Whilst trying to backup a SQL Server 2005 database on Windows 2003 I was given an error which said, amongst other things operating system error 5. That didn’t help a great deal, but the resolution was relatively simple: give the SQL user on the server access permissions to the folder I was trying to back …
The “Object reference not set to instance of an object” error in ASP.Net has to be one of the most annoying of all error messages giving, as it does, almost no clues as to what the error can be about. And yes, I know it’s easy to get more information, but it doesn’t really provide …
The apparently XML derived “500 server error” problem with FCKEditor’s image upload tool and asp.net seems very common, and there seem to be half a million different confusing solutions on the web. In my case, it turned out the problem was paths and was fixed by adding a new key entry in web.config: So nothing …
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 …
Why are regular expressions called regular expressions? Two regular expressions that achieve the same result can often look completely different, so what’s so regular about that? And also: they’re not even expressive. Who can really understand what /(<[^href]*href=(\"|'))([^(\"|')]+)(\"|')/ does off the top of their head? (Okay, I admit it's semi-obvious that it's something to do …
Programmers are brain surgeons is a blog post I was sent that looks at how programmers are perceived in the pecking order of job titles. The basis of the argument is that programming in itself should be valued, that programmers should not aspire to be managers who then leave programming behind, and that the programmer …
Three days after building a little bit of code to publish posts from this blog directly to del.icio.us, I still haven’t got every post on there. Despite following the “don’t hammer our server” guidelines and waiting over a second between API calls, my process is still being kicked off after about 20 posts and can’t …
I’ve been playing around with getting my blog to automatically post to del.icio.us when a new post is added (just because I can) and it’s actually very easy to talk to the del.icio.us API. To get any communication going, just create a WebRequest, add authentication, and away you go. The bit of code below reads …
I was pointed towards Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags by Clay Shirky and decided to read a few more posts. This one about the semantic web is interesting too. I particularly like this section on proposed uses for the semantic web: “This example sets the pattern for descriptions of the Semantic Web. First, …
This article entitled Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags is interesting for any programmer who’s had a client say they want a taggable/searchable/categorisable system of some kind. They’re all the rage at the moment, apparently. The interesting ideas reall start in the mind reading section. “One of the biggest problems with categorizing things in …