November 2004 - Mike Taulty's Blog

I got my phone bill from British Telecom last week and I hadn't yet got around to writing a cheque for it and posting it back to them. You'd imagine that their business processes cope with this - people go away on holiday and so on and don't always pay a bill for perhaps a week or two and that's just the way of the World. What used to happen was that at some point you get a reminder from the company written in red to tell you to pay up or risk getting your phone service cut off or something similarly nasty. I've just encountered the modern equivalent of this in that it seems that BT are now employing people (and I guess they're possibly in an offshore call center) in order to phone you up and remind you that you haven't paid your bill and, as in my case, suggest very strongly that you pay it right now with a credit card. There's some interesting security problems in giving credit card details to someone who calls you so I declined and offered to send the cheque as usual but I'd imagine most old ladies and so on...

I hadn't seen this before - the concept of a Wiki is being applied to news journalism - have a look at Wikinews

I've been thinking about slide-decks and demos. I spend a lot of time putting together talks to deliver at various events. In doing that I tend to steal bits and pieces of slideware and demos from other places but, ultimately, I always feel like I have to put together what I've found and make up quite a few pictures here and demos there in order that what comes out makes sense to me as a story and then I find it a lot easier to deal with. I've just checked and I have just over 1GB of presentation stuff on my laptop around various topics such as XML Web Services, Smart Clients, SQL Server 2005, BizTalk Server 2004, ASP.NET, Core .NET, TabletPC, etc. etc. I wonder would these be of any use to anybody? Should I be publishing these somewhere for re-use? Some of the stuff that I do gets re-published up here but there's a bunch of other stuff that doesn't. Would it be beneficial to publish it all into some area on this web-site? I'm loathe to publish demos if they don't come with an explanation and, generally, I don...

I've been looking at my blog stats today. This is the graph below of activity for this calendar year; I've no real idea as to whether these are accurate or not - this is what my blog hoster reports and, from time to time I go and look at them. I find it fascinating how this has grown throughout the year because I've done very little to try and encourage that growth, it just seems to happen as you publish a few bits and pieces of things and search engines start to pick up on what you're publishing. Now, the real challenge would be to try and get that growth again across next year - my instinct is that it's only possible if I come up with some funky software tool that I can give away to people.

I'd like the song rating system in Media Player to allow 6 star-songs :-)

Following up on my post around the new WinFX Community Tech Preview for Avalon - I pulled this down (it's a 255MB download and it comes as an ISO image ready for burning to CD). I took a previous VPC that I have SQL Server 2005 Beta 2 and Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 Refresh on, made a copy of it and installed the Avalon CTP into that VPC. It all seemed to go pretty smoothly - the setup stuff did what it said on the tin and I even managed to avoid having to burn a CD because of the VPC software's "Capture ISO image" feature which was nice :-) I was glad to see that you get a locally installed version of the WinFX SDK documents as I find it a pain to have to keep going to a web site in order to get SDK documentation. I did a quick "Hello world" style test in that I ran Visual Studio, created an Avalon application and ran it and it seemed to work fine. All I need now is a month off to stick my head in these SDK docs and try and fathom this out properly - I wonder when I'll get that month off ;-...

There's some new WinFX bits been posted up to the MSDN web site today for MSDN Subscribers to download. It's a "Community Technology Preview" and it includes an updated version of the Avalon presentation system targetted for Windows XP Service Pack 2. The developer center is here . There's a pointer to the download, a link to the online SDK documentation and an article from Tim and other luminaries around what's new Enjoy - I think the intention is for you not to install this onto your main PC and run the risk of having a bad experience so take some care with it :-)