Wikipedia cracks me up sometimes. I’m sat here at my desk, trying to knock together some C# code to quickly validate an entered string as being a UK postcode. Naturally I turned to this Wikipedia article for assistance, where I find this quip: “Automatic validation of postcodes on the basis of pattern feasibility is therefore almost impossible to design, and the system contains no self-validating feature such as a check digit. Completely accurate validation is only possible by attempting to deliver mail to the address, and verifying with the recipient.” ...

Many moons (and about four jobs) ago, a wise DBA by the name of David Hanson once recommended to me a book called Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Unleashed. I took his advice, bought a copy, and it rapidly became one of the most dog-eared and oft-thumbed computing books I have ever owned. It is comprehensive, deep, broad, well-written and covers everything one might ever wish to know about SQL Server 2000. With its help and guidance I came to love and respect Microsoft’s premier database product, passing the 70-229 exam by a comfortable margin. ...

I’m off to the MSDN Technical roadshow in Harrogate tomorrow, and am actually really looking forward to it this time. These events are free, so always well worth attending when they’re local, but some years are certainly better than others – it mostly depends on the material being covered. I remember one year circa 2003-4, when .NET was well established, but before the Whidbey release, so the majority of the day was effectively just a sales pitch covering elementary .NET concepts, presumably for those laggards who hadn’t yet made the great leap from VB6. Another data-binding demo, anybody? Yawn. ...

When I mentioned Edward R. Tufte’s excellent The Visual Display of Quantitative Information in a recent blog post, it prompted me to search North Yorkshire’s online library catalogue to see if they had any more of the great man’s works. I was delighted to find that both Envisioning Information and Visual Explanations were available, yet languishing in a storage room somewhere rather than being on the shelves of one of the county’s libraries! So, I placed a request and they turned up at my local branch a few days later. ...

Fifty-three years since Darrell Huff published the seminal How to Lie with Statistics, and still we have newspapers as august as The Times pulling the oldest trick in the book: At first glance it all looks very impressive, but closer inspection of the comparison with sales of the Torygraph reveal a mere 8.7% sales lead, not more than double as suggested by the graphic. Not fooled. ...

I keep intending, and forgetting to post a couple of videos from our US holiday last April. I suppose I was hoping to get round to writing up my paper notes from the holiday, but it’s becoming apparent that won’t happen anytime soon, so let’s skip forward to the funny bits: We spent a couple of nights at the Stratosphere Hotel in Las Vegas, which is the tallest observation tower in the United States. Atop the tower are three “thrill rides”, and I foolishly tried all of them whilst Jocelyn videoed proceedings from a safe distance. ...

I am now a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer in .NET 1.x technologies. This is a qualification that I’ve been working towards on and (more often than not) off for the past four years or so. It’s not really the case that the exams were super-hard, just that it took occasional motivation to get round to taking them! So, was it worth it? Did I learn anything en route? Did the exams boost my employability? Would I be more inclined to employ someone with an MCSD than an applicant without? ...

On this Remembrance Sunday, permit me to share with you a photo that my cousin Helen took this week of our Granduncle’s grave in France. Private William Henry Worfolk (1896 – 1916) of the York and Lancaster Regiment was my Grandfather’s elder brother (by four years), and was only just old enough to fight (and die) in the First World War. A couple of years later and it could just as easily have been my grandfather, and then I wouldn’t be here to tell you this tale. Ninety years on from that most bloody of wars, we still have much to be thankful for. ...

Late last night I reached a small but significant milestone in my family tree research: I now know the names of my sixteen great-great-grandparents! Or so I believe – I just need to wait for a couple of certificates to arrive from the GRO to prove my theories. So, who do I think I am? Well, at this stage it appears that my blood is: 50.0% English 37.5% Scottish 12.5% Irish Those sixteen ancestors were born between 1829 and 1860. ...

“INTPs are always so mentally active that they continually delve into new interests… The interests of an INTP would be enough to occupy him for several lifetimes if that were possible.” — A description of the INTP personality type, Paul James. I’ve been in need of a new hobby for a while now. The mental challenges offered from getting married, changing jobs and moving home have passed, and my free evenings and weekends were becoming prone to bouts of restlessness and sighs of “I’m bored”. This is not a good thing. ...

Having accepted that Returning DataSets from WebServices is the Spawn of Satan and Represents All That Is Truly Evil in the World (or at least, not exactly best practice), I’ve been trying to make a conscious effort to instead use lightweight custom objects in my middle tier, to be exposed via web services for use by other applications. I felt sure that some of the new Generic classes in the .NET 2.0 FCL would help me in my quest. Specifically, as I often need to expose simple arrays of Key/Value Pair metadata, I planned to create an instance of the System.Collections.ObjectModel.Collection class, containing a bunch of System.Collections.Generic.KeyValuePair objects. ...

As I mentioned last summer, I do enjoy whiling away a few hours attempting to solve the maths / progamming challenges set on Project Euler. My language of choice for most puzzles is C#, but this hampered me on some of the questions as there is no in-built support for really big integers. However, a little bit of Googling and I came across this excellent BigInteger class on Code Project which does everything I need and more – and it seems bloody fast, too. Thanks to this class, I’ve been able to knock off several more problems this weekend, and now have a rating of “11% Genius” – still some way to go, then… ...

I’ve recently completed a stint of jury service, which lasted a little over two weeks at York Crown Court. For obvious reasons, I can’t blog about the trials I was involved with, but it was a fascinating couple of weeks, and it would be a shame not to share some of the experience with you. Whenever I mentioned my upcoming service to friends and colleagues, their responses fell into one of two camps: either, “Ugh, I’d hate that! I’d really dread doing jury service!” or, “You lucky sod, I’d love to do that, but I’ve never been asked!” The thought of serving on a jury clearly polarises people, and I must confess, I felt a certain dread when I first received my summons. ...

On our first morning in California, we headed out to breakfast, which was preceded by a short session of Breakfast Prep’, courtesy of Jocelyn. It had been a couple of years since I’d last had Breakfast In America, and I’d forgotten how to respond to the awesome number of choices and options that would be flung in my direction by the waitperson. Here’s how you order breakfast in Britain: <td> “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_English_Breakfast">Full English Breakfast</a>, please.” </td> </tr> <tr> <td> Waitress: </td> <td> “D’you want tea or coffee with that?” </td> </tr> <tr> <td> Diner: </td> <td> “Tea, please.” </td> </tr> <tr> <td> Waitress: </td> <td> “OK.” </td> </tr> In due course, the standard, empire-forging breakfast is served, and is consumed heartily, perhaps after a little trading with your breakfasting companions (“I’ll swap you my tomatoes for a rasher of your bacon?”). Everybody knows what is expected, nobody has tricky decisions to make, there are no surprises, and everyone enjoys what they get – and if they don’t enjoy it, well, they don’t mention it, because complaining about such things just wouldn’t be British, damn it. ...

Monday 10th April 2006 The sun was still shining as we touched down at SFO, about 22 hours after we’d woken up. If every day could last that long, I swear I’d get more work done – or maybe I’d just spend more time playing Civilization… We picked up the car – a Pontiac Impala which initially seemed unfeasibly huge compared to our Focus, but it’s funny how quickly you adjust and get used to the size, making use of the available space – then it was off down US 101 on the final leg of our journey. Despite it being rush hour, we had a swift journey due to being able to use the Car Pool lane (by virtue of not being a single-occupant vehicle). I was amazed how under-utilised this lane was, and started wondering how much of an incentive would be needed for more Bay area commuters to start sharing rides – there’s another good question for the economists to ponder. ...