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Irregular Injection of Opinion
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 Tuesday, October 04, 2005
Didymo in the Buller and Clutha/Hawea

Yup... unfortunatly Didymo has been found in both the Buller and Hawea catchments.

Details at the NZRCA site.

http://www.rivers.org.nz/

the didymo issue for kayakers

Adventure Sports|Tuesday, October 04, 2005 3:38:00 AM UTC|Comments [0]|    

 Sunday, September 25, 2005
Day Light Savings Confuse You?

Thank the Lord you don't live in the USA...

Daylight Saving Time begins for most of the United States at 2 a.m. on the first Sunday of April. Time reverts to standard time at 2 a.m. on the last Sunday of October.

Daylight Saving Time, for the U.S. and its territories, is NOT observed in Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, the Eastern Time Zone portion of the State of Indiana, and the state of Arizona (not the Navajo Indian Reservation, which does observe). Navajo Nation participates in the Daylight Saving Time policy, due to its large size and location in three states.

GAH! So if you're an indian you're on DST but if you're not you're not.... DOH!

1t|Sunday, September 25, 2005 10:54:45 PM UTC|Comments [2]|    

 Friday, September 23, 2005
Go Hard or Go Home

OK. So the week started out pretty well for me with my first sub 104kg weigh in. But then it kinda didn't really spark. I didn't do a heap or exercise (Gym Mon, Canoe Polo Tue, Run Wed, Run Fri) and so come this weekend I needed a jump start!

I got up this morning, went to the farmers market, had an apple strudel and some yummy russian deep fried pastie for breakfast...... and then ran/walked up Mt Cargil 5 minutes faster than ever before.... that's like 10% off my best time!

Just to prove it, here is my chart....

Adventure Sports | Gettin Fit|Friday, September 23, 2005 10:47:33 PM UTC|Comments [0]|    

*** SVN Gemini Commenter v1.1 ***

We've just released the latest incarnation of our Gemini/Subversion Commenter Utility.

I can't claim to have really provided al that uch input into it... credit for that goes to Nick head and Steven Higgan who are a coule f guys who work with me....

*** SVN Gemini Commenter v1.1 ***

 

Release Notes:

- All configuration now located in app.config

- Robust regex-based issue ID parsing

- Support for multiple issue ID's per commit

- Optional debugging

- Error handling

- Fixed bug with spaces in repository path

 

Usage:

SVNGeminiCommenter.exe repo_path rev# debug

e.g.

SVNGeminiCommenter.exe "C:/SVN/sourcerepository" 9999 debug

 

Instructions:

1) Add post-commit.bat to your SVN repository hooks directory

2) Edit post-commit.bat to reflect your repository path

NB: post-commit.bat currently echoes the arguments to args.txt. This can be disabled.

3) Commit file and reference issue ID in comment. The following are tested commit strings:

#1568 \r\nFixed issue

#1568, #999, #1000\r\nFixed issue

#1568, #999, #1000 Fixed issue

#1568,#999,#1000 \r\nFixed issue

#1568,1736 \r\nFixed issue

4) For instructions to integrate with TortoiseSVN see here:

http://tortoisesvn.sourceforge.net/docs/release/TortoiseSVN_en/ch05s24.html

SvnGeminiCommenter1.zip (18.08 KB)

.NET|Friday, September 23, 2005 1:19:54 AM UTC|Comments [0]|    

 Thursday, September 22, 2005
Palm Treo Running Windows Smartphone....

Check it out here

http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000867059961/

Mobility|Thursday, September 22, 2005 10:49:29 PM UTC|Comments [0]|    

Star Aliance Gold Flying Air NZ and United.... read this....

United, bless their souls, have a set of 'Premium' Economy seats in the front of coach. These are not paid for extras but are instead dished out on a first come first served basis.

If you are flying through to a US destination on NZ/UA combined you should ring 0800 747 400 (press 1 then 1) and they will generally be nice and stick you in this section of the plane :-)

Travel|Thursday, September 22, 2005 9:29:54 PM UTC|Comments [0]|    

 Saturday, September 17, 2005
W00t! Taranaki beats Auckland

In case you didn't know I'm originally from New Plymouth and root for my home side.

http://www.tvnz.co.nz/view/page/411749/611894

Human Aggregation|Saturday, September 17, 2005 5:39:28 AM UTC|Comments [2]|    

 Friday, September 16, 2005
Dear Air New Bloody Zealand

I'm currently sitting in the Maple Leaf (Air Canada) Lounge @ LAX. It is a tiny, overcrowded hovel with nasty processed cheese at the food bar.

But, it has Internet, whereas your swanky pants brand new luxurious and spacious lounge next door, does not.

Do you have rocks in your head or something?

You upgrade the 747 fleet and don't put internet in them..... OK... you could arguably make that decision on reasonable grounds...>. But to get to the new lounge and find no internet! Come on!

[UPDATE] They have hard wired internet here..... so bring your travel WiFi router (I left mine @ Home this time)......

