After a stupidly long wait there's a new debugger article on the way, and the first part should be posted early next week. The topic for the next few articles is how to create a coverage analysis tool that can handle applications written in any .NET language without using the profiling API. It'll still be targetted at .NET version 1.1, but I'll probably cover porting it to 2.0 when the 1.1 version is complete. It's times like this that I love .NET as it makes doing this kind of thing terribly simple compared to the pain that it is under...

I was almost home today when I heard a story about a car that had crashed a few miles away so we swung by to take a look. Normally I wouldn't do this but the moment I heard about the crash I just had to go see if it was true. Apparently a red BWM clipped the curb, half mounted the pavement for quite a way and then swerved across the road. It looked like it was going almost sideways at that point judging by how far apart the wheels hit the curb and then cut tracks through some grass,...

Getting Mono to work with real applications is fun. Tonight I've finally gotten around to adding some local stubs for HelpProvider and HelpNavigator that do nothing, and I've also hacked in the ugliest bit of code into System.Drawing that you've ever seen to get bitmaps loading from streams. I've also commented out a bit of temporarily ignorable code in the application to get past a NotImplemented exception and next I've got to replace some P/Invoked API calls with something that will aproximate a state of workingness. On the plus side tonight I've actually managed to get the main UI displayed...

Tonight, after the pub of course, I saw clouds on another planet. I find that really amazing when you consider the distance between us and Jupiter, which means I'm hooked. I have a 5" telescope now, but how long before I want a bigger one? Still no camera mount, and conditions are still very bad to actually see much so I'll have to go somewhere a bit less populated sometime soon but I still need to buy a case and some more view pieces so that I have a bit more magnification before that. I think I almost got the goto feature...

The first rule of astronomy says that when you buy a telescope it will be cloudy for the first few days, weeks or months. I did get a few minutes of clear skies on Saturday night but the T2 adapter for my camera hasn't arrived yet so I couldn't take any pictures. It was almost a full moon too, so all I could see was craters around the edge of the moon (What do you mean it's not flat? You know what I mean) and Jupiter plus the first 4 moons. Hopefully I will have some pictures this by the...

Last week, after an evening in a pub and a challenge from a friend saying "Do better than this", I spent a while in a field in the middle of the night with my camera. These pictures are what happened. The pictures were taken using a Canon 20D with a 400mm lens and a 2x teleconverter. neither have been scaled at all, but they have been heavily cropped. The moon is too bright at the moment to allow me to improve on them to fix their flawed exposures, but in a few weeks I'll try again. Would it be...

As an addendum to yesterdays rant I checked out the dialogs on Linux again and I was right, they hadn't registered with me because they work in a way that I like. Under Windows though the bar is higher, and when you're not presented with one of the standard dialogs (they're called common dialogs for a reason) you notice every piece of functionality that you're now missing. For the record, the dialog looks like this: The biggest thing that makes it look so primitive is the lack of any icons for the files, which of course requires a platform specific...

I am in constant lookout for a good hex editor, and I've currently started using Bless. I will admit that It's a bit basic, but it does my core requirement perfectly, which is to be fast when dealing with large files. It doesn't seem to handle files larger than 4Gb which was something of a pain earlier but it's happy with files smaller than that.. The main reason that I'm using it is because it's a .NET app that uses Gtk# and runs under Mono. I haven't looked into getting Gtk# working for it under MS .NET yet, but I'll have...

Although I'm most of the first page if you search for Jon Shute you don't get any links to me if you search for Jonathan Shute, which is my real name, and the one that I use for my more acedemic life. Consider this post a first step in me reclaiming my name from Google.

Fedora had a new kernel update pushed out through yum the other day and so I installed it on my Linux box. Actually that's not quite right, I install all of the updates that become available so that I am 100% up to date for the obvious reason of security and the even more obvious reason of not wanting to care about working out what I really need to update and what I can ignore. I didn't actually realise I had upgraded the kernel unttil GNOME crashed on me a few hours later. It was totally frozen, and there wasn't...

Just in case there's anybody out there who cares enough to remember I thought I'd give a quick update into my progress with Linux. To quickly recap I installed Fedora on my main PC alongside XP in an effort to see what all of the fuss was about. It was Mono that did it, which is why I think it's one of the best things that has happened for getting people like me interested. This weekend the screensavers started to annoy the hell out of me. I just couldn't take them any longer and so had to do something about it...

So here I am watching Battlestar Galactica on DVD while listening to the Podcasts that were made available with the commentaries for the episodes. So my question is why is the voice over so short? The episodes that I've watched are, as far as I can remember, how they were broadcast over here. The episodes I'm watching seem to be longer than the podcasts though. Were the episodes cut for the American showings?

I love the idea of being able to run my many little utilities that I've written over the years under Linux with no software changes. I know that they would be better off running under Gtk# or something but I don't care, I just want to run my tools and this means having a working version of System.Windows.Forms.dll. I know that the development is coming on in leaps and bounds and it can do an awful lot already, but please can somebody get around to implementing OpenFileDialog and SaveFileDialog? It makes most of the applications I've written useless under Mono...

Downloading things from Microsoft nowadays goes something like this: Oohh. That looks interesting I'll download that "Please prove that you're not running a pirate version of Windows OK, I'll click through Please enter your product key But that's on the side of my case that's against the wall underneath my desk. F**ck that, I'll not bother Hang on, that opens up a great way of training users to type their product code into websites. Phishing just got easier. So why can't the ActiveX control it installs anyway look up it's own product key? I don't mind it checking, my copy of Windows is legal (since it is...

Adam Curry has a tablet PC and he likes what he sees. See, even a Mac user can like them when he tries to use one. It's just a shame that most of the people out there who say they dislike them have never tried one so don't get what they're about. This is a real shame as I think that all laptops should be tablets, even if the screen doesn't come off or rotate as it makes it such a nicer experience than using a (usually) horrible touchpad or an even worse nipple type thing. Most people seem to...

Well I've finally reached the point where I'm going to install Linux on my Mac. It was always the plan, but I was taking the time to see what all the fuss was about. So, what do I think about MacOS? I think that they've lost it big time and have lost sight of what people people like me thought the Mac was about. Take, for instance, the Dock. This is my biggest source of problems actually as it's just wrong on so many levels. For a start the position of icons change depending on how many applications you have open...

I don't know how, but my "I don't drink" housemate has started drinking since he's been living with me. Am I really that bad an influence? What surprised me is that he's become a big fan of Real Ale, which has naturally ended up in me drinking a lot more too. A common American opinion of us Brits is that we drink warm beer. You know what? It's true. We drink cold lager like you're meant to, but beer is something different. I don't know of any American beers off hand so I don't know if there are any. I...

It's that day again. It comes every year and you can't trust a word you read on the net all day. On top of all that booting a co-workers PC into Linux from a live CD didn't get the desired reaction, although the IT manager did manage to not be seen by hiding under his desk when he was going to be confronted about it. Twice.