I have some pictures of Ryan and I DJ'ing at TJ's party. Koan also managed to take a few but none of me playing - was my music that bad?

This animation pretty much sums up a recent conversation I had with the tech support of a well known webcam manufacturer. Warning, it contains extreme language (think Southpark) so don't watch it if you are easily offended.

• http://uploads.ungrounded.net/192000/192820_tech.swf

To that manufacturer: come and talk to Exony and we'll show you how to optimise your calls and avoid annoying your customers with stupid requests.

Whilst browsing the latest FireFox extensions this morning I found one for http://www.stumbleupon.com/. It adds a button to your toolbar which surfs to a random page on the Internet as recommended by someone else. This is a prefect compliment to Google and I've just spent an hour or so clicking the "Stumble" button.

Along the way I found some pictures that made me laugh out loud which doesn't happen often when I'm alone. I've added them to a gallery too but here they are:

I guess it had to happen sometime, the spammers have found the Blogger site I cross post to. Since their anti-spam guards are no where as sophisicated as dasBlog, I'm forced to remove the ability to comment. If you are reading on Blogger then why not come over to my main site where life is so much better.

I've had to install a few new pieces of software lately for work and some of them have decided to take over my system. Some of the worst offenders are as follows:

• Cisco Systems VPN Client - if I try and move it's shortcut on the program menu then it decides to reinstall. Why do that? Shouldn't I get to choose how I structure my menus?
• MSN Messenger 7 - if I remove the shortcut from the program menu then it causes errors when Outlook loads. Why?
• RoboHelp - this is the biggest offender. What right does it have to remap the "Open .CHM" extension (i.e. help files for all programs) to its editor? I don't want to edit the thing, I want to read them.

So, a message to people writing installers - it's my computer, my rules so please don't presume to know better than me.

Just a quick post to say I've moved the blog to a sub-folder because upgrading every virtual directory under the root every time I upgrade dasBlog is a pain.

You shouldn't notice anything different except you have now come through to /blog instead of the root. I have redirectors on the site so any old permalinks should still point to the correct place. This goes for my feeds as well but some readers don't understand redirects and you'll have to update.

If you are developing Reporting Services extension assemblies that require <appSettings> elements in application configuration file (e.g. <add key="SqlConnectionString" value="Integrated Security=SSPI;Data Source=(local);" />) then you will need to modify a couple of files:

• To design reports successfully, add the configuration to the VisualStudio app.config file
  C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe.config
  
• To deploy successfully, add the configuration to the ReportServer web.config file
  C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL\Reporting Services\ReportServer\web.config

Microsoft Patterns and Practises have finally released the tool they use to automatically generate the resx resource files in their Enterprise Library. My thoughts on the library itself are covered elsewhere in this blog but this tool is fantastic. It's a real time saver because each string only requires a single line in the strings file and no angle brackets which is no worse than typing into your source file. Grab the zip file (you will need to join the workspace to download), install and read the docs.

On the subject of tools, don't miss Scott Hanselman's 2005 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List.

Now playing: Koan Bremner - CO-010-20050703 - CrossOver Session Ten

Just a quick post to say Happy Birthday to my blog. My first post was a year ago yesterday and was pretty inconsequential but going to Tech-Ed shortly after brought some technical content online. My most Googled posts have to be "Uniqueidentifiers as Primary Key Columns" and "How to trash your system when writing installers". The geekiest toy was "Geekman" and the hardest post to write was "Coder Block". I used to post nearly every day but realised I couldn't keep up the pace and now it's more like once or twice a week at the weekend. Long may it continue.

Just for fun and to kill some time, here are the flags of the visitors to this website last week. They are ordered by number of hits from that country. I had no idea there was such a diverse collection.

[Apr 2008 edit: sorry, there used to be a picture here but it got to be the top hit in Google image search for a very common term and I can't support the amount of bandwith needed to service all the queries.]