New Year's Resolutions

All the press is going on about at the moment is the doom and gloom of the financial markets. Yes, we all know its bad, but when it comes down to it we can all change the world and its what you do with your own life that counts the most. If life hands you lemons make lemonade, when God closes a door, he opens a window – you get the idea! I don’t know about you but I am certainly going to try to make the most out of this year.

Without further ado, here are my New Year’s Resolutions (In no particular order)

• Get venture off the ground
• Pay off the mortgage
• Finish reading at least one book per month (yes, I stole that one off Kevin Rose)
• Clear the cupboard under the front stairs
• Register my oyster card online so I don’t have to queue at tube stations
• Declutter my drawers and wardrobe
• Keep in touch with my parents more regularly
• Cut down my salt intake

Now that I am able to work on my own independent projects, I got myself a sweet new laptop to work on but nearly two weeks since getting it I’m still going through all the hassle of installing and configuring all my favourite development tools. In my last work place I started using CruiseControl.net which is a nifty open source continuous integration tool which automates the build and testing of your various .net software projects. When working in a company you have people that take care of these sorts of things for you so I never had to play around with the server which hosted CruiseControl, all I did was check my code in and hey presto it was built, *ta-da*. Working on your own is an entirely different kettle of fish and you have to do everything yourself.

Anyway, I managed do find the CruiseControl.Net web site and downloaded the installer from sourceforge, all very nice and easy so far. The installation was simple too, just click Next a few times and there you go, its on there!

Now this is where I found the first gotcha. I am running Vista ultimate and when I went into the IIS7 manager I could see the virtual directory there and the content looked fine.

View of the ccnet virtual directory in IIS7

I went to view the application’s default page in the browser and I was just presented with an interesting message stating that I had not configured the application properly and suggested that I checked the web config for the following http handlers

<add verb="*" path="*.aspx"
type="ThoughtWorks.CruiseControl.WebDashboard.MVC.ASPNET.HttpHandler,
          ThoughtWorks.CruiseControl.WebDashboard"/>
<add verb="*" path="*.xml"
type="ThoughtWorks.CruiseControl.WebDashboard.MVC.ASPNET.HttpHandler,
          ThoughtWorks.CruiseControl.WebDashboard"/>

It also mentioned that I should check the version of .net on the application and that it was configured to run a .net application. Neither of these looked incorrect but having looked around on the net for a little bit I discovered that it was all to do with the App Pool the application was running on.

It seems that in IIS7 there is a Classic .Net App Pool to which the ccnet application needs to be assigned. To do this you have to follow these steps.

1. In IIS7 manager, right click on the ccnet application directory
2. Select Manage Application > Advanced settings
3. In the dialog that pops up, you will probably see the Application Pool setting is set to DefaultAppPool. To change this you click the ellipsis button to select a new app pool.
   

   Advanced settings for virtual directory

4. Select the Classic .Net AppPool, click ok and then ok again.

Now if you refresh the page you will see the application loads and the CCNET homepage is displayed.

This is where I got the second gotcha as the error message on the screen clearly shows it could not connect to the CruiseControl.Net server.

Application Loaded and Running

This is resolved simply by starting the server up. In Vista, hit the start menu and type cruise in the search box and you should see the CruiseControl.Net server come up.

All you need to do it click this and a command window pops up. Do not close this window because the server will stop.

The CruiseControl.Net Server Running

And refreshing the statuses, you can see the web app is running fine.

CruiseControl.Net all up and running!

That is one long bar sir!

On Thursday 14th August at Potters Fields between Tower Bridge and City Hall, 2004 Olympic gold medalist Mark Lewis Francis will be sharing a cold one with 1000s of Londoners whilst Budweiser reveals an Olympic Games related ‘record breaking feature’ between 11am-3pm.

Mark will be unveiling the feature to celebrate and support the efforts of Team GB over in Beijing.

I have to say I am not at all impressed that my less than 3 week old iPhone 3G is showing serious signs of ailing. This morning whilst out walking the dog on this sunny morning I was reading tweets on Twitterific and watching my route using the GPS and everything was fine and dandy.

On my walk into work I went to listen to the second half of this week’s TWiT podcast and as soon as I slid to unlock the screen just went blank. It cant have been the battery because it was charging overnight and despite people complaining of short battery life its not that short!

I did the natural thing anyone would do and franticly pressed and held combinations of buttons wondering if there was some secret vulcan-death-grip method of bringing this thing back to life. I noticed there was still the crackle of static in my ears if I unplugged or inserted the earphone jack so there was life in there somewhere. After about 10 minutes of this (I still had my earphones in and they were plugged in) I heard a pop and a crackle, looked down and the screen flashed with a number and the “slide to answer” message flashed up – but there was no ringing or vibration and I couldn’t answer. Anyway, the home screen came back and provied me with some minor relief so I carried on to do what I originally intended and started playing the podcast.

A few seconds after locking the screen and as I was about to put it can into my pocket, it all went dead again. *ARGH* So there I was doing all the button presses again and hoping someone would try to call me so I could carry on listening to my podcast. I eventaully gave up, went to get my coffee and figured I needed to plug in the USB cable when I got to my desk to see what happend. I did just that and the screen flashed back for a second or two, tried to sync but it is now a brick on my desk.

To top it all off the page with the customer service numbers for O2 is temporarily unavailable. What a pain.

Cuil is the new kid on the search engine block getting all the attention of the technorati but its going to take something really special for anyone to even get a look in at being able to topple the mighty Google.

On first impressions it looks nice and the eco friendly black home page is neat and simple. There is auto-suggest feature which responds well as you type in the search box with the plus point of actually performing the search when clicking on one of the suggested items straight away. The search results are presented in a tidy 2 or 3 column page (depending on preference) with an extract of content from each page alongside an image thumbnail.

The minus points then came out in the test searches I did which did not seem to yield the most useful results. An ego search for themadhiker pulled out some random pages where I have postings and comments, nothing unusual there and pretty much as I expected. My second search for “.net developer forums” totally failed and suggested I may have made a typo or used a term which was “very rare” which was not impressive in the slightest. I tried something a little easier so started typing London and the auto-suggest popped up London UK which is what I wanted. The first few results were for an international money laundering conference in London, wedding cakes made by Franziska and a site about business language training. Now I don’t think I’d be out of turn in saying that these are not exactly the types of results one would really want if they were looking up information about London.

Reports that the site has been struggling to stay up doesn’t bode well either. As Buzz Out Loud’s (CNet’s podcast of indeterminate length) Tom Merritt and Molly Wood reported the site was slow to return results or sometimes not getting results at all.

It could take sometime for this to work properly as the product evolves and reliability improves but in these days where Google still dominates search on the web, anybody who is venturing into this space has to do so with a huge bang, and this is merely a pop on the search engine spectrum.

I am a citizen of the 21st century so i thought it was high time I got myself a blog (ok, I’ve been down this route before) which I could actually maintain and add some useful content.

Now that I have my iPhone 3G with the WordPress app freshly installed I can blog from anywhere so I shouldn’t have an excuse not to keep this thing going. The big question I’ve always had about keeping a blog is what do I have to contribute? I guess my conclusion is that I’m allowed to blog about whatever I darn well please, however, to help me in my life as a Microsoft .Net developer (predominantly xml web services and the like) I feel I should generally use that as my underlying theme. You can find me on Twitter as @themadhiker