Codex

Spent most of yesterday trying to recover data from a friends pc. I found quite a useful utility ntfs undelete. Using it I think I have recovered the bulk of her files.

In the evening Bruce and Nina invited us round a to watch the England versus France in the rugby 6 Nations tournament. Nina cooked a lovely spread. Spinach and Feta pie, with tomato and potato salads. It was really tasty; Two nice meals out in two days I am pretty spoilt.

I was going to catch the train round then Phil offered me a lift. Caroline was with him. She had managed to fall out of bed and bruise herself. We arrived just in time for the 5pm kick off. The match was pretty nail biting. The first half was very even, both sides making lots of mistakes. In the second half England came out stronger and took the game to France.

After the match we watch Lets Dance, and then the film Faster. The Rock plays a criminal looking for revenge after he gets out from Prison. I found the "plot" quite convoluted however it wasn't important to really follow, the film was all about the action set pieces.

I worked through a pack of Peroni during the afternoon and was a little tipsy by the time I got home. I phoned Kath and fell asleep talking to her. We try and talk every night before bed and I find it hard to sleep without saying goodnight to her.

Little by Little

Friday was my mums birthday, I bought her a copy of a book she wanted "The Road of Bones: A Journey to the Dark Heart of Russia". I picked up my parents and my mums friend Kath and we all headed to the Kathmandu Tandoori for a meal. I have never been before, but a women I used to study Japanese with recommended it. Walking in I was a bit apprehensive the décor was a bit dated. The staff were very friendly though. The menu was very appealing, I tried a rather interesting dish with noodles chicken, lamb and prawns. Mum and Kath had the chicken chilli and my dad had the prawn chilli. When it arrived, I was incredibly jealous of their meals. Not that my Chow Chow wasn't tasty, it was very nice. It was just the Chilli was so well presented, the chicken strips were nicely cut and the flavour of the sauce was great. Kath also bought my mum some books, so she will have plenty to read.

It was a really nice evening, I think my mum enjoyed herself very much.

Video: This Angry Birds Cake Is Playable. It’s also ABSOLUTELY AMAZING

Video: This Angry Birds Cake Is Playable. It’s also ABSOLUTELY AMAZING

As You Are

Found this great guide to setting up a replication mysql replication slave.

That when I started the salve I had a particular problem that I got the following error "Could not find target log during relay log initialization".

I found adding the following to /etc/mysql/my.cnf
relay-log = /var/lib/mysql/slave-relay.log
relay-log-index = /var/lib/mysql/slave-relay-log.index

Then deleting any remnants of failed attempts
cd /var/lib/mysql
rm *relay*
rm master.info

Fixed the issue.

Morning Mr Magpie

Went out to Manchester yesterday for Caroline's birthday. I met Phil Caroline and TJ at TV21 in Manchester. In a rather surreal moment I found them nestled in a mock spaceship having a few drinks.
After a few drinks in there we headed towards the station stopping off for a couple of drinks along the way.
Next stop we went took the train to Stockport then a cab to the Joshua Brook in Gee Cross. This is where the party really started, with Caroline's family and Phil's parents brother and Jules all turning out.

I managed to cadge a lift back with Jim and Jules which was very nice of them. Was pretty toasted by the time I got home, I'm not the drinker I used to be.

The International

As most of you know I have a special interest in call rates to Poland.

I have just discovered a rather bizarre disparity in Three Mobiles call costs. I am currently on PAYG, though looking at the monthly tariffs.

PAYG calls to Poland are 9pence per minute for mobiles and 2 pence per minute for landlines. That is cheaper than I can make calls to landlines in the UK.

However if I take out a contract and pay monthly the costs rises to
Voice Call. 46p / minute
Text Message. 25.5p / text
Photo Message. 35.7p / message
Video Message. 76.6p / message
Video Call. £1.50 / minute

I Robot

I have been quiet for some time, so I decided it was about time I updated where I am.

First piece of news is after 6 years working at my current company I have decided to move on. I have accepted a new position as a support developer at a company based in Northwich. It was a hard decision to make however I am pretty excited to work on something new. I will be supporting and developing a new portal.

As part of the move I will lose my current mobile phone, which is provided by my current employer. I had long wanted to get an IPhone but after two failed attempts at buying one I decided to go down a different route. I got myself a Samsung Nexus S. It is an Android phone and so far I must say I am very impressed. Its very responsive and does multi tasking really well. I was talking to Kath on Skype while composing an email an attaching a picture of Cocoa

.

My old phone is a Blackberry Storm and while I briefly had an Apple Iphone 3G to play with the Storm is the phone I draw most of my comparisons from. The Camera is much better than on my Blackberry Storm. Also much better than the Storm is the haptic feedback. The Storm uses something called "Sure Type", where you actually depress the screen. It was an attempt to give your fingers some feedback for people missing keys which depress; I believe that Blackberry have dumped this on the Torch. The sure touch thing is good for new users but actually slows typing plus over time bits of the screen don't depress so well. The Nexus has feedback in that it vibrates as you hit the navigation keys or when they are locked. The screen is a lot larger, brighter and more sensitive to the touch.

One interesting factoid is while the Storm you can hold it in any direction in landscape mode. Android definitely has a top and bottom, both in portrait and landscape mode.

The Storm was dreadful for applications. It small memory and the General lack of decent applications meant I basically only had a couple. In a couple of days of having an Android phone I am swimming in them. I can edit photo on my phone, use the GPS, call Kath on Skype (please can you add video calling Skype?), and play angry birds! I am missing some applications that are Apple only, like Speed test, though given how many Android users there are I think most applications will end up with a Android version

Most people say I am crazy but I kind of miss using ITunes for music syncing. It acts as a mass storage device I can simply drag music into the music folder.

Overall so far I am very impressed with Android, and not missing the the Blackberry one bit!

The game has changed

Virgin recently upgraded all their broadband services, and for existing customers this meant an upgrade to 30MB/s srevice for a one off cost of £30. This being a bargin I phoned up adn ordered my new device. This morning I recieved my new Virgin Media "Super Hub". Basically they have integrated the cable modem into a wireless router. Its escencially a netgear manufactured router with a Virgin branded firmware.
Annoyingly they seem to have removed the DDNS option. This is very annoying as Virgin don't do static ip addresses so getting remote access can be tricky.

I am pretty happy with the speed though, faster upload and and download

Try broadband speed test or test your speed and donate to charity at the same time.

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Visual Studio 2008 MVC SQL Error

I have been trying to follow some MVC tutorials online and got to the step about ading the sql database.
Visual Studio popped up to tell me to install SQL 2005 Express, well I have SQL 2008 Express installed. Indeed the error link redirects to 2008.

I finally found out its because I installed SQL server as the default rather than the expected SQLEXPRESS instance.

To fix this I went into tools->options selected Database tools, data connections and removed the instance name from SQL Server instance name.

If you have no idea what the instance is called you can use the SQL server installation centre, choose tools then Installed SQL Server features discovery report. This will list all the instances of SQL and features installed on your computer.

Feist - The Limit to your Love