Scott's code and other ponderings...

Looking forward to my Raspberry Pi and XBMC

Scott Leckie — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 00:10:41 +0000

Ahhh…. the good old days…

It's like the launch of the Sinclair ZX80 and the ZX81 and the Spectrum, all over again. Endless hype, then we, the populace, get all excited about it, then we have to wait months for the actual kit to be delivered.

Do you know, back in (uhhh…mental age arithmatic…) 1980 I actually wrote all the programs I was gonna write in an A4 notebook, high on the anticipation of when I would finally get that ZX80.

And here we are. 32 years on, and Raspberry Pi have done it again. We want the hardware, and we're writing the code, but we have no clue when it will be available.

Anyways, I'm keeping my name on the list for no other [...]

My new toy; Mitsubishi L200 Warrior

Scott Leckie — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 01:04:29 +0000

A bit of a departure from the normal posts, but I can't help showing off my new toy! I've had all sorts of cars in the past, from sporty models to V8 saloons, and a whole host of painful company-car hatchbacks.

So, when I sold my last car (a 4.4l BMW) I wanted to find something to top it. As it happened, we just moved into a new house that has a massive garden that is going to need a ton of work doing over the next couple of years. And we need to knock some stuff down and build some new bits onto the house.

So, the obvious successor to the BMW 540i is a…. pickup truck! I looked at the Toyota [...]

What is to become of the SharpSSH project?

Scott Leckie — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 01:55:06 +0000

The SharpSSH project has, in my opinion been a success.

It translates the standard jsch libraries into .Net CLR speak so that we C# and VB afficionados can play in the heterogeneous space, too. It was an excellent piece of work by the original developer, Tamir Gal, but it seems that he has tired of it. His own blog has not been updated since 2009 and the project itself has been stagnant for even longer.

Matt Wagner has made an attempt to fork and maintain the code but he will only be successful if people follow and contribute to the cause.

I think that the original SharpSSH project has been an immensely successful project, and that Tamir Gal should be commended.

However, we now need [...]

SharpSSH and getPermissionsString() [bug in SftpATTRS.cs]

Scott Leckie — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 01:42:09 +0000

I've been using the SharpSSH Library quite a lot, recently and I've been coming across quite a few unfortunate errors…

Today's was to do with permissions from an SFTP entry. When you execute this using the standard library you get access to a "longName" property which contains the UNIX style listing of the entry, such as "-rwxr-xr-x 1 root apache 58585 Mar 14 2009 wibble.exe".

What was throwing me was the date format; "Mar 14 2009" – we have a script at work which reports on vital files that appear to change. It's not complex, but it depends on the string basically, err, not changing. Problem is that when a file reaches its six month birthday, UNIX stops reporting it as "Mar 14 [...]

Acchhh… the type ‘System.Data.EntityState’ is defined in an assembly that is not referenced…

Scott Leckie — Sat, 28 May 2011 00:34:55 +0000

This was a complete googlewhack; when I entered the complete text, I got exactly one response! BTW, when I try now I am up to three, so there are obviously at least two more people with the same challenges that I have…

So, you look up the generic advice and they say a variation on the below;

Update web.config to read "<add assembly="System.Data.Entity, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089" />"

All very exciting, but the key bit of information that we're missing is that adding the EntityFramework DLL / namespace does not complete the picture.

Make sure you add the .Net library "System.Data.Entity" and all will [...]

RC of Entity Framework 4.1 (including EF Code First) is released

Scott Leckie — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 23:11:16 +0000

Scott Guthrie announced on his blog that the Release Candidate of the excellent Entity Framework 4.1 is now available. See here for all the gen.

He has also updated the "NerdDinner" sample project to use the new EF4.1 features, especially the "Code First" pattern where you can create lovely, clean POCO models and have them automatically create the database schema, update the schema and handle the repository actions.

It's a fantastic post and goes a long way to explaining the topics. However, given the bleeding-edge of this technology, there are a couple of differences between Scott's code and the RC code that you can get from here.

New names for IDatabaseInitializer conventions

Scott's code shows the following to persuade (in debug code) how to recreate [...]

Rackspace managed hosting is EXCELLENT

Scott Leckie — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 01:38:55 +0000

OK, I need to admit a little bias here; my company (on my recommendation) went with Rackspace for our SaaS offering.

That being said, I was faced with a dilemna a few weeks ago. I needed to quickly procure a web site with a vital and graphical message ("our house is for sale") and I needed to do it in such a way that my CFO/CMO was happy (wife controls costs and writes copy for any such venture). Technology choice? Easy; Joomla and the underlying technologies of PHP and mySql.

So, I knocked up a site on one of my many in-house Ubuntu VMs (LAMP on VM Server 2 on Ubuntu 8.04 LAMP on what-can-go-wrong-I'm-a-professional) and it was great(tm). Uh. Until I tried [...]

Gallery, ImageMagick and Ubuntu

Scott Leckie — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 00:10:29 +0000

There is a very real possibiliy that I am the only person on the planet running this exact mix of software (isn't that always the case?). Anyway, I was getting deeply frustrated at my inability to get Gallery (a PHP / mySql photo gallery app) running on my Rackspace rented cloud server. The sorts of issues I was seeing included;

Running any task in Site Admin / System Maintenance just led to a white screen Uploading a single image just led to a white screen Trying to use the Java Remote / Upload applet led to a "Error: java.io.EOFException: Premature EOF encountered" message Multiple errors about ImageMagick not being installed or configured properly

It was really quite yucky and, as is sadly so often with the [...]

Kindle 3 – a game changer

Scott Leckie — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 23:14:32 +0000

Well, here I am, two days into Kindle ownership and I'm sold. There is a little bit of clunkiness but, overall, this is the best evidence yet that paper is dead. Actually, and more worrisome as some of my friends work in book publishing/distribution, I can forecast that we will have no need for traditional publishers and bookshops in 5-10 years…

So, what is it? It's a device that is roughly a third the size of an iPad (which my wife owns) that is designed for nothing more than displaying books and documents. The most striking aspect is the e-ink display that really (and, I mean, really!) looks like paper. The first time I was amazed by this was when I opened [...]

How excited am I about the new Kindle?

Scott Leckie — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 00:44:26 +0000

The answer? "Very"!

Oh Dawg, it seems that the magic cutoff for delivery by this week was 0600 on 6th August and I, of course, ordered it mid-afternoon on August 6th, which puts me in the twilight zone of "after 27th August and before some unspoken date in September".

To make matters worse, Amazon delivered (right on schedule!) my £30 Kindle Kover (my tm). So, I spent the day walking round the office, going "oooohhhh feel that… that is EXACTLY the place that my Kindle would occupy, if I had it"

To be fair to my co-workers; if they squinted enough, and could get as excited as I clearly was, and they remembered that "co-worker" = "employee, who I could get rid of at [...]