V Review - Sunday

Sunday had the better line up as well as the first good band coming on later (read lay in).

We started with Mark Ronson who rolled out some guest apparences, followed by a subduded Rilo Killey (mainly due to under filling the JJB/Puma tent). Lily Allen was next who was too funny. I caught some on video, so keep an eye out on video.google.co.uk for those. We caught an underwhelming performance from the Manics whom we walked away from in about 10 minutes to catch Kasabian instead who rocked! Killers finished up with a truely rock and roll performance. The whole of the main stage was packed, and it was rocking.

Awesome.

VFestival Review - Saturday

All the good stuff

Foo Fighters play secret gig - We got to V early, sorted ourselves out with a drink then sat and waited for Juliet and the Licks to perform and got treated to the unknown band 606. Turns out, it was actually an acoustic set by the Foo's. Awesome.

Paolo Nutini was a surprise for me, sure I'd heard some of his stuff on the radio but he put out a really good performance and I really enjoyed his stuff. Especially his covers of "I want to be like you" from the Jungle Book and Mobys' "Natural Blues".

Kayne West rocked, and I caught a video of him doing a sample of the Verve's Bittersweet Symphony

Snow Patrol were brilliant and even rolled out Martha Wainwright to do a duet of "Set the Fire to the 3rd Bar" and we watched the Kooks wrap up. They were pretty good, but it doesn't help when they play new stuff on the closing set of a festival.

All the bad stuff

I'm sick of the heavyweight commercialism of these events. With day tickets, like what we had, there was no re-admittance. Really? You think during a whole day I might not want to leave the venue to perhaps get a coat out of my car? Or in our situation, food so we wouldn't be forced to pay for overpriced crap, like burgers that'd been cooked this morning but now 'warming' on the side. As luck would have it, they had the Caribbean stall back and you know you're getting quality chicken rice and peas and goat curry there!

It seemed ridiculous, the queues for drinks. I was waiting in a 5 deep queue at the bar in the Cider House and the place seemed so disorganised, with most of the taps out of cider and the bar staff running around like headless chickens. After waiting half an hour, I gave up!

Photos

Check out Saturdays photos.

"Were you in that video?"

I've done two Channel9 videos in the last 10 months or so, one back in October at Tech Ed and other in January after the 2007 Innovation Accelerator. Now and again when I meet a new person I get "your from the videos". I'm not greatly surprised as these are people who are coming to work with us, they've probably Googled 'web21c' and found my videos.

However, last night at the Facebook Developer party someone came and asked me that question that they was not affiliated with the project at all and didn't work at BT. Now, that was a surprise!

Robbie on Rails Part 3 - The Conflict of Redirect vs Render

RFC2616, 10.2.2 says that a HTTP response code of 201 should be the response when creating a new resource but from a user experience view, I'd want to be redirected to the new resource. However, this returns a 302 redirected code which goes against the RFC.

Hmm, this is a bit of a problem. We can render the new resource using "render :action => 'action'", but it doesn't show the URI to the user who may want this.

It's pretty frustrating, and for now I can't find a way around it, so I'm defaulting to user experience.

My Facebook Quest

I randomly put my surname into Facebook earlier and was surprised to see so many others with the same name, so my quest is to get those people together in a group and say hello. Maybe even go for a drink with the local ones.

Gotta love the web!

Robbie on Rails part 3

What a difference a day makes. Eastmad and I were pairing and decided to leave the strange error behind us and move on. We collectively had one the most frustrating days in the office because of that problem on Wednesday. As we moved on, we started to build up momentum and really started to see results. We also had a little help from Kerry who managed to help us with our issue we had the previous day.

Turns out the validates_associates function doesn't really do what we had expected it to do, but by using the key function validates_on_create we were able to roll our own data restrictions.

I have to say, I really enjoyed coding in Rails yesterday, long may it continue =)

Robbie on Rails Part 2

What a difference a day makes. I've spent probably three or four hours pairing on a stupid problem. Earlier today I was bouncing around looking forward to start building our rails app, but we hit a problem almost immediately. We had added a foreign key validation to one of the models and although the unit and functional tests passed, the actually web pages would not insert the row into the table.

Very infuriating.

Robbie on Rails

The last few weeks I've been involved in a new project at work that invovles building a portal and we went and had a play with Ruby on Rails. So far, so good. I must confess that I like the way that your application is structured in Rails, it stops a lot of ambiguity and I'm a big fan of the MVC pattern which Rails uses everywhere. It's the first pattern learnt at university, so I suppose there's a fond place for me there kinda like how I shop at the supermarket I used to stack shelfs at when I was 17! lol.

I bought a few books on rails for the office and I'm a bit disapointed with one of the books which claimed to be "agile" and hasn't shown me how to write a test and I'm upto chapter 6.

On another note, I've been asked to do a rails brown bag at work, I may use what this book has taught me, but introduce tests.

hmmm

XML Digital Signiture in C#

Why is using DS so hard? No, I'm not talking about the Nintendo DS either.

There's almost nothing online about using this in C#, and the other doc is showing you how to do this in WSE which is what I'm trying to avoid. I've signed the request and sent it, but am trying to validate the response.

Nightmare.

Athlete @ Koko

I went to see Athlete at Koko in Camden on Tuesday evening with some friends and thought I'd share a little story. After years of getting to gigs early in the off chance there might be a good support band (there have been times, I saw Nada Surf supporting Blur once, good album) we decide to pitch our tent in the local boozer before heading down for the main event. This time we were in the Crown and Goose on Arlington Street and as it happens, Athlete were in there having a cheeky pint before the gig. Sam noticed them, so I gave her the tickets and she got them signed. Cool eh?

