Al’s Blog

From Wikipedia, “Kaizen is a Japanese philosophy that focuses on continuous improvement throughout all aspects of life”. After a review of our systems from a software coach in the department, I decided to instigate a weekly Kaizen session for the whole dev team. (I first heard of the term Kaizen a few years ago when [...]

Had a problem with NHibernate Lifecycle events recently where they appeared not to be firing when I was hitting ISession.Save(entity). After some investigation I finally realised that if you create a new entity, then query NHibernate it may implicitly persist the transient object during a Flush. When it does this any interceptors will be fired [...]

I love my Mac, but this morning I found the one reason why the glossy UI isn’t always that great - since upgrading to Leopard Apache hasn’t been working on localhost but according to the System Preferences panel all is well.
A quick Google and I found several references to apachectl which is the server control [...]

The system i’m working on at the moment recently went into systest and we found a couple of database errors relating which NHibernate was throwing an exception of
Unexpected row count: -1, expected 1
This wasn’t happening on the development system so we took the apparently faulty database from systest and ran it in [...]

Home WiFi has been playing up a bit recently with poor performance. After some manual tweaking of the channel based on the results of iStumbler (or NetStumbler for you PC folk) with no achievement, I found this discussion of channel selection.

Having upgraded the website I work on to .net 2.0, one of our console apps failed whilst talking to a webservice on the site. We’d not changed anything on either the console app, or the website other than upgrading the website to 2.0.
The error message was “global:System.Collections.IList cannot be deserialized because it does not have [...]

We’ve got a moderately large database here - 80gb, 5 tables and 500m rows - and we had problems updating it. Following a bout of Horizontal Partitioning we’ve now got 130 tables and those rows distributed evenly across them. However when a check constraint was updated today SQL Server 2000 wouldn’t allow data to import [...]

I’ve written a script to parse the London Underground real-time tube status page and convert it into an Xml feed. It caches the output from TfL for 1 minute. If their page structure changes i’ll endeavour to update my parser.
You can get the feed as Xml or HTML. I’ve also started the ball rolling with [...]

Remember those video games tables pubs had back in the 70s and 80s? Well they’ve evolved in the guise of Microsoft Surfaces - check out the website ‘magic’ demonstration. There are some great ways to interact photos with it - similar to the multitouch feature of the forthcoming iPhone.
It’ll be pretty neat to sync [...]

iSquint - Mac OS X only, converts and imports movies you have which aren’t in .MOV format into iTunes. This means you can use Front Row to watch them. Takes about 15 minutes for a 75 minute movie. Fingers crossed it also means I’ll be able to use Apple TV to watch them over the [...]