NotNowNigel

  [Concrete/Interesting] You know when sometimes a piece of code seems really simple, but it just won’t go right? The code just won’t behave properly. Fix one problem and another one pops up... Well, all I wanted was to use MFMailComposeViewController in my Cocos2d application. I’ve done it before so thought it would be a quick job. After many, many hours, I got it working, so to save you all the effort, here is what I did. Landscape and MFMailComposeViewController The problem was the game is in Landscape mode and it seems the mail view controller doesn’t like landscape. Works beautifully on the iPad, but the iPhone sees the world in Portrait. The standard method to launch email is to call presentModelViewController . Here’s the sort of thing that works well in Portrait: //Create the mail view controller MFMailComposeViewController *picker = [[MFMailComposeViewController alloc] init]; picker.mailComposeDelegate = self; [picker setSubject: @"The Title" ]; // Email B...

[Concrete/Little bit interesting] I wanted to call stored procedures by name using a string parameter. Sounds simple and with ADO it's a breeze. But with LINQ to SQL, life is a little more complicated. Here is how I cracked the problem.       LINQ to SQL In Visual Studio, when you add LINQ to SQL Classes to you project, you are creating a class that provides a convenient set of classes for managing tables, views, functions and stored procedures: When you add LINQ to SQL Classes to your project, Visual Studio creates a .DBML file set. These files describe the managed entities with partial class definitions. The main class is derived from System.Data.Linq.DataContext and provides the link between your code and the database connection. LINQ to SQL works through defining class members that maps LINQ onto the entity and makes use of attributes to map columns, parameters and returns to .Net classes. LINQ to SQL Classes takes a lot of code out of your application and i...

[Concrete/Little bit interesting] The Microsoft Prism framework provides a couple of very useful interfaces for managing awareness of view activation and navigation.       IActiveAware IActiveAware is a simple interface you can implement on your views to indicate that you want the view to be notified when it is made active or inactive. It looks like this: public interface IActiveAware { /// <summary> /// Gets or sets a value indicating whether the object is active. /// </summary> /// <value><see langword="true" /> if the object is active; otherwise <see langword="false" />.</value> bool IsActive { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Notifies that the value for <see cref="IsActive"/> property has changed. /// </summary> event EventHandler IsActiveChanged; } The IsActive flag lets you know if your view is active, and the IsActiveChange...

[Concrete/Interesting]   Here is a picture Like it?     Actually, this is a test for using Windows Live Writer to publish to SharePoint Wiki. Which sounds easy, but you guessed it, it’s not. I’ll let you know how I get on. Frankly, it’s all rather disappointing. I guess someone at Microsoft, looking to make SharePoint a little more useful thought “well it’s good at lists and HTML docs, if you add a template with an on-page editor, hey presto, you’ve got a Wiki”. Only, it’s not that simple and the editor is far too lightweight. Windows Live Write (WLW) on the other hand is a well thought out, powerful tool. Clearly the best Blog editor in my mind. It’s the reason I have a Windows VM on my Mac. So I gave it a go and WLW doesn’t want to talk to the Wiki because it’s not a blog, doesn’t support the APIs, just a list with an editor. However, it was suggested that I could author my pages against my SharePoint blog. Great. It worked brilliantly. WLW talks...

[Concrete/Interesting] A while back I saw a BBC Horizon programme about Fermat’s Last Theorem and the mathematically heroic work by Andrew Wiles in raising the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture from a mere conjecture to a theorem and using this to show a contradiction between the predictions of the epsilon conjecture and Wiles’ proof that all such elliptic curves must be modular. This contraction implies there are no solutions to Fermat’s equation, hence Fermat’s equation is true.   Like many, I was excited about this proof and although difficult to follow (Elliptic Curves are hard to understand, no kidding), the proof was without a doubt a clever piece of late 20th century mathematical wizardry, full of deep insight and imagination. But something was wrong. It was all to clever, all too complex, all to contemporary. So to mark the birth of my new baby boy, Khaliq, I decided to provide a simple proof, maybe not complete in mathematical rigor and probably nowhere near robust enough ...

[Abstract/ Sharing]   To close off 2010, I’m posting an article on how to carve a pair of linked rings from a single block of wood. It’s very simple so if you have a chance, why not have a go yourself.     This post is dedicated to the memory of Julian Guy Tulloch , who died peacefully on the 12th December 2010, aged 78. Julian first introduced me to carving. We start with a small block of wood, 5cm by 5cm by 10cm. The exact dimensions are not too important, you just want a block of wood that is rectangular in nature with a square end: I’m using Tilia or Basswood which is good for carving – not too dense and very little grain. You can find this type of wood at craft shops, often described as ‘Carving Blocks’. Extruded Cross The first step is to mark out an extruded cross using a pencil: I made the cross 1cm wide. The cross is drawn on the two square ends of the block of wood and joined up over the length of the block. Note, the extruded cross is th...