How to stop Outlook 2007 from letting off a beep when a new email lands

This is possibly the single most annoying thing Microsoft have ever done!

Especially when you're listening to some really loud music with ear plugs in.

*BEEP*

"Mother F***er" !

So, how to get rid of it...

Check out this guys post on how to stop outlook 2007 beeping at you when you get a new email.

Not the "world's first internet balloon race"

Just seen the Orange online balloon race and I really like the creative of the site though I do need to correct their incorrect claim in their title bar that it is the "worlds first internet balloon race".

I'm gonna take this opportunity to big up on of my ex-students, Nick Goward for the work he did in his 3rd year at the Hull School of Art and Design.

Nicks Big Balloon Race was his major project which took him about 9 months to build and after all that hard work he not only won the Student category at the 2006 BIMA, he also won that years Grand Prix for his efforts.

So nice website Orange, but get your facts right ;)

On Aire

I started thinking about On Aire ages ago as a project that would enable me and my work mates to do things we don't get chance to look at and explore in our 9-to-5 but to date all that has come from it is a blog post and a domain registration...

Now that summer has (almost) got a hold of the UK I find that Gina and myself are asking more and more where we could go out for food or a relaxed drink in comfortable yet stylish (poncy twat?) sorroundings.

And so this has started me thinking again about the idea behind On Aire, to provide a personalized guide to *evening entertainments* (tm) in the area of the river Aire (which is about 90% of Leeds depending on how liberal you are).

So hopefully my ever expanding network of half started projetcs will be growing once again with the addition of a social network stylée food/drink bar/resturante recomendation thing.

I'm going to try and get Brain and the Flash guys on board with a nice AIR app (half of the projects name sake, trying to be all web 2.ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh or something) that will make suggestions where you might eat or drink that day or evening.

In theory this could be expanded to any and all kind of events and other fandangled features but I think I want to get some feature, no matter how small, online soon so that it might start getting used and so spur me and the (possible) team on to expan the thing.

So hopefully I and some of the other guys at work will start posting over on the On Aire blog and might even get something on the site. I've got some ideas for the design of the site and features of the app so I'm gonna try and pitch them to the lads and see if I can get something rolling.

Watch this (or that) space for more...

The internet is a funny thing

When I first started this blog I couldn't help feeling a little self concious about "baring my soul" to the internet and thinking, what is the point? What have I got to say that anyone might be even slightly interested in?

However; In true Field of Dreams "If you build it, they will come!" styleee this blog has gone from getting bugger all hits to now getting "a few" hits from all over the world, and the bounce rate, time on site and pages per visit are on the decline/up/up respectively.

It's interesting to see which articles are getting the most traffic, courrently most popular is my little write up of an easy way to upload and resize in C#. Which is almost nice to see as I did intend on making that one quite big on the search engine front. So that seems to have worked / It's a very popular search topic (which is why I wrote it, Because I was sick of searching for it so I thought I'd use my blog as a kind of extended / shared note book for code snippets).

So the ramblings keep on coming (although I had another drought the last month or so) but I think the next thing I'm going to try and write will be an article on securing ASP.NET applications as we recently had a little incident at work where some rogue links go into one of our site and as a result I got volunteered to write some best practices. Bugger... and on the theme of writing articles I'm going to look at an article on versioning web services too. I know there has been pleanty written about this already but I haven't really read any of it and it's one of the things I want get my head around and writing it up will probably help me drum it in.

So watch this space for more absolute cobblers and other possibly useful things.

Ohhh so close

Christ I'm slack!

About a million years ago I prommissed some old friends a website for their youth theatre group, I said I'd do it for free as they have alway been good to me and so I set about being really really reaaaalllyyyy lethargic about the whole thing! It comes in fits and spurts, that last one being around the beginning of February, which as Is pretty slack.

So I've done it again; I'm spurting into another fit of enthusiasm and I'm going to put it to good use! I spent an hour last night and I was in the office at 7AM this morning getting it ready. I'm going to sent Hillary and Steve a link and isntructions to the first version of the site, Complete with a few basic pages, a news section and a place where they can document the past, pressent and future production of the theatre company.

