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Killer content for my Kindle - The Economist with no need for an iPad - yipeee!

- by Liam Westley

I admin it, I was jealous of someone's iPad. They were reading The Economist, for free, as they were a print subscriber. I'm a print subscriber too. However, I don't have an iPad or an iPhone, just an Android phone and a Kindle. As soon as I got the Kindle, I looked up how to get The Economist on it. £9.99 per month. Hmmm, twice as much again as a my print subscription and I wanted to maintain the print subscription. No way Amazon. Fortunately some nice person wrote similar comments on The Economist subscription for Kindle, but added a very important additional nugget of information; and there is no need, as a print subscriber you can just use the free Calibre e-book creation tool anyway. So I downloaded it, searched for The Economist online 'recipe', entered my login name and password (part of my print subscription) and off went Calibre to screen scrape every single article from the Christmas 2010 issue into a .mobi file, complete with front cover image and full indexing. It's wonderful. Truely wonderful. Every section individually indexed, with each article separated and all inline images preserved. It even feels wonderfully retro, back to the days when The Economist only used black and white images. So many thanks the guys behind Calibre and The Economist recipe creators. Finally, I have my essential Kindle content that I've been waiting for.

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Short interview I gave about Commercial Software Development is now available

- by Liam Westley

At the DDD8 conference in January I gave a quick interview to Sara Allison expanding my Commercial Software Development presentation (available here). The interview has just appeared on the Ubelly.com site, run by some of the Microsoft UK team, http://ubelly.com/2010/04/how-to-succeed-in-commercial-software-development-2 For those of you for whom video just isn't enough, you can get Commercial Software Development in person at DDDScotland and DDDSouthWest.

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Hyper-V for Developers - presentation from London .NET Users and VBUG Bracknell

- by Liam Westley

Thanks to both London .NET User group and VBUG Bracknell for allowing me to present my Hyper-V for Developers talk last week. A weekend at DDD Scotland followed by two user group presentations means I'm a bit late getting the presentations uploaded to the blog, so many apologies if you've been waiting. LDNUG - www.tigernews.co.uk/blog-twickers/LDNUG-HyperV4Devs.zip VBUG - www.tigernews.co.uk/blog-twickers/VBUG-HyperV4Devs.zip Also, at VBUG Bracknell I was asked if you could configure a Hyper-V server to user wireless networking (which might be useful if you have a laptop for demonstrations). Well here's the post from Ben Armstrong (Virtual PC Guy) which details how that can be configured, http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2008/01/09/using-hyper-v-with-a-wireless-network-adapter.aspx ... and it's also detailed on the TechNet wiki as part of running Hyper-V on a laptop, social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/hyper-v-how-to-run-hyper-v-on-a-laptop.aspx

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Commercial Software Development – presentation slide decks for DDD SouthWest 2.0

- by Liam Westley

Thanks to everyone who voted me onto the DDD SouthWest agenda, and a big thanks to all who attended the session and took the time to give feedback to rank me No.3 in the overall conference in presentation skills. There were some good feedback comments, which I'll try to make sure I take note of for future presentations. For those who came to the session, or even for those who were on one of the other tracks, I’ve uploaded the presentation for you to download. I created a more simple, and smaller, PowerPoint without all the fancy animations and video clips, which is available as a compressed ZIP file, http://www.tigernews.co.uk/blog-twickers/dddsw/commercialsoftwaredev-dddsw2.zip I also printed the presentation with speaker notes (which contain most of the information I was talking about) using PDFCreator, which is available as an Adobe Acrobat PDF here, http://www.tigernews.co.uk/blog-twickers/dddsw/commercialsoftwaredev-dddsw2.pdf ... and if PowerPoint presentations don't do it for you, also thanks to Craig Murphy, you can watch a video of the presentation that I gave at DDD8 in Microsoft TVP, Reading, http://vimeo.com/9216563

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Hyper-V for Developers - presentation from NxtGenUG Oxford (including link to more info on Dynamic M

- by Liam Westley

Many thanks to Richard Hopton and the NxtGenUG guys in Oxford for inviting me to talk on Hyper-V for Developers last night, and for Research Machines for providing the venue. It was great to have developers not yet using Hyper-V who were really interested in some of the finer points to help them with specific requirements. For those wanting to follow up on the topics I covered, you can download the presentation deck as either PDF (with speaker notes included) or as the original PowerPoint slidedeck, http://www.tigernews.co.uk/blog-twickers/nxtgenugoxford/HyperV4Devs.pdf http://www.tigernews.co.uk/blog-twickers/nxtgenugoxford/HyperV4Devs.zip I also mentioned the new feature, Dynamic Memory, coming in Service Pack 1, had been presented in a session at TechEd 2010 by Ben Armstrong, and you can download his presentation from here, http://blogs.msdn.com/b/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2010/06/08/talking-about-dynamic-memory.aspx

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Can inbound links through template-based layouts result in penalties?

