Matt Little's Blog

1) Washing machine drain pipe fails leading to flooded kitchen

2) Central Heating Boiler stops working - no heat / hot water for a week

3) Oven heat element fails - no oven until spare part arrives.

All these three happened in the space of two weeks. Let's hope that is it for a while!

I have just transferred my mobile number from one mobile provider to another. Totally painless in fact, it was very, very easy.

I got an email today from the old mobile company to tell me to go to my online portal to view my paperless 'final bill'. I logged in as usual but, instead of 'View Bill', I am offered options to 'Register for Online Bills'. Can you see where this is going?

So, I phone customer services and ask for their help - yes, you've guessed it - despite about 5 minutes of searching by mobile number, name, address, post code or inside leg measurement (OK, I made the last one up) they can't find my account as it is now closed. No access to any details especially my last bill.

I am assured that all is OK as I will be sent a paper bill within the next few working days. I'm not going to hold my breath.....

Since when were jeans not trousers?

Apparently since GAP stared offering 30% off trousers, but that doesn't include jeans as "they aren't trousers". Cotton trousers, linen trousers and tracksuit-type trousers are all trousers, jut not jeans.

Does that seem odd? I know that we don't often refer to jeans are "trousers", but they are trousers!

I thought that I could ride a bike, but nowhere near as well as this: (YouTube)

This website has registered with Phorm to NOT be included in Web Wise searching.

If that means nothing to you, don't worry about it. Otherwise, hopefully, you'll be quite pleased.

If you use Firefox, you can install De-Phormation to prevent Web Wise monitoring your browsing.

Google has launched Street View on UK Google Maps. Cue the obligatory 'research' of what you can see of your house/work/favourite local places.

I was surprised to see that my house is photographed on there and fairly surprised to see our car in the drive.

I knew that the Google car had been down our street as my wife had mentioned that she had seen it (although wasn't sure what it was). I was surprised nevertheless that my wife can be seen through one of our house windows!

Can anybody else see themselves or their family on street-view?

Following my last post, I went to my local Timpson shop to get replacement keys for Claire and whilst there, I got a new watch battery fitted.

Not too difficult? Apparently it was.....

The watch was returned to me with a new battery but with the internal mechanism not aligned correctly so the buttons couldn't be pressed.

When I got home, it turns out that 2 of the 3 keys that they had cut didn't work!!

Attached to the keys was a piece of paper telling me that if I had problems with my new keys, I could phone their 0800 helpline. I did and was told that I should go back for a refund and I should try finding a local hardware shop as they are "better at cutting keys".

Muppets.

Claire was out for her work Christmas night out on Friday. Apparently they were having a good time until the restaurant caught fire!

The restaurant was Kushi's the Indian restaurant at the centre of one of 2 large fires in Edinburgh at the weekend. At the height of the fire, there were apparently 100 firefighters on scene attempting to deal with the blaze. You can see details here.

Claire is ok, but in the rush to get out had to leave her bag, so now we have the fun of trying to get all her stuff back from our house insurance. At least nobody was hurt.

Sorry, it has been a while!

I've just been too busy at work, to be honest. That and my birthday, my sisters' birthday and my Dad's birthday.

Yes, that is correct, I am making excuses for not writing anything.

I'll try harder in future :-)

As reported on the BBC news website, a Welsh road sign written in both English and Welsh; the English version read:

"No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only"

the Welsh, when translated to English, read:

"I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated"

That's right, someone emailed the translator and got a reply and assumed that it was the translation - no, it was the out of office message!

Nicely done.

Apologies for not having been around for a while.

What have I been up to in the last 6 weeks? Well, in no particular order....

• I fell off my mountain bike whilst out with Alison practising for a 60 mile charity bike ride. It hurt. I mean it really hurt. I came off the bike and, after a few seconds of getting my bearings, stood up only for the world to go a lovely shade of purple accompanied by a wicked nauseas feeling. I assumed at the time that I had broken my collar bone (it hurt like hell cycling the 9 miles home) but it appears that I had separated the shoulder joint instead. Much better now.

• I went on holiday to Cornwall with the family for some sun, relaxation and diving. The weather was fair - often warm, sometimes sunny with only occasional rain. I couldn't dive because of the shoulder injury noted above. Boo.

• Didn't do the charity bike ride - see shoulder injury above.

• Changed jobs. I left my job as Senior Developer and became Head of Development! I had realised over the past couple of years that while I still enjoyed developing computer systems, it was the managing of teams that really got me excited. I enjoyed planning projects and executing those plans, ensuring that the team was operating efficiently by using the right tools and process and developing strategy, not just code. My new role is great and I am loving it - stressful and busy, but loving it.

