Al Priest’s Blog

Open Google Chrome developer tools. Click the cog in the bottom right of the window Choose “Preserve log upon navigation” This was tested with Google Chrome 14.0.835.163 m on Windows.

After a reboot yesterday, I got the following error message from Visual Studio. “Cannot find one or more components. Please reinstall the application.” I did the control panel fix/repair this app, nothing. Today i’ve found the solution on a messageboard so I thought I’d post it to save others hours of frustrated re-installation. To resolve… [...]

Coming back from a few days off work to a bloated inbox got me thinking, why isn’t my client helping me to get through the backlog? So here’s a few features i’d like to see.. If my out of office was on, rather than group my emails by date, group them by ‘received whilst away’ [...]

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 [...]

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 dev. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]