Barry Dobson

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 stupid kid he managed to get most of his stuff back. Its worth a read!

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 part of the way the Xbox does its decoding.

After a bit of digging around the web I re-read the December 2007 Xbox 360 video playback FAQ and discovered that this is a problem with PAL and VGA playback on the Xbox. The good news is that there is a fix, and it actually works. Check out the article:

40. When trying to play 25 or 50 fps content, I don’t get any video over VGA

on the FAQ for details on the fix.

Tags: Xbox 360 VGA DivX

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 computers.

After I signed up for my free account at recaptcha.net I read about how it works.

Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.

You can read more about it here.

Tags: reCAPTCHA

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.

As you can tell my web site has had an overhaul. I have switched hosting to Unix, and gone back to the trusty wordpress. Along with the changes my gallery has also been switched to Picasa Web. All this makes the site more interactive and easier for me to manage. When I have the inclination I may re-start work on my gallery application, but at the moment I don’t have the time.

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 of my custom schema class, it was trying to create an object of the person class, and the error being thrown by the LDAP server was because some of the properties I was trying to set did not exist for the Person class.

I managed to get around this by adding a property ‘objectClass’ and setting the value to the type of my custom schema class. This means that when I call commit changes, the LDAP server can validate it against that class.

AddUpdateProperty(newUser, "objectClass", "myUserClass")
AddUpdateProperty(newUser, "mail", user.Email)
AddUpdateProperty(newUser, "uid", user.ID)

Technorati Tags: LDAP, vb.net, directoryentry

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 DirectoryEntry(LDAP://yourserver:port)
	' Your Code
End Using

Spot the difference? That’s right! the protocol part (LDAP) is case sensitive. Changing to uppercase works like a charm.

Update: I have posted an article and sample code on working with LDAP here.

Technorati Tags: vb.net, directoryentry, unknown error, ldap

 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 missing near Memphis golf course

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

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 interesting to see if this works, if it does it could catch on. Can you image the days leading up to a game, just before the squad list has to be submitted for a match with 50,000+ people studying the coaches form guide and picking their first 11? It will be exactly like football management games and fantasy football.

Another good thing about this if it takes off is that it should generate a lot more interest in the lower leagues. People will be looking for the score every week, whether they have invested in it or not, and as for all that extra media coverage!

I don’t think I’ll be investing in this, but I will be keeping an eye on it!

read more | digg story