Leyton Orient have no players

Goalkeeper Glyn Garner, defender Adam Tann, midfielders Craig Easton and Luke Guttridge, and striker Gary Alexander were given the chance to extend their spells at Brisbane Road, but they have opted to seek fresh challenges and will join John Mackie, Shane Tudor, Justin Miller, Donny Barnard, Derek Duncan and Phil Mulryne in leaving the club this summer.

I’m hardly going to recognise anyone next season! Well, at least Adam Chambers is still there, although it’s hard to see how he can win every game by himself.

BBC SPORT | Football | My Club | Leyton Orient | Orient must rebuild as five leave

Champions League football headlines

In anticipation of various possible outcomes in the Champions League final tonight between Liverpool and AC Milan, I thought I’d make some possible headline predictions dependant on the on-pitch action:

It’s all gone Kaka

Liverpool win 3-1 after a Kaka own goal.

Crouch-ing goalscorer hidden goal

Liverpool are robbed as Crouch’s goal obvious crossed the line but was missed by the officials.

What a Carragher-on

Slapstick defending results in Milan winning 1-0.

Kuyt for 6

Dirk Kuyt scores a double hat-trick.

Agg-agg-agg-agg-agg-agger

Darren Agger eats some spinach, turns into Popeye, and scores afer beating Italian centre-back Brutus.

It’s Reina-ing men

Something bizarre happens to do with Liverpool’s keeper and lots of other players.

Return to Zenden

Zenden scores the winner following a one-two with any other player.

Liverpool Riise to the challenge

You can probably guess.

Gordon Benit-ez

Benitez is brought on as a subsitute in the 120th minute and scores the winning penalty.

Life’s a lottery, football’s a Rafael

As above.

Doing his Pennants

Jermaine Pennant’s clearance is deflected into his own goal and the player decides to retire and join a monastery.

Rafa’s lucky Jerzy

Benetiz is coincidentally wearing his favourite jumper as Dudek (the substitute keeper) miraculously saves all of Milan’s penalties.


Just some of the many headlines we may be seeing tomorrow.

Eurovision 2007

The Eurovision Song Contest 2007 is over and despite a low turnout (at our place, of course, not in total as apparently over 10 million people watched it in the UK) it was still quite excellent.

The quality of the songs was as variable as usual, although certainly not as soul-destroying as has been in the past. There were a middle patch of songs that were especially good (in the context) and I was worried that I was giving out too high scores too early by about song 10. Not to fear as they soon nose-dived, but it was good all the same.

The voting does, of course, leave something to be desired. Eastern Europe seems intent on dividing states like a rampant single-celled organism trying to reproduce until they have enough countries to vote for each other. It’s even enough for one MP to call an early day motion to change the voting system.

Our scoring and judgement was first class, it goes without saying. We had the projector set up with the scores on the wall and you can download our Eurovision scoresheet here.

Ukraine at Eurovision 2007
Ukraine scored highly for sheer laughter but Hungary were truly robbed. They made the fatal mistake of actually entering a good song and I was surprised to see them come through the semi-finals. Scooch, for the UK, didn’t get votes from anyone except some political votes from Malta.

Jimmie Krankie wins Eurovision for Serbia
The contest itself was one by Serbia, who were represented this year by Jimmy Krankie (shown right). The song was okay if a bit anonymous and was certainly a surprise winner for us.
Jimmy Krankie

Next year I’m expecting more of the same: songs varying from passable to atrocious, voting doing the same, and some more snide comments from Terry Wogan who must never be allowed to retire.

The official Eurovision 2007 scores

Our improved Eurovision 2007 scores

Events and postback with dynamic ASP.Net user controls

I’ve been trying to build an editable organisation chart for an intranet project and have built up a structure of nested dynamic user controls. This was all working well for displaying the information but wasn’t working so well for posting back and registering events.

A bit of Googling later and I found this article on the 4 Guys From Rolla site called Dynamic Web Controls, Postbacks, and View State which explained the general gist of it.

The cause of the problem was that if you bind the data that loads the controls in page load then the events don’t fire, but if you don’t bind it there’s no data to register the event on. The solution? Do the binding in the init function instead. It worked a treat.

Dynamic Web Controls, Postbacks, and View State

Firefox failing file:// link protocol

Something I didn’t know (before now) is that Firefox won’t let you use the file:/// protocol link from within a web (i.e. http) environment. Or rather, anything linked to with file:/// won’t open.

There is a local machine fix detailed here but it looks like for my intranet app I’m going to have to find another way to open files on the hard drive or network through the web browser.