Andy's Techie Blog

Just spotted this article on the BBC news site.

The advert in question was about the new 3g version of the iPhone where the advert said it was "really fast"

I previously mentioned how this irritated me as 3G isn’t the fastest mobile speed available which the advert may lead you to believe so i’m quite pleased the advert has been dropped

Apparently only 17 people officially complained (I wasn’t one of them!)

Apple’s response was that the speed claims were "relative not absolute" and they were comparing the speed of the 2G iPhone and the 3G iPhone

The current iPod adverts annoy me as well to be honest

They show how easy it is to download and install a program from the Apple store with the demo on screen just being a few clicks

Right at the end of the advert there is a some text at the bottom of the screen which declares

"Some steps removed and sequence shortened"

Isn’t that cheating a bit?

Just plugging a couple of things

First up, SMB Nation Europe

I’m not the first person to have mentioned this but I was asked if I’d post about it to here it is!

The full details can be found on Harry’s Blog here but in summary,

Harry Brelsford, author of many fine SMB books (including SMB Consulting Pest Practices, which I blogged about here, and highly recommend) and Jeff Middleton, Swing Migration extraordinaire (again I’ve blogged about this, and also highly recommend it!)  will be in London to talk about opportunities around SBS 2008 and how best to do the migration!

Date is December 5th and as Richard mentioned since this is a Friday there will more than likely be lots of “socialising” afterwards

Second thing is Vijay’s post on the SBSC PAL’s site he recently posted about

Vijay is going to be looking after UK regional site and he has a lot of good ideas on the sort of content he’s hoping to publish.

Since it’s a community site all contributions are welcome so if you have any ideas or even just want to let him know what a good job he’s doing (lots of people don’t get anywhere near enough credit sometimes!) get over to his blog

The UK PAL’s site is here

Finally, if you haven’t already head just a reminder that this months AMITPRO meeting is on WEDNESDAY 12th NOVEMBER and will they will be hosting the SBS 2008 Launch Tour

If your not going…why not?

That is all!

Two SharePoint posts in one day!

I only recently “got” content types in SharePoint. I’m not exactly sure why I had such a mental block about it but the penny finally dropped and I got quite excited about the possibilities (I’m such a geek)

So what I wanted to do was create some content types to use in calendars

In the previous version of SharePoint I had a company calendar that I used to track everything from meetings, to on-site support visits, to holidays and sick days

Once single form to try and figure all that out. Very ugly and difficult to use

For example, if your going to a client site, the customer name, a contact and a ticket reference are all pretty useful pieces of information. But if I’m just taking a couple of days off those fields become very pointless

Enter the content type!

I had the bright idea to create a content type for each of these “event types”

I pretty quickly ran into a problem. When creating a content type it has to be based on a parent type and the EVENT content type was no where to be seen.

So I had a poke through the help files and it mentioned that you could hide content types by adding them to the _HIDDEN group. That seemed oddly familiar so I went to an existing calendar, ensured content types were enabled and found the EVENT content type specified for the list

By drilling down onto the content type I was able to get the parent content type (also called event) and where it showed the group as _HIDDEN

After that it’s a two second job to put it in your own group

But that got me thinking

“It must be hidden for a reason”

After some quick searches I came up with two other posts

This one basically details the same steps I’ve outlined here

Working with SharePoint events lists

and this one talks about doing by getting in behind the scenes and changing the content type by hand in the ctypeswss.xml file

Calendar Content Types in SharePoint 2007 – Blog

Neither of them really go into any detail about if this will cause any problems or if it’s even a supported configuration

My only thinking is to do with how the calendar interacts with Outlook? and if you start making changes it could break it? Though I’m probably completely guessing on that to be honest

But I’ve done it and I now have this and everything seems ok so i’m happy for now!

Though I may need to change the title for the sick day content type

I’m not exactly sure how important this annoucement is as i don’t class myself as a developer but over on Coding4Fun there is news on Microsoft releasing the source code for the upcoming release of the .Net  framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008

The idea is that you’ll be able to debug directly within the development environment by pointing Visual Studio to a “source server”

Scott Guthrie has a good post that shows how this will work

This caught my eye as i always associated Microsoft and source code with the impression of CDs delivered by amoured car followed by tons of paper work where you sign your life away and promise to keep it in an maximum security facility

Ok that’s a bit of an exaggeration but you get the idea.

I’m suprised that Microsoft hasn’t made more of a fuss about this but it’s good news for developers!

This isn’t a gaming blog but i can’t post about XBox 360 & PS3 without mentioning the Wii

When i initially heard about the Wii i thought it would be the end of Nintendo. No Hi-Def graphics, a gimicky controller?

How wrong was i?

I have to applaud Nintendo for trying to be innovative.

They have been very open about trying to attract people to the console who would really be into gaming

The greatest example of have is my good old dad

The kid next door had a Wii just after christmas. He saw it and had a go. Then went straight back home and ordered one.

When it arrived his brother, nephew and niece all tried it for themselves and have ordered one.

None of these people own an XBox 360 or PS3 or plan to get one.

So mission accomplished Nintendo

And the reason? It’s fun. Plain and simple

I visited my parents for a weekend recently and played Wii Sports to death (i’m awesome at Baseball!)

My only is concern is it’s longterm appeal. While my dad loves it at the moment is he going to continue buying games in six months? in twelve months?

I think Virtual Console we keep his attention for a while as long as they keep the content coming. He already downloaded R-Type!

I’m going to keep on open mind but i’m certainly interested!

Just though i’d post to say i’ve been ill for last couple weeks with flu type virus

I thought i was getting over it but feel terrible today….

be back soon

Turns out i’m not the only one going to the Nottingham event!

Going through my feeds at least two other people whose blogs i read are going

Eileen Brown will be delivering “A look at Exchange Server 2007 featuring manageability, scalability, consolidation of servers and end user capabilities including voice integration, unified messaging and digital rights management”

Vijay Singh Riyait (who uses the same wordpress theme as me :-p) will be going to both the events

I’m looking forward to it as i haven’t been to one of these events in some time

Interesting post over on The Furrygoat Experience (by Steve Makofsky) talking about his opinion on the apparent death of client side apps.

I’ve seen a couple of posts on various sites over the last twelve months or so on how they think all applications will eventually become web based. This may (or may not) be true but i dont think it’ll happen anytime soon.

As Steve mentions certain applications just work better on the client side. His example of photo editing is a good one and video editing, 3d rendering, audio editing / conversion are just some examples i can think of off the top of my head.

Web applications will become more powerful as the Web continues to mature and bandwith increases but i believe rich client side applications are here for a long time

No sooner had a posted about the issues i was having using Sonicwall firewalls with Internet Explorer 7 i received an email from Sonicwall with their take on the problem

Have a look here

To fix the problem they are going to be releasing new firmware for all their current (fourth) generation models

I was pleased to have received an official notice of this, even if it took a little while (how long was IE7 in beta for?!)

Only thing i find a little strange is their workaround until the firmware release

(1) remove IE 7.0 and downgrade to IE version 6.0 or

(2) use Mozilla’s Firefox as an alternative browser

They don’t mention anywhere the user agent string utility mentioned in my previous post

It’s not that important i guess as the firmware release will sort everything out…

No details though as to when the firmware is to be released!

** Updated on 19/03/2007 **

This has been fixed!

Read my new post here