- by Liam Sorsby

So obviously link building is encouraged as long as it is natural, organic and has meaningful links with content relevant to your site. Obviously with the constant release of new updates to algorithms, Google is flagging sites for unnatural links to their sites. My Question is: Can this be caused by templating systems? With WordPress for example, where you can add a link on the footer and it is repeated throughout the entire website generating thousands of links? If we don't add any links, Good Content will be re-posted and linked to, surely if your content is constantly linked to this will flag your site for "unnatural" content as it's difficult to see if someone has been paid to write an article on your content. Or does Google just simply want us to audit some of the links to show we are making an effort? As you can tell we have had a Manual action for: Unnatural links to your site—impacts links. However, this seems to impact our website as well. Edit: To clarify the question: Can you get penalised for paying for advertising on a site that uses a templated sidebar. So when they create a new blog/page ect your link is also added onto the page hence resulting in 1000's of links to one page on our site. I know that one effect maybe a 0 pagerank web page linking to your page dilutes the PR of our page. However the links are only inbound not reciprocal

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apt-get update very slow, stuck at "Waiting for headers"

- by Liam

I have looked at similar questions: Stuck at 0% [waiting for headers] (apt) apt-get update stuck on "Waiting for Headers" However neither one of them answer my problem. I am running 12.04 AMD64 and have recently started getting an issue that when I update my repos from my connection at home through a terminal, using sudo apt-get update, it takes forever (literally after 2 hours it was at 28%), however when I run from a different location it takes less than 5 minutes to complete. I have attempted changing which mirror I use but that does not solve the issue. I have also cut down what is in my sources list but this also makes no difference. There are no faults on my ADSL line as I have already contacted my ISP to check this. It also makes no difference if I use a WiFi or network cable connection. What could be my issue? A speed test (www.speedtest.net) comes out at about 0.9 Mbps down and 0.42 Mbps up (which is a shade under the advertised line speed), I reside in South Africa and use the UCT LEG server. But I have also tried the other mirrors available in SA....none of them make a difference.

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Oracle VM server for SPARC 2.2 on S11

- by Liam Merwick

Oracle VM Server for SPARC 2.2 has been released for a little while now. The https://blogs.oracle.com/virtualization blog has an overview of all the 2.2 features. Initially, what was released was the SVR4 package for Solaris 10 (which is unbundled and wasn't constrained by any external schedule). On Solaris 11, the 'ldomsmanager' package is built into Solaris (and therefore doesn't need to be downloaded separately) so it is delivered as part of an S11 Support Repository Update (SRU). Some of the features in 2.2 are specific to S11 (SR-IOV and the ability to live migrate between machines with different CPU types) and so there have been many requests to know when are the S11 bits coming. Solaris 11 SRU8.5 was released on Friday and this includes Oracle VM server for SPARC 2.2 so if you're already running an S11 SRU all you need do is a 'pkg update' to get the 2.2 bits. If you're still running the original S11 and your 'pkg publisher' output shows the /release repository then you'll need to sign up for the /support repo by getting the appropriate keys and certificates to access the repository (requires a support contract). The 2.2 Admin Guide documents how to do this upgrade on S11 Two S11 articles which have some useful details on upgrading (not just 'ldomsmanager') via the support repositories are: How to Update Oracle Solaris 11 Systems From Oracle Support Repositories by Glynn Foster Tips for Updating Your Oracle Solaris 11 System from the Oracle Support Repository by Peter Dennis In particular, if you'd like to stick with the v2.1 release when upgrading to SRU8.5 or greater, see the 'pkg freeze' section of Peter's article.

