this blog) so what’s the big deal!?

The afternoon was given over to more business oriented presentations. Ryan Carson’s "Lessons learned from selling Dropsend and other web app stories" was really good. In particular it gave me some ideas on how my company can start using Twitter as a powerful marketing tool, something which I hope I can contribute to over the next few months.

So, a good day over all, thanks to Carsonified and Sun and the people I met at the event! I hope they do another one next year!

I'm attending Carsonified's Future Of Web Apps (FOWA) Tour in Edinburgh next week and my work have agreed to reimburse my ticket cost in return for a short presentation of what (if anything) I learn from it. Sounds like a good deal to me, and also gives me a chance for a decent blog post of a summary of my findings!

I follow Ryan Carson on Twitter and he strikes me a very creative, opinionated and forward thinking guy so I'm looking forward to seeing what one of his events is like, especially as it's so close by.

It takes place at Microsoft's Edinburgh office Sun Microsystems Edinburgh office and topics will include Amazon and Microsoft's cloud services offerings among others. Should be a good day, I'm really looking forward to it!

Should I keep this blog?

A question I've been thinking about recently as I would hate to leave another unloved, abandoned blog on the internet. It would be a true waste of digital space. But, do I have anything interesting enough to say to keep it going?

My Google Analytics account tells me that my visitor rate is pretty much zero (no wonder as I never write anything new), and in the vast ocean of tecchie/music/ranting blogs do we really need another drop?

Hard to say, if I've got something that I feel is worth saying then why not say it? It's never been easier to get your point across, people can stumble across your blog from a vast number of sources.

As a professional web developer, there seems to be a certain amount of pressure to join in with the great discussions that happen in the "community". On a day to day basis, I have come to rely on other developers blogs as a source of inspiration, help, humour and news. I want to be a part of that, I really do.

Maybe it's a lack of confidence which makes me feel that perhaps my views aren't as valid or "correct" as more outspoken developers.

So, I think I may have answered my own question. If I learn something really cool, if something is really pissing me off, if I generally just want to write stuff that other people might stumble across and find interesting or funny or whatever then I should keep this blog.

I'll set myself a goal of blog post every other week for the next few months, if I can't stick to that then I'm afraid the internet will just have to go without my opinions (well apart from on Twitter, 140 characters is an easy target to hit)!

So, here is my first post on my brand new dasBlog powered blog! And it's about something that I reckon at least 50% of iPhone users already know, how to transfer a DVD onto an iPhone!

I actually wrote these guidelines for my dad as I gave him my old iPod touch and he wanted to transfer some DVD's onto it. I had never bothered with video on my iPhone before so was pleased to discover that it's actually really easy to achieve using Handbrake, a tool that I had heard of for OSX but not Windows.

Anyway, here's the steps that I gave to my dad which led him down the path to video success!

RIPPING THE DVD

1. Go to http://handbrake.fr/?article=download and download and install the Windows version. It's the third one down and you want the GUI version (6.2 MB). If the program starts automatically then close it down.

2. Once the program is installed, start it by going to Windows Button/Start -> All Programs -> Handbrake and then right click on the Handbrake icon and select 'Run as administrator' (it should be the second item in the menu that pops up when you right click).

3. When the main Handbrake screen appears you'll notice on the right hand side there is a "Presets" menu. You want to select the item called "iPhone & iPod Touch". This should set up the program with all the settings required to convert the DVD into the correct format for the iPod.

4. Next, put the DVD into the computer and close down any programs that automatically start up (like Windows Media Player for example).

5. At the top of the Handbrake window there is a menu item called "Source". Click on this and select the DVD you inserted as the source.

6. The program should now pop up a window saying that it is reading the source. As it says this should take about a minute. If it takes much longer than this then the DVD is probably copy protected and you won't be able to rip it onto the PC.

7. Once the program has read the DVD successfully you're pretty much ready to rip it. You just need to specify a destination in the "File" box near the top of the window. You might want to create a new folder on the C drive for this. Just choose whatever folder you want the file to be saved to and type in a filename then click "Save".

8. Now you just need to click the "Start" button at the top of the program window and a black window should appear telling you that encoding has started. If the black screen appears briefly then disappears then something has gone wrong. Try repeating steps 3-7 again and then retry this step.

COPYING ENCODED FILE ONTO IPHONE

1. Once the DVD has been ripped, open up iTunes and plug in the iPhone.

2. Once the iPhone has been recognised open up the folder were you saved the encoded movie and drag it onto the left hand side menu in iTunes and drop it onto your iPhone.

3. The file should copy on fairly quickly. Open up "Music", then select the "More" menu and choose videos. You should see and be able to play the video from there.

I've been playing around with Oxite, the ASP.NET MVC demo blogging engine and decided to try and whip out all the content from this here hosted blog and import it into Oxite. Oxite is pretty basic just now but with plenty of room for anyone keen enough and with the appropriate knowledge of ASP.NET MVC (I'm still very much at the beginning of my learning) to improve and extend it. It does however contain a nice import tool to pull in blog data via a BlogML XML file. Unfortunately, WordPress doesn't have a native "export as BlogML" tool, but handily one can be found here. The problem now is that the BlogML exporter requires the user to update the export.php file within the wp-admin folder, and as my blog is a hosted solution I don't have the required access to modify this (as far as I know). My solution then was pretty simple and effective:

• To start I exported the content of my blog using the standard WordPress export tool which fires out the data as a WordPress eXtended RSS (WXR) file.
• Next up, I downloaded the latest WordPress release, ran the installer (ridiculously easy) and set up a local, empty WordPress blog. I then imported my WXR file into this fresh WordPress install, essentailly replicating my live blog.
• You can probably tell what's coming now...... as I have complete control over this local copy, I was able to update the export.php file and export the content into the BlogML format.

