Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know!

I received a call from my wife as she was leaving the hospital. She attempted to describe exactly, and in great detail, exactly how the consultant extracted a sample from her wrist to biopsy. All the time I was yelling at her, “Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know!”, but she pressed on with great glee. I guess she decided that if I couldn’t share the pain, then I was at least going to experience it mentally.

I’m not going to attempt to describe what is actually wrong with her wrist but it does sometimes swell to a disturbing size and cause great discomfort to her, so she has got it looked at and it looks like it will require painful and debilitating surgery.  She will likely lose the use of her right hand for a number of days which will make things a little awkward for all of us.

My part in this to do more housework, apparently. She always says I need to do more housework, which I never feel is fair as I do a fair bit of tidying and cleaning, loading and unloading the dishwasher, making the beds and dealing with the rubbish and recycling, and I am the one with the full time job. However, this time she means I need to do nearly all of the housework, which is understandable really.

It’s a bit worrying really, as should my wife be unable to do much with her right hand, she is going to find looking after out kids difficult, which means I may need to take time off work to help out. Unfortunately, we live in a small maisonette and cannot afford short term child care on only one salary. My wife works part time with variable hours.

Anyway, it did mean I had to take today off, so I was able to watch Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire with my daughter who has just finished the book, my wife insists she reads the books before the movies, and then I was able to attack the kitchen.

We have lived in this house for about seven and a half years and have put up with a small and messy kitchen for all of that time. My wife  complains that it is messy because it is small, but I suspected that it is messy because she doesn’t throw anything away. Three bin bags full of out of date food from the cupboards have proved me vindicated in that assertion. It is still a mess but at least we have more space in the cupboard to hide it in.

A miserable New Years Day

We were supposed to be going for a walk in Richmond Park this afternoon but just as we were about to leave, my wife mentioned it was raining. Now, being the eternal optimist, I assumed it was that dreary kind of drizzle you usually get so when  my daughter said she wanted to go anyway, I said I would take while my wife would stay with my son, who absolutely hates rain.

When I say walk, what I meant was that we were walking but my daughter wanted to ride her bike. I am a bad father because I still have not gone out with her enough on her bike for her to remove her stabilizers. She’s eight. So I went out the back door to get the bike and found it tipping down. Cue apologies and sobbing.

So now we are all dressed up with nowhere to go. Brilliant start to the New Year.

The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon

I have been absolutely blown away by the first two episodes of Doctor Who this year.

First the killing of The Doctor in the first ten minutes which seemed inconceivable until his younger self appeared giving him a couple of hundred years to prevent his own death (even if he doesn’t know about it yet).

Then the new “monster”. How inspired! A creature who you cannot remember but can still influence your behaviour through a kind of post hypnotic suggestion.

And a little girl being kept alive in a space suit. The same girl who is seen in a photo of Amy Pond (who may or may not be pregnant). And when she does get out of the suit, instead of dying, she regenerates!

Not forgetting the triangle between The Doctor, Amy and Rory. And who is River Song? She is obviously involved with The Doctor in some way after planting that kiss on him.

Unfortunately, by posing all these intriguing questions Steven Moffat seems to have opened himself up to the criticism that his episodes are getting too complicated. Poppycock, I say.

The basic plot was easy to follow if you ignore the series arc elements. The answers to the unanswered questions will come at the appropriate time and will be quite apparent in context, of that I have no doubt.

You only have to look back at the classic series to see how they wove complicated plots over the course of up to four, and sometimes six weeks, and this is what Moffat is reintroducing, a reason to watch next week’s episode.

If there is one criticism I do have, it is that these two episodes have gone very dark and the rest of the series sounds like it may continue in a similar vein. I like a little bit of dark drama but dark does not equate to better. Doctor Who also needs its lighter side to remind us that the universe is also full of joy.

Next week’s episode looks to be a return to a simpler plot structure which will please some. It still looks rather dark in both senses of the word.

Mice, teeth and telephones

I had a dentist appointment today. My previous appointment had been cancelled due to it being booked under the “wrong dentist”, which was discovered at the time of the appointment. It wasn’t a totally wasted trip as I had been booked with a dental hygienist beforehand anyway, but it would have been a little awkward to admit to my boss that I had taken a couple of hours out of the working day to have my teeth cleaned. I had to pay £45 for the privilege of having my gums bled and being taught to use dental floss.

