As anybody who has seen my book collection will attest to one of my favourite authors is Phillip K Dick. I guess most people know who he is, but if you don't he wrote books about paranoia and perceived reality such as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the book on which Bladerunner was based on. I didn't pick that example because it's just his most famous work, but because of this. I don't know if this makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, or totally scared. Either way it's the coolest thing ever.

Visual Studio is great, but if you have a solution with lots of projects that reference each other it just goes totally to pieces. For a start the Copy Local setting has to be manually changed to false if you don't want Visual Studio to get very confused. Worse still, even if you set these tags it sometimes gets confused and fails to unload assemblies so that you have to close down visual studio, delete the assembly and then restart VS before you can actually build anything. It does make me wonder if anybody actually uses VS and .NET to...

Last night on BBC 2 at 9 pm I saw my first trailer for a Christmas TV show. There is something very wrong with the world. It was for Dr Who, so that's OK then.

People say that Longhorn doesn't look like a compelling upgrade. True, Microsoft keep delaying or spinning off bits of the OS and people are seeing an OS that is shrinking but I think they're getting all hung up on shiny features. The latest thing to be mentioned was the new command shell, which is a shame but it'll be around in the future (most likely for free, and perhaps for 2k as well). The real key killer feature is still in there. It's the feature that changes the world the most too. It's the one that will effect every one...

There is a large box in my house that contains loads of tapes containing Spectrum games. I'll not explain what a Spectrum is as if you don't know you're not going to care about this link This is the best use of technology ever.

Some hobbies just eat up your time and I just spent an hour out in the garden with my telescope that feels like it was only 10 minutes. There wasn't much to see because the moon was being obscured by the hellish light that is Basingstoke (I went to school there many years ago. I'm allowed to hate the place). Astronomy always seems more fun when I have a bottle of Scotch to work my way through as I do it.

My Mac Mini needed resinstalling because I fiddled enough to break my old Ubunti installation so I finally went the whole way. I now have no MacOS at all on this mbox at all and it's a pretty interesting experience. So far I have missed zero features of MacOS and I've noticed the following points with my experiences since I first got the Mac: The box flies when you don't have MacOS running on it. How inefficient is MacOS? The horrible one button mouse works a hell of a lot better under Ubunu than MacOS. It's a lot smoother and doesn't...

The current Avalon bits only support Microsoft video formats. Are there any plans for MPEG2 support in the final version? Anybody know?

I'm in a rut again with coding I think. I've just got no enthusiasm for actually sitting down and doing anything productive like, say, making the example source code for articles about debugging work well enough to make the actual article worth reading. I need to be doing more research type work during the day to be enthusiastic during the evenings nowadays. I think I'm getting old I have been coding a bit though. I still have that itch but since anything that needs a bit more work (and actually finishing) is beyond me at the moment I've picked up something...

Here's a quiz for you: Which characters are valid for file and directory names under the operating system(s) that you develop for? If you know great. or if you know that you don't know but that you don't need to worry about it because of a nice API such as System.IO.Path.InvalidPathChars will tell you whenever you need it then that's great too. If you don't know and don't check, or check with the wrong characters then you're opening yourself up to bugs. Even Adobe gets it wrong sometimes. If you are doing any form of work with filenames under .NET then...

I can't remember how many times I've heard the rumours about Apple switching to x86 processors over the years, but It's that time again and people are talking about an announcement tomorrow. So does this mean that we're about to see a version of MacOS that we can ditch our copies of Windows for? Although that would be a seriously good move for Apple's sales I seriously doubt it. Apple love their hardware lockin because it increases security. Ahem. Of course it has nothing to do with the profit margins of being able to set your own prices for the hardware....