NotNowNigel

[Concrete/ Quite Interesting]   Well probably, but that’s not important now. I came home from a short trip to Malaysia to find my Windows 7 desktop had crashed. We have a lot of laptops at home but the desktop is the family machine. It’s connected to my Samsung 6000 LED TV and we use it for music, pictures and 1080p movies. After a day trying to recover a crashed registry, I finally decided it would be simpler to reinstall Windows. The data on this machine is important and lives mostly on a 1TB USB drive, so re-install is not a problem. Then I had a mad idea – why Windows, why not Mac OSX? Mac OS -  Why, because I can As always, I’m very busy. I’ve got a couple of development projects running, some updates to write, articles, work and with the family away, a golden opportunity to clean the house from top to bottom. But I want to – why, because I can. Not just because I can, but also because I like Mac OSX. I’m 90% Microsoft and very comfortable with their operating sy...

[Abstract/A bit interesting]   - The book is about a man who dreams of his death and super beings who control his life. Steeped in his own paranoia, often he misses what is really going on around him, until one day, it is gone. I remember Dad saying, “never drink alone” – stupid old bastard. How did he know, maybe he’s one of them? No, not nearly smart enough. Of course, what he really meant was, he drank alone and he was a drunk. If you drink alone, you’re a drunk. He was right. Rob got off the tube at Kings Cross, but instead of running to catch the crowd on platform 8, he walked out of the station and found himself at a local watering hole, the Kings Arms just off York Way. He had never been there before. This was Rob’s new game. The usual pattern was to stop for a couple of pints on the main platform. Well usual, up until today. Today, Rob had turned over a new leaf. Nothing so grand as actually giving up the drink, but if he was going to drink, he would certainly make the ef...

[Concrete/ Quite Interesting] Me and C++, we’re old mates – the sort you find on Friends Reunited. I was fortunate to work with Microsoft and Glockenspiel in the late 80’s, working in MFC 1.0 and beyond. Later I would teach C++ for QA Training and others. I really loved the language and managed to build some sizeable solutions in C++, MFC and ATL. Then came .Net and C# and for me as with many others, we could now start to focus on the problem domain, design and patterns to solution rather than pointers, memory and language syntax. In C# almost every line of code looks cleaner and addresses the issue at hand, something C++ never seemed to achieve. Look at this simple example taken randomly from the MSDN: HTTPWebRequest in C++ #using <System.dll> using namespace System; using namespace System::Net; using namespace System::Text; using namespace System::IO; // Specify the URL to receive the request. int main() { array<string^>^args = Environment::GetCommandLineArgs(); ...

[Concrete/Interesting] In this article I’m going to talk about HTML5 Canvas and graphics programming for web apps. I’ll be focusing on my experience and as way of example, I will be talking about ‘Cosy Orbs’ – a very simple, interactive graphics web application. Installing Cosy Orbs You can install Cosy Orbs onto your iPhone by following the link below in Safari: http://www.lowrieweb.com/iphone/cosyorbs Once the page has loaded, ‘Add to Home Screen’ by selecting the ‘+’ icon on the navigation bar at the bottom of the Safari page. Cosy Orbs will now be placed on your home screen and can be run by clicking the application icon.  About Cosy Orbs In 1999, the moon was knocked out of its orbit by a nuclear waste explosion, sending all 311 inhabitants of Moonbase Alpha into outer space. Also, like a lot of other people, I was looking at Java and Java Applets. Working my way through the SDK and samples, I came across a sample called ‘Graph Layout’ . I was quite impresse...

[ Concrete/Very Interesting ] Ok, so hopefully you got the static application working offline. I was quite satisfied when I got it working, though not nearly as much fun as watching Push in HD on my Samsung 6000 LED TV (thinner than my laptop – wow). Now for the RESTful part. We need to make REST calls when online and work from a cache when offline.           Cache Manifest White list As well as defining the resources that are cached, you can specify resources that should not be cached in your manifest file: CACHE MANIFEST # Version 0.9.4.1129.007   NETWORK: /iretailpassportsvc/clientservices.svc   CACHE: index.htm images/arrow.png Any resources named under the ‘NETWORK:’ label are considered white listed and should not be fetched from the cache. Notice that you can name cached resources after a ‘NETWORK:’ section by using the ‘CACHE':’ label. Naming white li...