That is a brief update on my world - apart from that, all the usual stuff has been happening too, but I won't bore you with it now ;-)

It may not be a broken collarbone, but I can assure you, it HURTS.

Details here.

I might have posted this before, but if you want to change the amount of time that windows give you between suggsting that you reboot following the recent windows update, you can do the following (care of Microsoft):

1. Click on Start and then click on Run.

2. Type in 'GPEDIT.MSC' without the quotes and click on OK.
 
3. Within the Group Policy Editor, navigate to 'Local Computer Policy / Computer Configuration / Administrative Templates / Windows Components / Windows Update'
 
4. On the right hand pane, double click on the policy named 'Re-prompt for restart with scheduled installations'.
 
5. If the automatic computer restart prompt needs to be completely disabled, select "Disabled" and click on OK.
 
6. If the default time interval needs to be changed from a value of 10 minutes to some other value, select "Enabled" and type in the desired time interval in minutes in the following box. Click on OK.
 
7. Restart the computer for the changes to take effect.

You can, if you wish, disable the reminder instead of changing the timeout.

Usual caveats apply - don't do this if you don't know what you are doing and remember that if you don't reboot, your machine is not properly protected.

I was using firefox 3 today and needed to add a site to the list that firefox will pass my windows credentials to. I have blogged about how-to before.

I typed about:config in the address bar today and got:

I got out to watch the new Indy film at the cinema over the weekend. What was it like?

It was so predictable - you just knew what was going to happen next. You had seen it all before [when is he going to learn that when you have got the treasure and emerge from whatever cave/hole in which you found it, the bad guys will be waiting for you?] The characters were paper thin and the plot was almost non-existant. The fridge - the less said about that the better.

Was it any good? It was brilliant.

It was like being 10 again - just let yourself go and enjoy it - it is a real Indy film, not some modern remake of what has always been a bit corny and far-fetched.

The decision not to use too much CGI and instead concentraste on set-based effects really paid off - it looked like a film made 10-15 years ago and that just added to the warm feel that it gave you.

I  can't remember when I last had so much fun watching such a rubbish film. I want to see it again :-)

BTW - spot the references to previous films throughout - recognise the hanger? See what was in the box? Why is the boy named Mutt? Where have you seen Marion before? Sankara Stones. And about 100 other things.

The first release candidate for SQL 2008 can be downloaded here.

Some of the nice new features you can use are [taken from this website]:

1. Backup compression (25-35% at least) - huge cost savings and hey it's native! (note SQL 2005 encryption is not supported by product support but
2. Transparent Encryption - transparently encrypt the data without the application needing to be aware or know about it.
3. Database Mirroring Enhancements - compressed logs, more automatic fail over options
4. Policy Based Administration - manage policies across databases and even across instances and servers
5. Cluster enhancements - easier to configure and more scenarios that it supports including many in WS08 that provide more intelligence for failover
6. Resource Governor - limit wild database resources or control one database resources from another!
7. Easier to deploy - Easier to install, easier to configure, on and on
8. Reporting Services in SharePoint Mode (report builder rocks!) - easy reporting solutions built to leverage SharePoint mode with more flexibility and with ease.
9. Data compression - smaller databases with the same amount of data (compression will vary, but watch the overhead on enterprise environments or heavy used environments)
10. Powershell integration - super extensible and super scriptable

More in-depth details can be found here.

I got a rubbish text message through from my mobile provider today offering my Travel Information at 75 pence per minute.

Although it might seem like an irresistible offer (not), I thought I could probably manage without any more 'useful' offers from them so replied with 'STOP'. Of course that didn't work (universal stop code? not that universal apparently).

So I called the mobile company and asked if they could possibly remove me from the wonderful offers that they keep sending me. They did so and told me that I had been removed from marketing via:

• email
• text
• MMS
• post
• data call analysis

What was that last one? Monitoring my calls for, I am guessing, marketing reasons.

I don't ever remember that being clearly brought to my attention....

I was reading the Metro yesterday and discovered that the 'heat' of a chili actually has a measure. The units of this measure are scovilles. A 'normal' chili has a rating of about 3,000 scovilles; a Jalapeño pepper, which I think is quite hot, can rate up to 8,000. 

The 'Naga' chili on the other hand has a measure of up to 1,000,000 scovilles.

It doesn't matter how the measure works, you aren't going to want too many Naga chillies on your pizza - that has to be one hot chili!

Someone wants to cash a duff cheque to get some money. How much could you get away with without raising suspicion? $100, $1000, $10 000, maybe even $100 000?

No, think big. Think $360 billion big. Wally.

Story here.

