Archive for June, 2007

Wiimote and Mac

We have to do this: use a Wiimote to control a Mac.

Thanks, Larry and DownHome

Larry has a fantastically useful page identifying the things that still go wrong in Microsoft CRM installations in a Small Business Server environment. Reports are now working, so we’re nearly there…

I forgot to mention DownHome, who were also great.

A new update rollup is available as well.

Happy Birthday

Happy Birthday to Jonathan, just back from NYC. He enjoyed the Ellis Island museum - it is still one of my favourite experiences of America, as I have previously mentioned.

Strategy is go

The NHS procurement eEnablement strategy is now live. We helped a great group of people draw it together. Summary: the NHS doesn’t make effective use of the information about the goods and services it purchases. We have a route to make better use of that information which depends on putting some key enablers in place, increasing adoption and ensuring delivery.

El Bulli

Just like the Taj Mahal, El Bulli blows you away. There’s not a restaurant that comes close. We were lucky beyond belief to get in and are suitably grateful. All over again tomorrow, please.

Speaker tips

Lots more things to do if you are required to speak in public.

Granger on CfH

Lots of good stuff in the unedited evidence that Granger gave to the health committee.

UK Top 10 in e-Government

Funny that Accenture’s new report talks about Delivering on the promise - the now defunct content management system that ran a lot of government websites. Good news that we are rising, though.

Hard tests

Multiple-choice tests just aren’t hard if you grade by counting right answers. Thankfully I doubt I’ll have to do many more, but I’m glad we had to do real exam questions when I was learning.

A really hard test would be colonising space. Kurzweil thinks we can do it relatively easily. Charlie Stross isn’t so sure.

ASP.NET template persistent cache error

I got the following error showing up on the IIS logs:

Error: The Template Persistent Cache initialization failed for Application Pool ‘DefaultAppPool’ because of the following error: Could not create a Disk Cache Sub-directory for the Application Pool. The data may have additional error codes.

Mr Barber helped me fix permissions on certain directories. Not seeing the error again doesn’t mean it worked, though, does it!

Happy Birthday

To me this time. Nice lazy day so far at the Tate Modern with Mike, Dee and Caroline. More lazing to come. Hurrah.

Google street view

Google street view is very smart - it’s a little like the Amazon equivalent, but still very well implemented.

Tips on public speaking

Some excellent tips on presenting to a room - whether ten or ten thousand, the general ideas work. I had never thought of biting the tongue for saliva. Genius.

Chinese surnames

Extraordinary that China is running out of surnames.

Reflection Nebula

I hadn’t seen anything like this reflection nebula before - the pictures of the sky are normally super colourful. Just beautiful.

MS SQL 2000 reporting services install

It has taken ages to work out what on earth is going on with SQL 2000 reporting services. The install wouldn’t take because the IIS services had the wrong version of ASP.net registered “ASP.net is not registered or configured correctly”.

In the end, you need to use aspnet_regiis.exe to register the older version of ASP.NET with the root instance of IIS (normally W3SVC as the path argument) and the restart IIS.

aspnet_regiis.exe -sn W3SVC/

Job done. But painfully.

MS CRM articles

Articles for the future:

And some more

Super cool wall

I’m sure it will pale once you have seen it, but this rotating office wall in Liverpool looks brilliant. Utterly pointless but excellent.

Pathfinder for mac

Worth a look at Pathfinder, a replacement Finder / file finder. I guess I do quite a lot of this stuff with Quicksilver anyway, but I do use Finder and don’t like it.

Property pr0n

I just came across a list of expensive London properties (details here)for 2006. Nice to see what’s going on up the Bish.