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Microsoft Async CTP for DDD9 UK Developer Conference - slides and source code now available

- by Liam Westley

Thanks to all the nice comments from people who attended my presentation at DDD9, and extra thanks to Jon Skeet, Mark Rendle and Mike Hadlow for coming on stage for the last ten minutes to help debate whether the Async CTP is the correct way to go to enhance C# 5.0. The presentation is available at Prezi.com http://prezi.com/gysz5nohltye, which I can recommend as a refreshing change to the more standard PowerPoint slidedecks. I've also uploaded all the code samples into a single ZIP file. You will need to install the Async CTP to be able to run them, and I would remind everyone that the current Async CTP is not compatible with either ASP.NET MVC 3 RTM or Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 so you may need to use a test system of virtual machine to play with it! Source code - http://www.tigernews.co.uk/blog-twickers/ddd9/AsyncSrc.zip Again, thanks for all the positive feedback and the whole of the DDD team for putting on a fantastic conference for all the presenters and delegates.

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DDDSouthWest 4.0 26th May 2012 - Async 20/20 presentation

- by Liam Westley

As I wasn’t voted in with my nominated sessions I presented a 20/20 talk on the new async functionality coming with the .Net Framework. This was based on the PechaKucha presentation format, where you have only 20 slides with only 20 seconds per slide, and it progresses automatically. It was the first I’d attempted, so thanks to the organisers for allowing me to have a go. Although creating the slide deck was definitely easier than a one hour presentation, it was much more stressful giving the talk by the end of the 6m 40s. I’m not going to upload the slide deck (it won’t make much sense) but I did record the audio and used the excellent Camtasia to create a video of the slide deck with that audio which you can watch over here, https://vimeo.com/42957952

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DDD9 - voting now open for the UK's premier community event

- by Liam Westley

If you are interested in software development including a heap of great open source frameworks, then get over to the DDD9 web site and vote for some sessions for the next DDD conference. It will take place at Microsoft's UK headquarters in Reading on 29th January 2011. http://developerdeveloperdeveloper.com/ddd9/ProposedSessions.aspx I've proposed a session on the new Async CTP announced at PDC, but there's loads more interesting stuff such as Ruby, CQRS and jQuery Mobile, so get your votes in now so it's the content you want to see.

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How can I exclude content in my notifications bar from being indexed?

- by Liam E-p

Of course I want my content to be indexed pretty fast by search engines, however not my notifications bar. My notifications bar contains the last 30 changes to content on the site, and I don't want this to show in my SEO meta. As all the notifications are generic, it often doesn't provide any relevant information. As I said the notifications are generic. If an article named "123" was created, it would create a notification that says "Article "123" was created by xxx at 12:00AM". I'm now wondering if this is a content design problem. As only 1/3 of this information is actually relevant to users (the title, what happened). By SEO meta, and irrelevant notification data being shown, I mean this - Basically what I was wondering, is how I could optimise this, so search engines wouldn't show this generic nonsense.

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DDDNorth2 Bradford, 13th October 2012 - Async Patterns presentation and source code

- by Liam Westley

Many thanks to Andy Westgarth and his team for organising a fantastic conference at the rather elegant Bradford University School of Management. Also, a big congratulations to all the delegates who gave up there free time to come and hear us speak and who were, in general, enthusiastic and asked some cracking questions to keep us speakers on our toes. For those who attended my Async my source code and presentation are now available on GitHub, https://github.com/westleyl/DDDNorth2-AsyncPatterns If you are new to Git then the easiest client to install is GitHub for Windows, a graphical UI for accessing GitHub. Personally, I also have TortoiseGit installed – the file explorer add-in that works in a familiar manner to TortoiseSVN. As I mentioned during the presentation I have not included the sample data, the music files, in the source code placed on GitHub but I have included instructions on how to download them from http://silents.bandcamp.com and place them in the correct folders. What I forgot to mention is that Windows Media Player by default does not play Ogg Vorbis and Flac music files, however you can download the codec installer for these, for free, from http://xiph.org/dshow. I am planning to break down this little project into a series of blog posts, with each pattern being a single blog post over several weeks. In these I will flesh out the background behind the pattern, the basic goal being achieved and how to monitor the progress of the sample data being processed. Basically, what I said during the presentation and is missing from the slides.

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Last chance to see ... Virtualisation for Developers at NxtGenUG Cambridge, Tuesday 14th December

- by Liam Westley

As a farewell to 2010 I'm also saying farewell to presenting my Virtualisation for Developers and Hyper-V for Developers presentations with a final outing at NxtGenUG in Cambridge (my first visit to a user group in The Fens). I may have some homemade nibbles and party stuff to liven up the evening, and a certain Rachel Hawley has suggested a santa hat might be appropriate too. It's going to be a fun night. Sign up details are available here, http://www.nxtgenug.net/ViewEvent.aspx?EventID=353 And for those of you who can't make this last outing, I am planning on converting both presentations into a series of blog posts so the content will be available to a wider audience. If the posts don't seem to be appearing fast enough drop me an e-mail to remind me to get on with it !