Today was the day they were going to remove a large part of tooth and replace it with something that looks vaguely similar, but before that there was a mouse to dispose of. It wasn’t dead. We don’t believe in killing cute little creatures just because they inadvertently started sharing our living space. Well, we didn’t until my wife found a huge hole nibbled into a new pack of bagels. Now it’s war. Yessiree, that is probably the last mouse to be chauffeur driven to a patch a green area well away from our house and released where, I’m sure, it made a beeline to the nearest occupied building before dying a hideous death in a snap trap, or eaten by owl. Good luck to the owl who wants to eat this one though, what emerged from the trap was rather wet and bedraggled. My normal method of checking if the trap has an occupant is to shake it gently, but I think this mouse was of a rather nervous disposition and consequently, had urinated and defecated liberally inside. After I looked inside the trap, I just threw it into the nearest bin; I would not be needing it again anyway.

After the dentist visit, which turned out rather a straight forward affair, after the tribulations of the previous visit, I returned home to wait for the cable guy to come and fix our telephone line. It had been crackly ever since it was first installed and then we discovered almost two weeks ago the dial tone had disappeared. The first email was responded to after five days with a message that it looked OK to them. After buying a cheap phone to verify to was not our current cordless phone (which is wasn’t) and the realisation that we still got a dial tone from the unused BT socket (thus rendering the need for a second phone redundant as a test), I emailed them back saying, no, it’s definitely you. And now we have a working phone with no cracking. So that was a result.

An odd day for turning 41

Yesterday was my birthday. I am now 41. Odd that birthdays have become such non events nowadays; I think my kids were more excited about it than I was.

It was an early start as my daughter was going to Littlehampton and had to be at the school at 8:15am. As that is the time I usually leave for work, it made sense for me to take her. However, not much time for opening cards and presents, so that would have to wait.

After work, I came home to pizza and potato wedges and a shop bought cake, in the shape of the TARDIS. I was pleased to note that it had Matt Smith as the Doctor and was a Victoria sponge, my favourite type of cake.

For my presents I received a cushion with a Dalek and R2D2 embroidered with a heart  between them, which was a little bizarre, and a Wii game called Family Trainer which included a dance mate although none of the games appeared to be dance games. I also received a box of chocolate brazils, which are my second favourite chocolate only beaten by Ferrero Rocher. The Ferrero Rocher are a guilty pleasure as I am certain they are not really marketed towards someone like me, i.e. male.

My daughter was apparently felt sorry for my pitiful pile of presents and decided to make me another from a couple of pieces of paper: a cushion and a paper Doctor.

The evening was rounded off with a rather pedestrian episode of Smallville.

I gave up an iPhone to give my kids bicycles

I made a decision. I will stop buying things I can’t afford. It sounds so patently obvious but we all do it, stick it on the credit card and pay it off later, only how many of us do? I know I’ve used my credit card telling myself that I will pay it back after I get paid, but then something else catches my eye and so my credit bill increase almost imperceptibly until suddenly I am paying two hundred pounds to pay off the minimum payment. Well, no more. If I want something I will now do the very old-fashioned thing called saving.

So, there’s this new iPhone coming out (you might have heard of it) and as I am near the end of my current phone contract I thought, I would like that very much indeed. My wife has a (quite frankly old-fashioned) iPhone 3GS which I have been rather impressed with so, with my new resolve, I started saving figuring that I could afford to buy one within a few months.

In the meantime, my daughter’s bike situation was coming to a head. She is six and a half and has yet to have a bike. My wife bought a wreck for a fiver over a year ago which then lay neglected outside out back door. When eventually we tried to get the thing roadworthy, we found we could not get any stabilisers to fit. So we turned to Freecycle , which is a noble endeavour, and found someone willing to give us their old bike, which turned out too big and also difficult to put stabilisers on. (Still she will grow into it.)

Out of desperation, as she really needs to learn how to ride a bike sooner rather than later, I bought them two new bikes. A 16″ purple girls bike for her and a 12″ red and blue balance bike for our four and a half year old son.

I think I will be waiting a little longer for my new iPhone.

Cable madness

We’re joining the 21st century and getting Virgin cable. Sure we’ve had digital terrestrial for a long time, from when it was known as ONDigital, but now we’re truly entering the realm of stupid amount of channels.

I actually decided to take the plunge because I was getting increasingly frustrated with my Internet connection dropping randomly and the mythical 8Mb max speed was slowly dropping to below half that.

Of course, if you take their broadband you have to take their telephone and you might as well get the TV, and the upgrade to all channels from the basic line-up is just over a tenner, so that all makes sense. In fact, the pricing is such that taking anything but all three services is actually more costly.

