Other the past week I've still been blogging but I've decided to host my own blog using .text. Since I'm no longer a student, or in education :'(, it's time for me to venture into the big world of the intraweb as well as the working life.

I've added the few people I could find again on theSpoke whose blogs I regularly read to my newsgator aggregator but I know there are alot who I've missed out. I shall still be back to theSpoke, commenting on some blog entries by people and will keep an eye out for the API when it's released to play around with.

My new blog can be found at http://blog.lukesmith.net/ (http://blog.lukesmith.net/Rss.aspx) where I will be blogging about 'gadgets, geekness and all things randomness'.

It's been fun spokedom!
Luke

well not yet, i'm still waiting for o2 to announce it. I've heard october

Danny Wallace, the former flatmate of Dave Gorman, has set up his own country. He's had a tv show over the past several weeks about how he's gone about doing it. With over 30,000 citizens signed up it's coming ever so closer to beating China.

Check out the website. If your still not convinced then the National Anthem should hook you in.

Citizen LordMarmite

The bank holiday weekend just gone I went to the Reading Festival. The time of year when 60,000 rock lovers congregate on the outskirts of Reading to drink beer, listen to music and I'm sure take other substances.

I'm becoming quite the festival veteran, now with 4 consecutive Readings under my belt. Each festival has been a completely different experience. This years was more laid back and relaxing, maybe because I'm getting old.

Compared to the previous years where I was camped a million miles away from the arena entrance this year we were camped within a 5 minute walk, no 45minute treks with the hordes of people returning to their tents.

Some of my highlights of the weekend included saying 'choo choo' everytime a train went past the festival site, seeing Puggy playing on the Carling Stage, getting a nice tan on my arms, funeral for a friend rocking a sunny sunday afternoon, and having Charlotte Hatherley look at me (she also looked at the rest of the audience). The sunday night finale was Iron Maiden, after a 23yr absence (before I was born). These guys are absolutely amazing, they have certainly topped the list of the best live acts I've ever seen. They have so much energy on the stage, considering they are getting on abit.

I'm already considering buying some of the advanced sale tickets for next years festival. Get in there early since Glastonbury isn't being held in 2006.

The new site is looking good but I'm annoyed with several things. Firstly the list of spoke users whose blogs I subscribe to has vanished and secondly it doesnt appear that comments left on posts were migrated to the new version.

For nearly 3years I've owned the domain names abaxus.com/.net and somehow came into ownership of .info. All remaining blank with nothing there...until a few weeks time if I get around to it.

Anyway on with this post...

Since my time playing around with TCL a year ago I thought it would be 'cool' to create my own scripting language but I just never knew where to start. Then the other day I was required to fill in specific sections of a template with values. So went about and within 1-2 hours had something working. I sat back and admired my code and thought 'yuk'. So created the whole thing again, neater and in .net v2. The new language name, well since I have the random Abaxus domain, is abaxus.net.

Here's a peak at what it can do for you.
Take the string "hello! today is $(DateTime.Today)" and pass that into the parser and you get "hello! today is 12/12/00 blah blah blah" but without the 'blahs' and the correct datetime.

Within the Abaxus library there are (well currently only the DateTime class exists with Today but more will follow) a number of prebuilt Macros that can be used. These wrap around the CLR classes.
You can also create your own custom classes which can be accessed from Abaxus. Currently by adding an AbaxusClassAttribute to the custom class and an AbaxusPropertyAttribute to the properties you want made available you can then access these class properties (useful for static properties).
For accessing variables a variable can be registered with Abaxus parser by calling the implemented interface method RegisterAbaxusClass(). Giving the variable a unique AbaxusName (say "usrBob") this variable can then be accessed from Abaxus, $(*usrBob.FullName).

After I get back from Reading Festival I shall work a bit more on the library, adding more prebuilt classes, as well as making it possible to create a new instance of an object from within the script, eg $(*usrBob=User) and allowing the setting of property values. Once this is done I shall make the assemblies available to people who want to play around with them. I'd really like to obtain some feedback on this idea. I hope to at some point add some more powerful features such as statements. But for now I think its really useful if you need to parse a template document and fill in the blanks.

I was reading some of the comments of a post by scoble about the new Google Desktop application.

When will we ever see people like MSN/Google/Yahoo finally get around to releasing finalised versions of their products instead of just adding the word beta at the end. Im beginning to want something final instead of a new beta which is radically different to the last and which the last never made it out of beta.

Due to the numerous problems I'd been having with my previous webhost I decided to search for a new host. This time I decided I'd go state side, mainly due to the better deals for your buck. So taking the recommendation from Mike Bright I signed up with WebHost4life. From the experience so far i'm extremely impressed with the package I signed up for and the extremely helpful and quick support response.

For under $10 a month I have access to 2Gb of webspace, unlimited bandwidth, aspnet 1.1 and 2.0 beta. MySql and MS SQL databases. pop3/IMAP (great for keeping my emails in a central location now I have a tablet), easy install of a number of .net applications (community server, dnn and more), and sharepoint. The control panel allows far more configuration of your web applications than any other hosting Ive had before. And I can host unlimited domains using the same account (just have to pay a little bit extra if I want email on the domain). All around I'm very impressed.