From there it was simply a case of running the Oxite import utility and blam, my WordPress blog is replicated in Oxite!

There are many, many great things about the iPhone, but being a very cynical person I have decided to ignore them and compile a list of the most frustrating things I have discovered while using my iPhone for last few weeks.

The current list:

• You can't send or receive MMS messages: Why not, is it the year 2000? It's all very well saying that "Oh, you can just check any picture messages sent to you online at your O2 account", but following this, I would rather that any MMS messages sent to me go nowhere near the O2 website!
• The camera is pretty damn poor and doesn't support video: I'm not a keen photographer or anything but my phone was generally my most used camera, capturing hilarious pub/club incidents for me never to look at again. Sadly I tried to take a photo in a club using my iPhone and due to it's lack of flash, the result was a black rectangle. Nice. The lack of video camera and the fact that the camera is only 2 megapixels (whether this matters for my crappy club-themed photography or not I would expect a few more megapixels for my money), are also strange ommisions for a top of the range phone. I'm pretty sure Nokia wouldn't even consider putting out a high end phone in this day and age without these features.
• You can't use your own MP3's/audio files as ringtones: I know there is a rather round about way to do this (something about making your own ringtone on your PC and then transferring it to your iPhone) but I'm not gonna waste my time doing that. Nearly every phone that I have owned in the last 5 years has allowed me to set any sound or piece of music I want as a ringtone so why not the iPhone? If I want to cheapen one of my favourite pieces of music (that I own) by setting it as a ringtone then I should be able to!
• You can't access the music on your iPhone from other computers: I don't sync, I just don't like the idea so I manually manage everything on my iPhone. Even though, when I try and connect my iPhone to my PC in work I am unable to play any of the music on it through iTunes as I am told that the iPhone is synced to my PC at home. No it isn't, I disabled all the syncing didn't I? I could use my iPod touch wherever I wanted and add/listen to music as I pleased. Not so with the iPhone it seems. Bollocks!

This list may grow in time and I should point out that if I was to compile a list of all the great things about the iPhone then it would be much longer. But I'm not going to.

Ok, so it's been ages since I blogged about using the awesome open source CMS Umbraco. This was mainly as I didn't have a project to work on so my interest had kinda died. Thankfully however, my friend has asked me to build a basic website for his company (I'll post the URL when it's live) so I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to put Umbraco to use. I've been working on it for a few days now on and off and every day I'm learning more about Umbraco and every day I like it more! Really, for me, simple things like allowing you to insert any page field from a drop down is a big time saver. The ease and speed with which you can get a site up and running is fantastic. I have given up trying to load custom controls from a DLL and have started using user controls which work a treat. The control integration is great as well, all you do is build your control in Visual Studio, copy the DLL and ascx into the appropriate folders and away you go! Tonight I found a gem, the umbraco.library class which contains a whole bunch of useful static methods to aid with your development. NiceUrl() is a favourite so far although I haven't really looked at the rest yet. Also, I should mention the forum. It seems very active and full of people willing and able to help newcomers with some of the basic questions which really stem from a lack of experience with the system. I can see me returning to that quite a bit in the future. Umbraco.tv has also just launched which is a video based tutorial site (subscription required) the aim of which seems to be remedying what seems to be a long standing issue with Umbraco documentation. An interesting proposition but I think I would only subscribe if I was doing full time Umbraco development as I'm sure I can find most of the stuff I'll need on the forum and other Umbraco themed sites. More to come I'm sure (looking forward to Umbraco 4!), hopefully including some technical articles once I start to figure things out!

Dear Alan, I appreciate your comments over the previous month regarding some of my blog posts. I also like the fact that you took the time to use Google's translator to produce a message in Croatian. But really, it's time for you to stop. Find something else to do with your time. Why not start your own blog about your adventures in Glasgow's night clubs, or perhaps about how you are responsible for the current difficulties that Morgan Stanley is facing? I think you need an outlet to the world. You need to reach out to people, and for them to reach back to you. I hope this message finds you well Alan Gadd. Yours, Robert

I've pretty much had enough of Mozilla's Weave. It's a real shame as it looked like a really good tool but it's just so unreliable. For the last week or so I have been unable to login and sync, consulting the activity log told me that my username and/or password were not recognised. Strange, as I have kept the same details saved ever since I started using the service. Tonight I finally found a password reminder link on services.mozilla.com but to my utter annoyance, when I filled in my username I was told that my account did not exist! Excuse me? So, apart from the fact that I can no longer sign in, I was getting pretty tired of the frustratingly slow sync times, especially when I just wanted to shut down my computer and get the hell out of the office! With the news that Google have just launched their brand spanking new browser Chrome, it makes me wonder if Browser Sync was discontinued as a similar tool will be released for Chrome. Time will tell but I'm seriously tempted to just get rid of Weave and look at alternatives. Delicious seems like a reasonable option. I wonder if anyone has made any progress on getting Browser Sync to work with Firefox 3 yet. Anyone know?