My fun with Ubuntu

I've been using Ubuntu at home for a while now. To be honest, all I've used it for so far has been surfing and email and it's handled all I've needed well with the added bonus that OpenOffice is already installed so I can read those documents that people send to me, even the ones where people have pasted pictures into a work document. Never quite understood that, but hey ho.

I haven't really been pushing it, but today I decided to come good with my promise to learn a new programming language and I've chosen PHP. I tried it on my Vista PC and quickly got bored trying to configure IIS, so I thought I'd try it on my Ubuntu computer. I've been following this: http://hostlibrary.com/installing_apache_mysql_php_on_linux

So far, so good. Some hiccups though, like the C compiler missing and therefore not being able to build Apache Tomcat. I quickly found out what I needed to do, but I was a little stuck without Google's help. Saying that however, I quickly came unstuck, but when I found package manager I told it download what I wanted and it did. Then I created a hello world PHP file and it worked.

Cool huh?

evolution of internet communities

Isnt' it strange how a few years ago I would have been considered a real geek for posting on a forum with a bunch of people I'd never have met before, yet now with MySpace, Twitter, Facebook and all the others, it's almost the norm now. Odd how the technology has evolved now as well, with forums people come together around a topic or area, now they have their own little place on the web and people go to each other, and interact with that space directly.

Developer Express

I was at Developer Developer Developer Day 5 at Microsoft today, it's a pretty cool free event. It's mix of technology discussions with some vendor plugs, but I'll forgive them as long as they have a point.



One interesting application that was presented was Developer Expresses DXCore for Visual Studio plugins. This app allows a really easy way to to build plug ins using the code based used for CodeRush and Refactor from Developer Express. It's pretty powerful but there was a drawback, and that was in distribution.



If you wanted to distribute a Visual Studio plug in you'd developed, the target computer would have to have DxCore installed to. It's free which is cool, but it's just another step. Still, it's worth considering if you're developing a framework or tool kit to run in the VS IDE.

Filter/Dispatcher pattern for URI handling in .Net

I put together an interesting component of an application recently. It didn't get used in the end, but I liked it none the less. Using the HttpModules in the web.config I was able to get it to act as a filter pattern, intercepting all web requests through the web server. Then using a custom configuration I was able to implement a dispatcher pattern to configurable classes. This resulted in a web site that could catch any requests and process regardless if that page actually existed. It's a nice way to think about implementing a REST friendly web site.

Software Engineering as a Service

From the blogs I read and the people I talk to, I get the impression there's a ever growing movement of open source, free software delivered over the internet. The web is for everyone and owned by no-one is just one phrase which has added to this movement recently. I think it's fantasic; I can't think of many industries where people come together and passioned debates about the work we do, how we do it and the tools we use. Someone has to pay for it somewhere along the lines though right? I mean, if I write the next cool app, who's going to put food on my table? I think more and more, developers are having these great conversations and they're about making the development experience for other developers easier and better, simple and open always wins as they say. Although developers have a big say, and as Tim O'Reilly pointed out with alpha geeks they tend to pull the industry along somewhat, it's businesses who pay for applications, products and services. So, although we care about developers, we still have to be mindful of businesses.



I suppose a question to ask is: who is our customer?

Sleepless in Colorado

I thought I had learnt my lesson of travelling west to the americas before, but although I applied what I thought would work, I still can't sleep. Mind you, when I was last here I was 20 and fit! Now I'm 25 and decidedly unfit, I find myself waking at 4 or 5 in the morning with nothing to do but use the 24 hour gym or surf the net.

My Bear vs Shark Moment

If you've read this book, you'll know about the message of gross commercialism contained within. Today, walking around my local supermarket I felt like the main character, mindlessly picking up products that I thought I needed. It seems the easier these supermarkets make it for us to buy everything in one place, along with wrapping everything in pretty packaging, the easier we concede to their marketing ploys, even if we think we're resisting.

Share The Love!

I've just read a great post on coding horror by Jeff Atwood (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000845.html).

I've had similar thoughts on, as a software engineer I don't care what tools I use as long as their the right ones to get the job done. Sometimes that's been Microsoft tools, sometimes open source tools, or sometimes just the good old web! Jeff really hits the nail on the head, stop fighting and start worrying about building better software.

=)

edit: also was sent this, which adds a nice perspective: http://port25.technet.com/archive/2007/04/19/gapingvoid-got-it-wrong.aspx

Mavericks at work - Review

Read it. Especially the first three sections on 'open source' innovation across industries, discovering strategy and reconnecting with the cusomters. A worthy read.

Release Early vs Release Smarter

A while ago I tried to get onto the WCF bandwagon, but struggled because of the high barrier of entry. I was more put off when a few of the smartest developers I know (generally anyone developer I know) when to Redmond to play with the WCF team and couldn't even get something working. Then, as I was in a bookshop, I noticed a WCF book. Well, if someone's written a book about it, it must be ready for consumption by mortal developers like me. Seems not. I still have to install the Windows SDK to get a tool which is around 100kB to generate WCF friendly proxy classes.

Releasing technologies early is cool. If you get a beta, you expect some teething problems, but now after a few months of .Net 3 being released, I'd expect better tool sets by now. It just makes me thing, if you're going to release something, please make sure there's appropriate tools and support.