May 2011
2 posts
Champions league final
Unlucky to Manchester United but the better team won. I don’t think there is any shame in losing to Barcelona. Awesome team.
N00b!
Hi, I thought I check out Tumblr as an alternative to paying for a hosted Wordpress blog. I don’t really blog a lot though!!
Creating iPhone Ringtones For Free In iTunes
Unfortunately Apple decided they would like to charge for people to be able to download ringtones for songs they already bought. Luckily there is a way you can use iTunes to get ringtones from any MP3 file for free, here’s how.
Open iTunes and find the song you wish to make a ringtone out of.
Play the song in iTunes. Take a note of the start and finish times of the section of the song you...
February 2009
2 posts
PLS-00103: Encountered the symbol "" WHEN...
I recently came across this error whilst developing stored procedures in oracle. The stored procedure will be built in Oracle but marked as invalid. Trying a re-compile will give you the above error. The problem appears to be with Windows CRLF characters on line breaks. Oracle does not treat this as white space, instead it sees it as an empty string. In order to get round this problem, convert the...
Using VB.Net To Encrypt LDAP MD5 Passwords
When passwords are stored in an LDAP directory they are stored encrypted. LDAP supports different types of hashing, but I chose to use MD5. The LDAP implementation is to use Base 64 encoding. Below is a simple function I use to convert the plain text password into a hashed string ready to be added to LDAP.
Public Shared Function EncryptPassword(ByVal value As String) As String
Dim...
January 2009
1 post
VB.Net HttpWebRequest Takes A Long Time On First...
I have recently been using the HttpWebRequest object in .Net Framework 2 and 3.5. I’m using it to observe the timings of requests on a project and noticed some strange behaviour. The first time you call GetResponse it can take over 30 seconds to return the response, whereas subsequent calls to the same URL will result in much quicker responses. I have found the problem to be in the use of...
August 2008
1 post
Deleting LDAP Entries
Following on from my popular post on searching LDAP directories I thought I’d follow up with a simple piece of code that allows you to delete entries.
There are two ways to remove an entry. The first way is to search for a node an remove it, along with all of its children. The second way is to search for a node and remove one or more of its children. Below I will demonstrate both...
July 2008
2 posts
Wordpress iPhone Application
I’ve just installed the Wordpress iPhone application on my iPod Touch, and am giving it a go. Have you used it? What do you think?
iPhone & iPod Touch Screen Shots
I don’t know if this is a new feature of the iPhone 2.0 software (I doubt it) but you can take screen shots from your iPhone or iPod Touch! When your on the screen you want to capture just hold down the ‘Home’ key and press the ‘Sleep’ button. The screen will flash and the screen shot will now be in your pictures folder. The screen shots are stored in PNG format and...
June 2008
2 posts
Working With LDAP In VB.Net
I wrote a post a while ago dealing with an error that VB can throw when dealing with an LDAP connection, you can find it here. Because this post has proved popular with people searching for the error code on Google, I thought I’d put together a quick post on using LDAP in VB.Net.
Simple Directory Search To perform a simple query you can use the following syntax:Dim results as...
Windows Live Writer Plugin
I have recently created my first Plugin for Windows Live Writer. I’m starting off simple with a Plugin that allows you to add Amazon affiliate links to your posts. It works with Amazons Quick Linker Widget which needs to first be added to your pages (in the footer).
I have submitted it the Windows Live Gallery, but I have no idea how long the submission process takes.
My Plugin and its...
May 2008
1 post
AJAX Tutorials
I found this very good article that has links to 30 of the best AJAX tutorials around. It covers things from drag and drop to lists, as well as the basics of AJAX. Designs Advice
March 2008
1 post
Is there anything the Internet cannot achieve?
I am pretty late spotting this story but it’s a good one. How many times did you hear about someone getting burgled? How many times do they actually catch the people responsible? How many times to the people get there stuff back? The Internet to the rescue. It seems the guy over here came back from a trip to find he had been burgled. Due to some sniffing around, the Internet, Digg, and a...
January 2008
2 posts
Xbox 360 DivX Only Plays Audio
Since the fall 07 update, the Xbox 360 now has the ability to play DivX/Xvid files through the media blade on the dashboard. This was probably one of the best features to be added to the dashboard.
I use this feature a lot but recently I came across a couple of videos that would play fine in WMP but when played on the Xbox would be audio with no picture. I thought this was a limitation on the...
reCAPTCHA
I recently added a contact page to my site. To do this I used a wordpress plug in, Dagon Design. Its a very good plug in by the way. It allows you to prevent spam by adding a reCAPTCHA image to the form. I’ve always known about reCAPTCHA helping to digitise books where OCR is not working, but I have always wondered how the system knows you are correct, if the word cannot be read by...
December 2007
1 post
Xbox 360 DVD Up-Scaling
All Xbox 360s have the ability to up-scale standard definition DVDs. There is a catch however. It will only up-scale when it’s being used with either the VGA cable or the HDMI cables on the newer Xbox’s.
Technorati Tags: Xbox 360,DVD,HD,up-scaling
September 2007
1 post
System.DirectoryEntry - Adding new objects
I have recently been playing around with Apaches Directory Service, creating custom schema types and the like but came across a problem.
In VB.Net if I tried to add a new child to a directory entry, of a custom schema type (in this case in inherited from the person class) it would throw an exception when I tried to commit changes. On closer inspection I noticed that instead of creating an object...
August 2007
1 post
System.DirectoryEntry Unknown error (0×80005000)
I have recently encountered this really unhelpful error message in VB.Net whilst trying to code a connection to an LDAP server.
After much head banging I found the solution! It’s all down to the path you supply to the constructor:
Old Connection (doesn’t work):
Using dir As New DirectoryEntry(ldap://yourserver:port)
' Your Code
End Using
New Connection (does work):
Using dir As New...
July 2007
3 posts
Pet Names
After reading the story about a woman’s pet Boa-Constrictor, named ‘Fluffy’ it got me thinking about other good names for pets. I’ve always thought that given a cat or a dog a human name would be funny. I don’t own a pet, but if I did I think I’d name a dog Kenneth, and a cat either Martin or Kevin. I don’t know why, I just would. Woman’s pet snake...
Are ISP’s modifying your web pages?
Apparently some of those nasty ISP are modifying web pages you request, so insert their own adverts into them, can you believe it? To see if this is happening to you, visit this web site is designed by the University of Washington and ICSI to answer these questions. read more | digg story Technorati Tags: ISP, internet, adverts, web pages
50,000 football fans worldwide to buy an English...
This is a football club takeover with a difference. Not like Glazier, Lerner or Kroenke buying into English football - this is a web site that harnesses the power and enthusiasm of football fans around the world. They will have an equal share in the club, vote on team selection and tactics, buying and selling players and club business decisions. I think this is a good idea and it will be...