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Optimising website IP for location

- by Liam Sorsby

From my understanding of SEO, websites are optimised for the current location of their IP address. For example if xxx.xxx.xxx.xx resolves to the UK then you are more likely to get higher rankings in the UK then you are in the USA. However, my query is when you use a CDN you are storing a cached version of your website across multiple servers at strategic locations across the globe to reduce load time in locations that your trying to target. Now if you use a CDN and geo-locate the website URL then it only resolves back to the USA (where our IP address resolves too) but it doesn't say it resolves to any other countries. As far as I know you can have multiple IP address resolving to one domain (from different countries). Do CDN's really help to optimise the location of your website or are they soley meant to optimise load time? Is there a better way to optimise for multiple countries with regards to the resolution of the IP address? Are VPN's as per this post here relevant to this? Any advice would be helpful.

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How should I store a Game Database on Android?

- by Liam

I'm looking at creating a game for Android and while I have most of the ins and outs worked out, the one thing I'm struggling with is how to store data for the game. Ultimately, the game will be based off of a lot of pre-defined data and statistics so the obvious choice to me would be something like SQLite, but as I'm pretty new to the realm of Android and Game Development, I'm not 100% certain if this is the right route to follow. The data will be general pre-defined data as well as player data (along the lines of careers stats - what place finished, etc). I was wondering if there was a better/best practice solution that wasn't SQLite and that would provide said functionality and if so, could you point me in the right direction?

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Simple moving object jitters every couple of seconds [on hold]

- by Liam

I'm trying to get smooth movement in my game, right now every couple of seconds the moving square jitters. I'm using C++ with SDL2. I made a very simple project to test different methods so all that's happening is a box moves across the screen. Here's a pastebin of the code http://pastebin.com/7YxxSw0D Here's a link to a dropbox folder containing the 'game' https://www.dropbox.com/sh/0ygntl140qv8iv0/AABVuuk6khArOJmdBi1OaFlua?dl=0 Any input would be greatly appreciated, and let me know if you need any more info. Thanks!

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Learning PHP from beginner to advanced

- by Liam

I've dabbled with PHP for a few years now and I'm capable of most of the basic things, building login forms etc but from my time on here I've noticed there's so much more I need to learn, like best practices, security issues etc and so I want to learn everything from the very basics. In the past I've used forums and browsed the web for snippets of code only I think this has led to my bad practices, can anybody recommend books or Valid, recommended learning sources? Thanks in advance!

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Update to Where’s My Graphic Equalizer in Windows Media Player – now covers Windows 8

- by Liam Westley

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/twickers/archive/2013/11/11/update-to-wherersquos-my-graphic-equalizer-in-windows-media-player.aspxHave you wondered where the graphics equaliser in the Windows 8 version of Windows Media Player has moved? It’s certainly not on the menu option you’d think it is …. well, I’ve updated my Windows 7 post to include Windows 8, it’s over here http://geekswithblogs.net/twickers/archive/2009/10/23/135680.aspx.

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Learning PHP from beginner to advanced [closed]

- by Liam

I've dabbled with PHP for a few years now and I'm capable of most of the basic things, building login forms etc but from my time on here I've noticed there's so much more I need to learn, like best practices, security issues etc and so I want to learn everything from the very basics. In the past I've used forums and browsed the web for snippets of code only I think this has led to my bad practices, can anybody recommend books or Valid, recommended learning sources? Thanks in advance!

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SQL Server architecture guidance

