Vista high CPU on startup

For a while I have been suffering that when I switch on my Acer Core2 Duo Vista laptop, both cores sometimes go to 85%+ utilization, so the PC is slooooow. Usually after a few reboots it seems to clear. This can happen after a resume from hibernate and complete restart; there was no obvious pattern. Task manager only says that the load is due to the NT Kernel process - so not much help there. ...

October 30, 2007 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

DDD6

I have been on holiday for a week and I see that registration for DDD6 has opened and closed - good job my session was voted onto the agenda else I would not be going. Thanks to anyone who voted for my session, see you there.

October 26, 2007 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Bradford the 'greenest city'

I see Bradford, where the Black Marble offices are, has been ranked the greenest city in the UK. Strange that at the technology centre we are in there is no recycling at all, not for paper, cans or plastic. We have asked if such a service can be laid on (developers drink a lot of can of coke), but were told that recycling is not a service offered as part of the council’s commercial refuse collection service. ...

October 20, 2007 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

A long day of seminars

Just got home from a long day of Black Marble hosted presentations. This morning I was presenting on SQL 2008, seemed to go well. This afternoon it was a very busy MSDN session by Martin Parry and Daniel Moth from the Microsoft DPE team on VS2008 and .NET 3.5. Finally this evening there was a interesting community event on the .NET Micro Framework by Rob Miles, the same session he is doing at TechEd in Barcelona, worth getting along to if you are there, if not try the book. ...

October 18, 2007 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

SQLBit Podcast

Craig Murphy has just posted a podcast we did at SQLBits last weekend. Enjoy…………

October 13, 2007 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

DDD news

The voting for DDD6 is now open - as I always say vote early vote often. I hope my submission of a proposal for a session on Scrum is of interest. I know I have had feedback on my previous sessions that people want to know more on this area. Also saw today on Colin Angus Mackey’s blog that DDD7 DDD Scotland will be in May 2008 at Glasgow Caledonian University. Well another 3+ hour drive but in a different direction! It will be interesting to see if the change of location alters attendance ...

October 12, 2007 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Agile Workshop by Clarke Ching

Last night went to an excellent free meeting at the Yorkshire Extreme programming Club given by Clarke Ching entitled : Programmers may be from Mars, Customers may be from Venus … but why does everyone think that Project Managers are from Uranus? From the title I was unsure of the content, other than it would be about project management. It turned out to be a workshop on using formal conflict resolution techniques to dig into problems in projects to find solutions and to expose underlying patterns - very interesting. This is set of techniques I had come across (I did got to Bradford University which has a well know Peace Studies department that studies just this area) but had not considered their use in project management. ...

October 12, 2007 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

I think I got away with it!

I have just got back from SQLBits after giving my session on Unit testing in SQL. As I said at the start of my session, at developer events I often feel a bit of an outsider when I say I am talking on testing as opposed to development; today it was doubly so when surround by so many DBAs. I have to say some of the sessions I attended seemed to be from a completely different world to my day to day work. Hey but that is what makes IT interesting is it not? ...

October 6, 2007 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

Javascript errors with Escrum

Whilst sorting our eScrum installation I kept getting a variety of Javascript errors when selecting a project using the dialog on the top right of the main web form. I also was unable to create new product via the web site. It turned out to be two problems: Templates Some the projects I had registered to be used via the Escrum web site were not using the eScrum template, they were using the Conchango Scrum one. ...

October 4, 2007 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

TFS Update to 2008 Beta2 and Escrum Admin

As I posted before I have been updating our TFS server to 2008 Beta2, today it was the WSS from 2.0 to 3.0. Well I followed the process on Sudhir Hasbe’s blog and it just worked, so now we have WSS3.0 running the the TFS application tier. The final step will be to move the SharePoint sites to our main MOSS 2007 farm, but that is for another day. As part of today’s upgrade I was working on process templates. We use Escrum but I had noticed our Escrum web site was not showing all the projects using that template. I had completely forgotten that you had to manually add Team Projects to the Escrum web site. This is done using a URL like: ...

October 2, 2007 · 2 min · Richard Fennell