So I have to cancel my existing ISP, losing an e-mail address I’ve had for years which seems rather sad. Fortunately, we keep our telephone number.

Another option, which is really an essential for us, is a multi tuner hard disk recorder. We’ve had two Freeview one’s and I really can’t imagine doing without now, so we’ll be getting a V+ HD box. Which offers the additional benefit of High Definition (and 3D apparently!). Just a shame our 32″ HDTV is looking a bit poorly with a three vertical dark bars; sometimes you can barely see them and other times they’re glaringly obvious. (Also, neither analogue and digital internal tuners appear to work, not that we have much use for them).

All this brings me to the subject of cabling. Our TV is fixed to our (unused) chimney breast. I made a hole in the wall to pass the cables through so they are not visible and it has worked well so far. But I became worried about connecting the new box as I think I’ve already hit cable capacity.

Connected to my TV at present is: an aerial, DVD player and Freeview recorder via SCART, PS2 via component, Wii via composite and PC via VGA. And now I need to add HDMI and the hole just isn’t big enough.

I did think about getting a component switch box and connecting it to the DVD player and Freeview recorder using a conver; the cables seem reasonably cheap. Then I spotted that for the cables to work, the SCART must be capable of output component in the first place. Neither Freeview recorder not DVD player do, it is a pretty old DVD player now. There are SCART RGB to component converters but these are too expensive.

So I think I will be losing the PC connection, I don’t think I’ll have much use for it now anyway.

A cold office day

Great start today. Got into the office, looked at the nursery thermometer I keep on the desk and saw it was reading 14ºC. So a little chilly. Turns out a massive power outage knocked out the heating. It’s now mid afternoon and the office is a little more reasonable.

Anyway, I’ve restarted this blog and I’m going to try to make short regular updates to it. Well, they say third time lucky.

See? I did it again!

Last blog post 19 days ago, so ignore that Coming Up post I posted because they are no longer coming (or, indeed, be up). (What the hell am I talking about?!?)

Quick update, had lovely two holiday from week but back to work tomorrow.

There. Done.

Alternate Access Mappings in SharePoint, what’s the big deal?

I’ve been involved in a project where SharePoint is hosted by a third party and consists of two front end servers and a back end database server. This site is accessed by a typical Internet style address, https://myapp.companyname.com. Do you spot something that might by caused confusion yet? Yes, it uses https. But that’s not the real fun part, as when it goes through the third party’s load balancer it gets turned into http://myapp.companyname.com.

This caused much teeth gnashing and anguish as this results in all the links from SharePoint being prefaced with http and the the load balancer is only capable  of translating some of the links back to https. So some links were prefaced with http and others with https. Fortunately a solution was at hand, Alternate Access Mappings!!!

Reading various blogs and articles gives the impression that this is deeply complex function of SharePoint but in fact it is simply a method to ensure all links point to the correct URL. In my case we needed to make sure that all our links started with https.

Now this is where I start to talk about zones. Zones enable us to access the SharePoint site from different parts of the network.

When the web application is created, the entered URL is  used to access the site by default. Unsurprisingly, this URL is entered into the Default zone as the public URL. And all is fine and dandy. But what if the site can be accessed by a second URL?

In most cases, you may simply wish to redirect this second URL to the standard public URL. This can be done by entering it as an internal address to the Default zone and now, when the second URL is entered, all the links returned will be translated to the public URL. And that’s all there is to it.

Our site was being accessed by the public address https://myapp.company.com, (well, obviously, not really, but in that format) so we realised this needed to be the public URL. But the incoming request was to http://myapp.company.com, which was not recognised by SharePoint. Adding  it as an internal URL in the Default zone caused all links to be translated back the the public URL and suddenly we had a fully operation site.

Unfortunately we hit another snag. We wanted to add an additional dedicated search indexing server but were unable to access the site using the default public URL from within the hosting companies own network. Alternate Access Mappings to the rescue again!

We needed to use an internal URL to access the SharePoint servers but if we simply added that URL to the Default zone, it would just spit the public Internet address out. We needed another zone.

The names of these zones are irrelevant, although they are conveniently named so it would be churlish to put an intranet address in the internet zone. We chose add the new Intranet URL to the Intranet zone as the public URL.

What this means is that a request sent to the intranet URL is now classed as in the Intranet zone and consequently, the public URL for the Intranet zone will be returned.

And that is that.

The are other advantages to separating your SharePoint site into different zones with their own unique URLs, you can tailor your content according the zone, for instance, offer the complete site to an Intranet address but a more limited access to the extranet, or Internet.

I shall have to look at that in more detail some time.