Well 'Microsoft Luke' is now going to become a cult following online. I can only bet it will haunt me in the years to come, but oh well...enjoy

by sending her a video, song etc made by you of what makes you stand out from the rest. Unfortunately I didn't make it, but the content is about me, so I sent an email with links 'Microsoft Luke', both wmv and extended mp3.

Some of my loyal blog readers may remember i posted about MSN Virtual Earth and Google Maps a while ago, linking to a difference in the placing of 'Lamp Post Pizza'. Well I logged back onto virtualearth just now and it amused me to see where lamp post pizza is.

Oh and Pat they seem to have fixed the scroll wheeling on virtualearth now

Tablets are great. I’m writing this while not at my desk – unfortunately not at 30,00ft like most people say they are, instead I’m heading west on the M4 back to Swindon. And since I’ve got nothing else to do while be chauffeured I thought id write about my experience with Pluto (my new Toshiba Tecra m4).

 

I’ll start at the end and work my way backwards. The conclusion is it’s a brilliant piece of kit, go buy one! If you don’t want to read the pro’s and con’s I’ve saved you reading the rest, otherwise keep going.

 

My first impression was it wasn’t as heavy as people made out; either that or I’m stronger than I thought. Sure for use as a predominant slate tablet it’s probably a bit too heavy but for laptop uses its fine.

 

I’ve read else where that the screen suffers from a lot of glare when outside. Currently with the sun in front of me I can just make out the screen (I am still using the protector sheeting which isn’t helping).

 

Unlike the Tectra’s they ship in the states my Tecra hasn’t suffered from any spamware. Having read Eric Macks’ blog I was awaiting a 2hour cleanup before I did anything with it. The only preinstalled software is the Toshiba tools. The networking utility is superb; showing the in range wireless access points orbiting around a central point, the nearer to the center the stronger the signal.

 

The screen is easy to rotate and responsive in slate mode.

 

The keyboard is comfortable; once I get used to the positioning of some of the keys (windows key in the top right corner!) things will feel a lot more natural.

 

Battery life seems reasonable, Toshiba claim just over 3hours, and I’ve not had any complaints with it. A software tool bundled with the tablet allows a huge amount of control over the device settings, changing the most common battery life eaters so you can customize how you work. Some presets include DVD mode, full power, and battery use.

 

If you have a tablet I highly recommend downloading the Microsoft Power Toys and Education Pack (even if you’re not a student). I just wish I had ink equation editor when I actually needed it.

 

I’ve not done any performance tests, figures don’t really interest me. But so far I’ve had no problems, Visual Studio 2005 beta2 ran perfectly. I’ll let you know how Football Manager 2005 runs when I get it installed.

 

Using Microsoft SyncToy allows you to synchronise, echo, and merge folders and files between two location/machines. I’ve got this set up to synchronise my favourite’s folder as well as my Outlook data folder. I wish there was something built into Outlook to do this, since when copying the changed files it’s still a big data file that needs to be transferred.

 

Pros: Nipple and touchpad mouse (suits everyone), good speakers, Toshiba software, no spamware, high/clear screen resolution.

 

Cons: Screen isn’t so suitable for outside (in sun) use. Produces a lot of heat when charging and being used.

If anyone who reads this also reads my MSN name each day then they will know that over the past two days its been changing, alot like a Delivery Tracking order system. Today it is 'Tablet PC arrives in Swindon'. Within the hour this will be changed to 'Tablet PC arrives in Reading'.

I wasn't expecting it to arrive so quickly, we ordered it Sunday evening and it was dispatched Monday morning. And because it's my birthday tomorrow, the big 21 (geez I remember when I was iccle going to my cousins 21st birthday) my parents are coming up to take me out for a nice meal, as well as bring the Tablet up.

I spent all my months earnings, and the next months and a bit on this beast. The 'beautiful' and rather weighty, Toshiba Tecra M4. I'll get some photos up and a review when I can be bothered but first ill be eating pizza and playing.

I've not posted many techie entries in the past, i've done alot of cool stuff at work over the last 4 weeks I really should get around to blogging about but it's one of those things where I don't seem to have the time in the evenings when I get home. 

A taster of what I've done; used the horribly documented Office PIAs to create an app that manipulates excel spreadsheets - extracts a range of columns from a source sheet and a target sheet, the user then links the source columns to target columns and a new spreadsheet is automatically generated. Saves alot of time from doing it by hand. I've also been working on a intranet portal, playing around with the AJAX.NET wrapper. If you havn't given this a go then I highly recommend downloading it. It's also made me play around with some javascript, which I've never done before.

Anyway down to the reason of this blog, and as the title says. I've found an annoying bug/quirk in VS2005 beta2. When playing around with the dataaccess it appears the .Add method doesnt appear in intellisense, annoying! Type the following code into vs2005 and check the intellisense for the cparams, Add doesnt appear. It's also the same in several other classes.

On another note, the font settings in vs2005 are great :)

SqlParameterCollection cparams;

// insert command parameters
cparams = deleteCommand.Parameters;
cparams.Add();

Check out NASA TV for a live space walk