I'm going to hold their hand through the innitial setup and hopefully watch the traffic pour in!

The photo gallery bit is about 70% done but I'm going to go live without it now as I reckon watching the hits pile (?? trickle) in on google analytics will spur me on some more to get the gallery up and running. The site looks a bit bare without it so it definitely needs to happen, and this time I think it will! i really really reaaallllyyyy do!

Beta software, Microsoft, Windows and other shit things

A while ago when the first release candidate of Windows XP Servcie pack 3 came out I read a couple of reviews and got sold on the fact that it promised some speed increases over SP2. Now I'm no fool and I knew it wouldn't be anywhere near the equivalent of getting some hardware underneath the thing but I didn't think I'd experience anything near as retarded as I have done.

Shortly after the release candidate was made available I formatted my laptop ready for a clean install. The first thing I installed after my fresh windows was SP 3. Now I know you're about to say "It's your own fault for using pre-release software" and it completely is! I doubt I'll ever use a pre-release of something so fundamental as an operating system ever again.

So what happened? Well, I came into the office Tuesday after being ill on Monday to find I couldn't use remote desktop as "this beta software has expired"...
After a quick chat to James I discovered he had had the same problems and that you needed to install a "technical refresh". This involved uninstalling the previous version, which was installed before any other software on my system.

So I uninstalled it, spent about half an hour trying to get IE back on my system as the uninstall had shagged it up royal and made the decision never to use pre-release software again.

Now I don't blame myself completely for my world of shit. Sure I installed it in the first place but Microsoft made it a bag of shit!!!

Why and how?? Well this is many-fold

1) By making it time limited in some way

This is ridiculous; if someone has gone to the trouble of installing Beta/RC software you can pretty much guess they are going to be tech-savvy enough to know when to upgrade to the full release or get the new / updated release candidate. Don’t all of a sudden make their system unusable!

2) Make uninstallers that work.

Once I’d taken the plunge into uninstalling SP3, and waited hours for it to happen I decided NOT to install the technical refresh and stick with good old SP2. Which you would have imagined would be what I was left with after removing SP3 as it was a SP2 disk I used in the first place. But no, it wasn’t! It was some clagged up hybrid crock of shit which windows update wouldn’t even recognise. I had to download the SP2 installer and run all of that again to get my system back to “working”

2.1) Make installers that work / don’t fuck your computer up

So after all that I was left with IE6 so I installed IE7 and which now refuses to accept cookies, loads of sites complain about security and loads of other shit has gone wrong.

At 1st opportunity I’m installing Mac OS 8.1 and having done with it! Well maybe not but it just baffles me why developers make things so overly complicated. Ok, it’s Beta and you’d prefer people not to run it forever so stick a warning in there. Don’t cripple their system for them and force them to brick their computers. You have a responsibility to the end user as much as to the business objectives, unless one of those objectives it to piss users off!

Recruitment consultants are a special breed of idiot

Following up on Matt's article about recruitment consultants I want to rant about them myself!

Ten minutes ago I recieved an email from someone at Senitor offering me an excelent Desktop Support candidate.

Now, having nothing to do with desktop support as all our IT is provided by our parent group I wrote said recruitment consultant a polite but concise email stating that I am a web developer, I am only concirned with web development and that I wish to be removed from any mailing lists for IT Support staff, but that it was fine for them to keep emailing me about Flash or Web Development candidates they might have.

So two mins later I recieve my read-receipt and all is well. THEN, five minutes after that I get a phone call from some other chap at senitor saying he's just recieved word from this other chap (who I just emailed) saying that I'm looking for a freelancer and can he be of any help.

So I spent five minutes explaining what I had previously wrote in my email and then informed him that we are acutally looking for a Permanent Senior Flash Developer and that he could rind Matt about that.

He mumbled that one of collegues deals with permanent developers and said he would get him to ring through. The conversation ended.

Wonder if I'll get any more IT support emails from them, or maybe a freelance chef or a mechanic?

Good work recruitment consultants!