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- September 3rd, 2008
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Doogal has posted a new entry on: Bell End
How to kill the hits to your website
I went on holiday a few weeks ago. Unbeknownst to me the Random Pub Finder's database died the day I went away. With no web access I only found out on my return. A few days of emails to our ISP followed (yes we should have had a backup but we didn't;
- August 29th, 2008
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Doogal has posted a new entry on: Bell End
The wonders of e-ticketing
If you go to Rail Europe and purchase a ticket, chances are you won't actually be sent real tickets. Instead you'll be sent an itinerary with some reference numbers. Then when you get to the station, you go to a machine and pick up the real tickets.
- August 18th, 2008
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Doogal has posted a new entry on: Bell End
Babysitting laptops
PCs are so fecking demanding. I've got a few laptops at home ready for some training I'll be doing and every time I switch one of them on I'm assaulted by a bunch of popups telling me I need to update this or that, Windows Update, Java, Macafee, some
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Doogal has posted a new entry on: Bell End
The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class
This video may be about the US but I'm guessing it also applies to the UK. We may think we are richer than previous generations, but in fact we are spending more on housing, healthcare and have more debt, even though we generally have two parents i
- August 3rd, 2008
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Doogal has posted a new entry on: Bell End
Connecting two PCs with a network cable
Wireless networks are great for home networks, unless you need to copy large amounts of data around. OK, 802.11g is probably pretty fast, but I've got 802.11b here and when I tried to copy 4Gb of data around, things got a bit slow. I had no blank DVD
- August 1st, 2008
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Doogal has posted a new entry on: Bell End
SonicWall VPN client and wireless networks
I've had this problem for a while. I have a couple of computers connected on my home wireless network which generally can see each other to share files. But sometimes I'm unable to connect to the other machine. I'd always put this down to some weirdn
- July 31st, 2008
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Doogal has posted a new entry on: Bell End
Cuil not so cuil
It's been done to death already but I can't help agreeing with the pundits who say Cuil will not replace Google as the search engine of choice. I did a search for "Doogal Bell" and most of the returned sites were search listings on other sites that l
- July 22nd, 2008
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Doogal has posted a new entry on: Bell End
Radiohead - Ceremony
One of my favourite bands* covering one of my favourite songs, what's not to like? And if you like it, download it with KeepVid (this is mostly a reminder for myself, I'm sure you already know about this website since you're probably much more web s
- July 19th, 2008
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Doogal has posted a new entry on: Bell End
Tracking down memory leaks in managed code
I've been spoilt in the past when I've had memory leaks in my applications. I've worked at places where AQTime has been readily available. But I've recently noticed what appeared to be a memory leak in the FreeFlow Administrator and given that it's a
- July 9th, 2008
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Doogal has posted a new entry on: Bell End
IE7 vs FireFox : The never ending debate
I was reading a forum today when I spotted yet another debate about FireFox and IE7. Much like the Windows vs Mac vs Linux debate, this is getting incredibly tedious. Both browsers (along with Safari, Opera et al) do a perfectly good job of letting p
- July 6th, 2008
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Doogal has posted a new entry on: Bell End
Zoopla - How much is your house currently worth?
Yet another site for the British obsession with house prices. When I first looked, our house was apparently worth £371,039, now it's worth £375,350, who says house prices are falling? (well me for one...). I'm not sure how valuing it to the nearest
- July 3rd, 2008
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Doogal has posted a new entry on: Bell End
How to escape text in SQL statements
Two things got me thinking about escaping text in SQL statements recently. I had previously thought it was a simple topic that everybody already knew about but given that these two things occurred I can only assume that not everybody knows about why
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Doogal has posted a new entry on: Bell End
The joy of WITH (NOLOCK)
For a long while I thought it odd that reading from a SQL Server database caused the rows that were being read to be locked. Thinking about it for a little longer makes it clear that it's a necessary evil. You don't want some other process to update
- June 27th, 2008
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Doogal has posted a new entry on: Bell End
RIP Elmo
Yesterday our pet chinchilla Elmo bit the dust. He had been ill for several weeks. He'd stopped eating and a visit to the vet and some drugs didn't help the little fella. At least I wasn't to blame for this death unlike our last chinchilla, who I ac
- June 26th, 2008
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Doogal has posted a new entry on: Bell End
IE8 not ready for prime time
I downloaded and installed IE8 beta 1 primarily to have a look at the new XDomainRequest object which allows for cross-domain requests. Unfortunately that old problem security gets in the way. Although the documentation implies it is possible to make
- June 24th, 2008
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Doogal has posted a new entry on: Bell End
IE6 is dead, long live IE7
I'm not one for making predictions. OK, I've made a few in my time but I'm invariably wrong. Predicting that the majority of IE users would be using version 7 within two months was one of my worst. Here we are, over 18 months since it was released a
- June 22nd, 2008
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Doogal has posted a new entry on: Bell End
How to use Experts Exchange
I don't know about you but a lot of my web searches bring up Experts Exchange articles. When you first look at the page, it looks like you have to register to see the responses to the query. In fact it says "All comments and solutions are available t
- June 15th, 2008
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Doogal has posted a new entry on: Bell End
Metastorm BPM 7.6 and Windows Workflow part 3
In the first two parts of this series I've given a brief introduction to the integration of Windows Workflow into Metastorm BPM 7.6. For this final part I'll be discussing what interests me, being able to execute workflows authored in Visual Studio f
- June 10th, 2008
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Doogal has posted a new entry on: Bell End
Fixing Flash problems in IE7
I've had this for a while, some of the Flash content on the BBC website wouldn't play (although this is better than the problems I had with their previous Real Player content which always seemed to kill my wireless router). I was told my version of F