Rants|Friday, September 16, 2005 11:26:20 PM UTC|Comments [6]|    

Dave Glover Gets His Smartphone App on PDC Commnet

Dave, one of the DE's for Aus had his Smartphone voting app featured on the PDC Commnet!

Go Dave!

It's a cool little app that lets you use a WM5 smartphone for collecting votes at events and so forth.....

.NET|Friday, September 16, 2005 1:11:00 AM UTC|Comments [15]|    

 Thursday, September 15, 2005
Holy Shitballs...... WWF Designer Hosted In IE

THey have just shown the WWF designer pulled up into IE to dynamically edit the Indigo workflow they've just built...... and you can also edit currently running workflows.

This is just SOOOOO cool....

Imagine how good this could be for mobile routing solutions.... you can login 1/2 way through the transaction and reconfigure a running workflow to handle and exception case.

This is probably the coolest WWF demo that I've seen so far.

THey showed a workflow hanging on a delay activity and they dropped in some new activities after it stright from the web browser.

.NET | Windows Workflow|Thursday, September 15, 2005 11:45:40 PM UTC|Comments [4]|    

Workflow and Indigo

Sitting in a Don Box session at the moment looking at some future stuff for how WWF and WCF will talk together.

Very cool concepts- theability to simply have a workflow be an Indigo service but they really tightly integrated the two.... which is great.

For example if you have a correlated receive and send pair or activities in your workflow when exported as an Indigo service they will be matched up as a Send/Receive pair..... This also means that we can model contracts more richly than just single pairs- we can model contracts as conversations- i.e. we know the order in which our workflow expects to recieve messages.

Looks great. One thing that I'm interested in is just how much hosting support they're going to give us for Indigo Workflows. I'm pretty sure that IIS is going to be an out of the box supported hosting mechanism (hosting session is next).... will be interesting to see what sort of higher end support services we get OOB... things like persistence services and so forth to enable long running work flows.

 

.NET | Windows Workflow|Thursday, September 15, 2005 11:38:15 PM UTC|Comments [2]|    

 Wednesday, September 14, 2005
WWF Hosts, Services and Event Driven Activities

One of the fundamental things you'll need to get your head around when you start playing with workflows is how to go about getting stuff out of, but more importantly into your executing workflow. Here's my 30 second synopsis......

1. Your workflow runs inside a runtime engine.
2. All of your communications from the outside world will come to you via services provided by your host. In addition, in many cases your communications with the outside world will be sent by way of services provided by your host.

This is basically the provider pattern in action and it's an important concept to grasp... here's an example of why.

Say you build a workflow that manages registrations for your user group events via email. The logic is obviously going to be pretty simple, receive registration emails, send confirmations etc.... Your workflow declarativly defines the logic of what should happen in the sequence. Your workflow contains EventSink activities e.g. ReceiveEmail that allow your eworkflow to receive inbound mail. Try, as much as you can, to think of these EventSink activities in their abstract form. That is, your activity represents a mechanism by which your workflow receives an email but, as far as is possible, doesn't mandate or specify too much concrete implementation as to how that is delivered. The actual mechanics of how it does this will often depend on where your workflow might be running- e.g. You would probably receive the email in a different way depending on whether you are running your workflow in Outlook or on a server hosted in IIS. If we want to be able to use exactly the same Workflow definition, with exactly the same Activities then we need some sort of indirection mechanism to seperate the logical concept of ReceiveEmail with the actual concrete implementation of how we do it.

So let me give you an example. You have an activity that represents receiving an email. This is an abstract concept. You then create a workflow definition (in code or XOML/XAML) that uses this activity. You then host this workflow in a couple of different hosts. When you set up each of the hosts you can construct a different service type to service you ReceiveEmail activity depending on where you are running the host. When it is running, your activity is going to ask the runtime to provide it with a service that implements a certain known .NET Interface type. Thus you could have two different services that use two different email receipt mechanism, one for a desktop host and one for a server host. Through this mechanism you achieve the indirection that enables us to use the same delcarative business logic definition (the workflow) in a number of differnt contexts which may have markedly different requirements.

 

Windows Workflow|Wednesday, September 14, 2005 8:33:02 PM UTC|Comments [0]|    

All ABout WWF- No not the wrestling stupid!

All About WWF
SO Windows Workflow Foundation shipped today. We've been kicking it around for a bit now.

WWF is going to be the worflow engine for windows. It basically allows you to declarativly stitch together application logic into worflows. Not only does it support your typical 'Biztalk style' sequential workflow types but it also allows you to build state machine type workflows. You can either write them in code or.... wait for it..... you can declare them in XAML (though it's called XOML in the current drop). What this means is you could potentially stictch together a whole application out of components in just XML. Avalon would form the UI and WWF could be used to provide a state based execution engine. Slap a nice GUI UI around it and you've got a high productivity app builder that any old BA can use.

I'm going to post a bit over the next few days about some of the things that I've learnt around WWF thus far and some of the cool ideas that I've got for WWF.

I'll post some screen shots tonight once I'm back on my dev machine.

.NET | Windows Workflow|Wednesday, September 14, 2005 8:28:38 PM UTC|Comments [0]|