Posts

My Lenovo W520 is the best laptop I have owned, but I have had one major issue with it, external projectors. The problem is it does not like to duplicate the laptop screen output to a projector, it works fine if extending the desktop, not duplicating. Every time I have tried to use it with a projector I either end up only showing on the projector and looking over my shoulder, or fiddling for ages until it suddenly works, usually at a low resolution, I don’t know what I did to get to this point so I don’t dare fiddle any more so use it anyway. A bit of a problem given the number of presentations I do. A quick search shows I am not alone in this problem. ...

Recently I have had a problem with my LG E900 Windows Phone 7 running Mango. Whenever I try to make a purchase on marketplace I was getting the error “There has been a problem completing your request. Try again later” and seeing the error code 0x80070490. A search on the web, asking around everyone I thought might have an answer and placing a question on Microsoft Answers got me no where. ...

We have all done it, opened Word typed all morning, not bothering to save the file as we go along and then for some mad reason exited Word say you did not want to save. So you loose the mornings work. Now we know that Word does an auto save, but if you are stupid enough to say yes on exit without saving how do you get the auto backup file? Does Word even keep a backup if you never saved the file for the first time? ...

Background I have recently moved this blog server from using Community Server 2007 (CS2007) to BlogEngine.NET. We started blogging in 2004 using .Text, moving through the free early versions of Community Server then purchased Community Server Small Business edition in 2007. This cost a few hundred pounds. We recently decided that we had to bring this service up to date, if for no other reason, to patch the underling ASP.NET system up to date. We checked how much it would cost to bring Community Server to the current version and were shocked by the cost, many thousands of dollars. Telligent, the developers, have moved to only servicing enterprise customers, they have no small business offering. So we needed to find a new platform. ...

Hopefully you should not notice, but we have moved this Blog Server from using Community Server 2007 to BlogEngine.NET. We have been busy bring over all the content so any search should still return the same page, but it might take a few days. I will be posting on my experiences as soon as I have my notes sorted. THE MAIN CHANGE YOU MIGHT SEE IS THAT THE BM-BLOGGERS AGGREGRATE FEED HAS MOVED TO http://blogs.blackmarble.co.uk/blogs/syndication.axd ...

The Today programme on BBC Radio 4 this morning had a section on children not being taught computer science. so says a variety of employers who cannot find the staff they need. It seems entry to Computer Sciences degrees has been dropping over the years and the current ICT course at school are to blame. I was at school in the first generation to get access to computers. I did Computer Sciences O level (1982 I think, it is a while ago) and we learnt about flowcharts, CPU, memory and programmed in BASIC on a teletype and sent 5 hole punch paper tape off to a local Polytechnic for processing and a week or so later got back a printout saying error on line 10 (and my staff today complain about their slow PCs!). During the course we did at least move onto a Tandy TRS80 so it did get a bit more immediate. ...

I had a problem with my LG E900 WP7 phone over the weekend, Outlook stopped synchronising with our office Exchange server. It started when I got back from a trip Ireland. My phone switched back from roaming and started to use 3G for data again, as opposed to WIFI. Also over the weekend we had a connectivity problem from the office to the Internet so for a while I could not connect to any of our services from any device. However, even after both these things were sorted my Outlook still failed to sync, it said it was in sync but showed no new email since Friday when it was disconnected from my Irish ISP based MIFI in Ireland. No errors were shown. I waited until I got back to the office and tried a sync via our internal WIFI, all to no effect. ...

I did a post at the start of the year about Lab management and VLAN tags, how they are not supported, but you can work around the problems. Over the past few months we have split our old Hyper-V cluster into one for production and one for test/lab development. This gave our IT team a chance to look at the VLAN problem again. So a quick reminder of the issue – the deployment tools in Lab management that create environments provide no means to set a VLAN tag for any networks connections they create. Once an environment is created you can manually set a VLAN tag, but it is all a bit of a pain and certainly unsupported. ...

Typemock have recently released a new version of Isolator, 6.2. As well as the usual fixes and enhancements you would expect, this is the first version to support TFS 2010 team build out the box. Prior to this release Typemock supported MSBuild based TFS builds (2005/2008) but not the Windows Workflow based version in TFS 2010. The issue was that in TFS 2010 builds it was possible for build steps to run in parallel, maybe on different build agent PCs, so you could not guarantee that Typemock Isolator was intercepting the correct threads. You could call the MSBuild tasks to enable the mocking interception, as in 2005/2008) it was just that they did not work in practice on 2010. ...

We got a good turn out of Black Marble staff at this years Age UK Abbey Dash 10K in Leeds. We were amongst over 8000 runners who turned out for a cool and foggy Yorkshire Sunday morning run. We had a handicap race amongst ourselves, using a wisdom of crowds poll to estimate everyone target time. This was won by Steve Spencer our Development Director. He beat his target by 20 minutes. I am not sure whether this says more about his fitness or our staff’s opinion of him! ...