Wednesday 31 January 2007

NCover and TestDriven.Net on Windows XP64

Just wanted to share this with any of you having the same pain.

If you are using TestDriven.NET and/or NCover on Win XP 64, and get this error in the event log:

.NET Runtime version 2.0.50727.42 - Failed to CoCreate profiler.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

Along with "Failed to CoCreate Profiler" in the VS2005 output window, when trying to "Test with.. coverage", the best fix I have at the moment appears to be to set your test assembly (e.g. Project.Test, rather than the actual project itself) to be a 32bit assembly, via the Properties->Build section. This seems to be a bug in NCover, and will hopefully go away soon.

Tim Anderson talks a little about this here, and this link provides some more technical info.

Friday 26 January 2007

They joys of local city councils

Yay. I have to deal with the council again.

I need to update my residents parking permit, because I have a new car. Currently I am paying £10 a week for 7-day temporary permits, and soon I won't be able to buy any more, because I will have exceeded my "quota" for this period.

Now that I've got my V5, I can do this. Of course, I don't know what else I need to take with me (e.g. do I need the new permit? I don't want a SECOND one, because I'd have to pay for that).

I'll phone and ask.

Of course not. They're only open when I'm at work, they have no answerphone and don't seem to be able to reply to their email. Sorry, I pay council tax for......? occasional rubbish collection?

Recruitment CONsultants

Let me be fair, before I begin - some Recruiment Consultants or Recruitment Agents are very good. When I last changed jobs, I dealt (in main) with three people from different agencies, and they were all excellent - "IT Talent" in particular were really, really good - the guy knew what he was talking about, called me about relevant positions I stood a good chance of getting, and so forth. Plus they found me my job.

However.

Some are utter nobbers.

Got an email today asking if I want to be a UNIX Systems Administrator in London City, earning 30k. Had the rat-loving fart-faced mumble monkey bothered to even OPEN my CV, he would have found that I don't do UNIX, I'm a Programmer, not a SysAdmin, I live too far from London to commute there and finally, that I probably wouldn't get out of bed for the money. Unless I could work from my lounge.

I suspect he was also the source of my 4 screened, err, missed, calls today.

Monday 8 January 2007

New Car!

Finally, something to be happy about. I've bought a new (well, new to me, anyway) car (Ford Fiesta), which I'm collecting tomorrow.

Of course, this means I now have to sell my old one - which needs an MOT first. It's booked in for Thursday, and typically, one of the back brakes has started making a noise not unlike "ggrrrhhhhrrrnnnnkkkkkrrrrrrrgggg", no less than ten minutes after I made the booking.

Damnit.

Sunday 7 January 2007

Blog: IT Gears - Serving The Hackers Culture

Stumbled across quite a good techie blog (well, at least, it had a rant about IE7 on it, which I enjoyed reading) today. You can find it here.

Saturday 6 January 2007

Why IE Sucks

I ran accross this blog today while trying to find out why on earth a web page was doing something odd in IE7 but not FireFox. Shockingly it seems to be a bug in IE.

That's never happened before.

Oh well. At least I found some good reading material on the way - and thus I thought I'd share it with you.

Friday 5 January 2007

What shall we do with the lazy coder?

Perhaps more troublesome than the drunken sailor!

Wired news have an article here about how wonderful and fast PCs are going to become in 2007.

Lies. Well. OK. It's true, to a point. At least, it will be true until lazy coders fall into more bad habits and ruin the dream for everybody - again.

I remember when my PC had 32mb of RAM and a HDD measured in Megabytes, along with a CPU that was in the realms of 300mhz (and at the time - circa ten years ago, that was a pretty good system).

Now my PC is a dual core 2.2ghz, 2gb RAM system, and the total amount of storage available to me both locally and via my LAN is well over 1Tb. But if I want to do something simple, e.g. write a letter telling someone how much their poor service has infuriated me - I can't do it any faster.

It takes just as long, if not longer, to send an email now, as it did then.

Have you noticed that Outlook (note: I'm not Microsoft-Bashing, just using Outlook as an example) consumes upto 30-40mb of RAM? Thats more than most PCs had ten years ago.

Why?

Partly because we want everything to be nice and polished and happy-looking these days (this is a good thing, don't get me wrong - Windows 3.11 was butt-ugly, I'm much happier with XP), but its also partly because coders are much lazier.

They frequently use the tools/languages they know best, rather than the best ones for the job, and their test systems are normally top-spec machines, which they use for their development.

Personally I like to use my 800mhz VIA mini-pc for testing. If something runs quickly on there, it's definitely going to present a rapid user experience on a medium to high end machine.

Do you want to die?

Next time you cross the road, ask yourself this question:

Is today a good day to die?

If the answer is "no" then I suggest you use a crossing, or open your eyes and do not employ what appears to be a standard tactic for under-60s these days; The "I'll just walk blindly accross the road - the cars will stop for me" code, rather than the old favourite - Mr Green Cross.

One of these days, I won't stop.

Un-Civil Engineering

There is no other way to vent about this, other than to post here, therefore:

Dyer & Butler (a Civil Engineering firm) employ nobbers.

I know this because a van load have just driven past me and a number of other shoppers on the street, singing loudly out of the window of their corporately branded van (Y352ROT), generally shouting abuse, and behaving like idiots. The driver included. Quite how you steer a van (even slowly in traffic) while dancing to "I'm so excited" and waving both arms in the air I don't know.

The same [censored] also felt it was totally appropriate to stop in the middle of a pelican crossing to set down some of his passengers.

Twats, one and all.