- by Liam

Hi, We are designing a new version of our existing product on a new schema. Its an internal web application with possibly 100 concurrent users (max)This will run on a SQL Server 2008 database. On of the discussion items recently is whether we should have a single database of split the database for performance reasons across 2 separate databases. The database could grow anywhere from 50-100GB over 5 years. We are Developers and not DBAs so it would be nice to get some general guidance. [I know the answer is not simple as it depends on the schema, archiving policy, amount of data etc. ] Option 1 Single Main Database [This is my preferred option]. The plan would be to have all the tables in a single database and possibly to use file groups and partitioning to separate the data if required across multiple disks. [Use schema if appropriate]. This should deal with the performance concerns One of the comments wrt this was that the a single server instance would still be processing this data so there would still be a processing bottle neck. For reporting we could have a separate reporting DB but this is still being discussed. Option 2 Split the database into 2 separate databases DB1 - Customers, Accounts, Customer resources etc DB2 - This would contain the bulk of the data [i.e. Vehicle tracking data, financial transaction tables etc]. These tables would typically contain a lot of data. [It could reside on a separate server if required] This plan would involve keeping the main data in a smaller database [DB1] and retaining the [mainly] read only transaction type data in a separate DB [DB2]. The UI would mainly read from DB1 and thus be more responsive. [I'm aware that this option makes it harder for Referential Integrity to be enforced.] Points for consideration As we are at the design stage we can at least make proper use of indexes to deal performance issues so thats why option 1 to me is attractive and its more of a standard approach. For both options we are considering implementing an archiving database. Apologies for the long Question. In summary the question is 1 DB or 2? Thanks in advance, Liam

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how do I make my Dualshock 3 gamepad work in Ubuntu 14.04?

- by user290527

When my desktop computer was running Ubuntu 12.04, my PS3 controllers would work with USB. I didn't need to do any special setup. I could just plug it in before I start SuperTuxKart and it would recognize it. I can also do this on my laptop (still running 12.04). Since I gave my desktop a fresh install of Ubuntu 14.04, the controller would never work. I have played with some installed software that I found when looking for information. Here is what I get with xboxdrv: liam@Liam-CustomDesktop:~$ sudo xboxdrv --detach-kernel-driver xboxdrv 0.8.5 - http://pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/xboxdrv/ Copyright © 2008-2011 Ingo Ruhnke <[email protected]> Licensed under GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html> This program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions; see the file COPYING for details. Controller: PLAYSTATION(R)3 Controller Vendor/Product: 054c:0268 USB Path: 003:012 Controller Type: Playstation 3 USB Your Xbox/Xbox360 controller should now be available as: /dev/input/js0 /dev/input/event16 Press Ctrl-c to quit, use '--silent' to suppress the event output So the existence of this controller is acknowledged at on my computer. But it never works for input. In my old installation, I didn't even need to get software like xboxdrv for it to work. I have never tried bluetooth on either computer, but I don't think I even have that on my desktop. So now, how do I make my gamepad work in Ubuntu 14.04?

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AMD Phenom 2 is idling at 50°C, can I get it cooler?

- by liam

Is it possible to damage a CPU so that it works, but only at high temperatures? My Phenom 2 1090T is idling at 50°C and I have tried everything to get it down. I can play Deus Ex HR, Arkham City, or Dirt 3 and it hovers around 60. I have cleaned out all my fans: 2 intake (front and side), 1 exhaust (Arctic Freezer). My machine is a brand new Antec 520 high current gamer. Also: Extreme3 770 8 GB Kingston DDR3 (2x4 GB) 750 GB Seagate Barracuda ASUS Xonar DG Radeon HD 5670 New Arctic Freezer Pro Rev 2 (days old and mounted properly with Arctic Silver 5). I also dropped an Athlon 250 dual core into my rig and that ran at under 30. Is the CPU dying? I know that 50°C idle for an AMD is not normal.

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Unable to configure Ruby with readline

- by Liam Berg

1) ./configure --prefix=$HOME/.packages --with-readline-dir=$HOME/.packages 2) configure: WARNING: unrecognized options: --with-readline-dir I am trying to setup the most up-to-date version of Ruby on my webhost (I do not have sudo access). Line 1 is the configure command I used for Ruby and Line 2 is the first printed line after executing 'configure'. I've googled this issue and found other people with the same problem but there aren't any real solutions. There are no warnings or errors when configuring/compiling readline-6.1. I am pretty stumped, any help/insight would be greatly appreciated. Thanks ahead of time.

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Expanding Files 0%, error 0x80070017 Windows 7 x64 RTM

- by Liam

I have downloaded Windows 7 x64 from MSDN. I have checked the hash of the file and it is correct. I have them made a bootble USB stick (http://kmwoley.com/blog/?p=345 (had to use my vista bootsect.exe as running 32bit at the moment). When I boot from the USB it fails when expanding the file. It stays on 0% and fails after around 90 seconds. The error is 0x80070017. As the hash is correct and I am using USB I guess it could be a hardware problems. Any advice how to get Windows 7 installed? The machine is a Dell Studio Slim.

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