Congratulations on your wedding and thank you for a wonderful weekend of celebrations.

Memories of spontaneous laughter breaking out during the service because of the actions of one of the flower girls and also being on the roof of the castle hosting the reception will last a long time.

I hope that you have a wonderful break in Brazil and look forward to catching up with you when you get back.

Today was he second time in probably about 3 months that the bus I was on had an accident. Last time, the driver took a wing mirror off when he hit a lamppost, today a driver hit a parked car.

It was good to see that the standard approach to this is radio the details to control and then leave a note on the car (the owner was not present). At least they didn't run away without leaving a name.

I can't even get on a plane with a small bottle of water or a nail file.

The olympic torch (flames, bang, boom, etc) gets on a plane no problem. That just isn't fair ;-)

Story here: "The flame arrived from Greece early on Monday, aboard a chartered Air China plane, and was greeted at Beijing airport by hundreds of flag-waving schoolchildren"

If you have XP Pro 64 bit edition (x64) and can't get your Sony Digital Camera working, there is a (not so) good reason.

When you plug the camera in, it is recognised as a "Sony Digital Camera". Windows doesn't know what to do with this hardware. If you were running 32 bit XP, a driver file would explain that the device should be treated as a disk drive.

In x64, there is no such file to explain the link. Sony can't be bothered to produce drivers for x64, so you are in trouble. This nice forum here has written their own driver. To install, you'll have to switch off the 'signed driver check' though.

Now, why couldn't Sony do that?

I got an external Hard Drive for backups last year and with the new computer, I could make use of its eSATA link (much faster than USB).

Only I couldn't. It just wasn't recognised by windows at all.

After much, much, much searching talking about altering BIOS settings and downloading firmware for the SATA controller, the answer was much more Heath Robinson.

It appears that the Western Digital drives need eSATA cables with a really long connector. As most companies put some plastic housing around the end of the cable, it tends not to go far enough into the WD drive. Answer? Get a knife and take some of the plastic off the end of the cable.

Thanks to this guy for having the answer and showing what to do.

It is good to know that the Scottish Government is tackling the real issues in our modern lives. Teenage binge drinking, smoking, drugs, caring for cats,crime, the environment and other good causes.

!!! Caring for cats??? Yep, read the draft bill on 'Caring for Cats' here.

Good to know that out tax pounds are making a real difference to people.

Remembering that Astrologists are often thought of as people able to see the future, you wonder why this webapge suggests that "unforeseen circumstances" caused the cessation of publication.

How amusing.

... when will websites start accepting that not every Switch/Maestro card has an issue numnber? I know for a fact that a couple of the largest banks in the UK issue cards without issue numbers on them.

So why make it a mandatory field when you try to buy something on a webiste? I'm looking at you FlyBe!

There has been an interesting series of Channel 4 programmes recently covering the sale of Free-Range Chickens and Eggs whic goes under the banner of the "Big Food Fight".

Without getting into the right or wrongs of free-range (although I do buy only free range), I feel sorry for Jamie Oliver who is a co-presenter of the show extolling the virtues of free-range and explaining why battery production is wrong after this story came out.

In summary:

"Staff at the Cornwall branch of Oliver's Fifteen chain bought 360 eggs from battery-farmed chickens when a regular supplier was unable to meet demand. Last Friday a party of twelve farmers and battery egg producers were dining at the beachside restaurant when one of them discovered the eggs on a tour of the restaurant.

The news is a major embarrassment for Oliver, whose one-off programe Jamie's Fowl Dinners, which highlights the industrial methods used in chicken farming, was on air at the time. He immediately said that "heads would roll"."

Oops.

It has been snowing here over the past 24 hours. It was snowing last night, so people knew about it before they went to bed and yet, despite that, people don't bother to clear the snow from their cars before they leave the house.

A few things:

1. Driving with a car-roof-sized slab of snow 10 cm deep on top of the car is dangerous as it will come off at speed and 10 kg of snow hitting the road/car behind could cause a crash
2. Having lights on is useless unless you have removed the snow covering them
3. Having an A4-sized gap in the snow on your front screen or just clearing a football sized gap in the condensation on the window and leaving all other windows covered in snow is not enough to drive safely.
4. Doing normal speeds and leaving a couple nano-metres between you and the car in front is stupid
5. Approaching a turning at normal speeds when the road that you are turning into has 10 cm of snow on it is stupid
6. Trying to get up a snow-covered hill in first gear and wondering why you aren't moving and what that burning rubber smell is - stupid too.

Enough said. Thank you.

We had a nice Christmas and New Year which was only slightly marred by the fact that we managed to pick up 2 separate gastric bugs over the holidays!

Back to work and welcome to 2008.