Craig Bailey

I’m concerned about the lack of return on investment our continuning involvement with .net is going to produce. I guess I’ve bored enough people with my views on this over the past few months to warrant a blog about it (that way I can just point people here, they can smile politely and ignore it :-)) In a nutshell my train of thought is this:1. Developers are not only victims of hype...

I received some direct mail from Google yesterday. Now, I know I shouldn’t be surprised (I mean, Google must be closest thing to Big Brother so far) but frankly it did come as a surprise. I guess I never really thought Google would stray from their online model.I wonder how successful this move (ie to paper advertising) will be. Obviously direct marketing is a lot more expensive than online...

I’m not one for just adding links to stuff that has already been blogged by others, but this one by Ken is recommended watching. Ken Levy takes us through some of the ideas going into Sedna. Its a big download (113 MB) and goes for close to half an hour so its not a quick offering, but well worth it.One of the (many) things I like about Ken is how enthusiastic he is about Fox and technology...

Following on from the VFP code for checking this in my last post, here’s a link to some code Scott converted for quickly checking a client’s machine for MSXML parser installs. (and Scott, you really should start a blog and begin pushing out your great ideas.)It is a simple VB script file that will run on any machine with W2K or XP installed, ie you don’t need VFP installed...

Seeing Rino’s blog entry on XML Sniffing reminded me of how common this little gotcha is.So you might find the following handy. When our apps start up we just run a checkdependencies(bCheckXML3, bCheckXML4, etc) method with something like the following (and can someone tell me how to get code samples looking good on blogger please): LOCAL cSaveErrorLOCAL oObject3, oObject4, cMessagecMessage...

A big thank you to Andrew MacNeil for putting me on to this one.Haven’t laughed this much since I saw Team America last week.
Here’s a taste:

We’ve been playing with DNN the last few months and so far it is proving to be worth the effort.On the good side it is reasonably straight forward to get up and running, has all the basic building blocks we need in a content management system including security and simple workflow, and is reasonably easy to customise.On the bad side, it is free (ie support is difficult) and documentation is...

Virgil’s coming home for a few days. Two shows. My advice – use the first show to work out the best place to position yourself for the next night.

It has been a really tiring year so far (good for Talman though) with so much work on.So it was a welcome phone call a few weeks back from my good friend Greg calling to say he wanted to get the band back together (sorry).Many years ago a bunch of us were in a band called Kaos Theory (we were crap) and then later formed a studio band called Sexagesima (look it up – it’s not what you...

Magic Dave (our IT Manager) has installed our brand new R+D Blade Server. At Talman we do most of our development on Terminal Servers (allows our 15 developers to all have consistent Dev tools, performance, backups, test environments etc) and so it is necessary to be strict with what gets installed on them. No Betas, untested tools, unknown shareware downloads etc.So when it comes to evaluating...