What’s on your desktop background? Some bland corporate logo perhaps, or maybe one of the bog-standard Windows wallpapers, or maybe a photograph you took years ago? Let’s face it, when was the last time you changed your background? Wouldn’t it be great if you could specify a few keywords and have your background periodically change to show a new image courtesy of Flickr? Say, a sunrise, a mountain, a wintry scene, a favourite holiday destination, or, well, whatever takes your fancy? ...

It’s over a month now since Visual Studio 2005 officially RTM’d, and during that time I’ve been fortunate enough to have been using it for the majority of my time on most working days. One of the things we’re trying to achieve is the integration of several distinct internal corporate web applications into a bespoke portal system, with single sign-on, common authorization model, common look and feel, etc. There’s been quite a heavy R&D / proof-of-concept aspect to the workload so far, as we try out different ways of achieving this, and grow familiar with the new technologies available to us in ASP.NET 2.0. ...

Ah, I do enjoy beers by the Wychwood Brewery, who have a particularly good website (i.e. better than most of the brewery sites I’ve come across so far). Hobgoblin is an obvious favourite, easily available from any supermarket worth its salt. Today I sampled their Whirlygig ale, a 4.5% “frenzy of hops and malt”, which really is delicious. Lots of flavour, lots of character – very enjoyable indeed. This one goes into the “buy again” column. Jocelyn didn’t get a look in, so I can’t give you the female opinion, sorry. ...

Rosey Nosey by Bateman’s Brewery has a deceptively cutesy name, but it turns out to be a really decent-quality ale with plenty of flavour and a pleasing warmth. If you have to buy one festive-themed beer this year, you could do much worse than this one.

Another day, another beer. It’s a hard life. Mars Magic is a rather unexciting 4.6% ABV “Premium Ale” (it says here) from the Wold Top Brewery. Noticeably lacking in anything resembling a head, it did however seem to improve as I progressed through the half-litre (funny how that happens). So, with my whistle well and truly whetted, I’m off down the pub. Cya! Oh, I nearly forgot to record Joce’s comments on the bitter. It went something like: “Eurgh!” ...

Wednesday night’s tipple was the rather strange 5% ABV Kronenbourg Blanc, from UK brewing giant Scottish & Newcastle. Described as a “refreshing, fruity white beer”, this is in fact blatantly piss-coloured (which probably explains why it comes in an opaque bottle). I found this to be more reminiscent of a weak cider or some kind of bizarre citrus alcopop than anything deserving to have the word “beer” on the label. Still, try everything once except Morris Dancing and incest, as the saying goes. ...

A return to form today, with the vase of fate serving up a helping of Riggwelter, the Black Sheep Brewery’s delicious 4.7% strong Yorkshire ale. I could drink this till the cows come home. Or perhaps that should be the sheep, for (according to the bottle) the name Riggwelter comes from the Old Norse rygg meaning to overturn. “When a sheep is on its back and cannot get up without help, local dales dialect says it’s rigged or riggwelted.” ...

Today’s festive ale is the Teignworthy Christmas Cracker, a strong (6% ABV) dark and warming malty bottle conditioned ale from deepest Devon. Um, it’s OK, certainly tastes weighty and, well, worthy, but it isn’t really to my taste – it has a very strong aftertaste yet is lacking in any interesting fruity flavours. There are plenty of other things I’d rather drink before picking this. Jocelyn says: “Damn, I’ve dripped it on my top, I’ll have to wash this now.” ...

Another superb ale tonight, and this one is close to home. Nightmare by the Hambleton Ales microbrewery in Thirsk is an extremely creamy, fruity, and flavoursome stout—not as bitter as you might expect from its appearance. Very tasty—I’ll definitely be buying this again.

Third Time Lucky! After two days of novelty nonsense, the vase of fate finally served up a half-litre of Harviestoun Brewery’s 4.8% masterpiece, Schiehallion, named after my all-time favourite Munro. Here’s an interesting fact for you: the mass of the Earth was first measured in 1774 when the Astronomer Royal, one Nevil Maskelyne, spent four months mucking about on Schiehallion with pendulums. By observing how the mountain’s bulk caused the pendulums (pendula?) to swing away from the vertical, he was able to estimate the mountain’s mass and extrapolate from this to calculate our planet’s mass at 5,000 million million tonnes—which is a pretty reasonable estimate, if you ask me. Based on that work, it then became possible to determine the mass of all the other planets, their moons, and even the Sun itself. All of which rather puts my own summer’s evening stroll up Schiehallion in 1998 into perspective, enjoyable though it was. ...

Well, this evening’s advent beer couldn’t be more different from yesterday’s. I had the dubious pleasure of sampling Crazy Ed’s Cave Creek Chili Beer, all the way from Arizona. Be warned: the website dates from 1999, and boy, does it show—we’re talking Comic Sans in a scrolling tag, framesets that have a tendency to get confused (try clicking the “home” link), and a 53-kilopixel JPEG weighing in at an astonishing 232 KB (why?!). Seeing those “Netscape Now!” animated GIFs makes me all nostalgic for the twentieth century… ...

This is surely one of the best ideas I’ve ever had! I’ve followed through with my plan to buy twenty-four beers from around the world to count down the days until Christmas. Their names are all written on slips of folded paper in a small vase (nobody actually draws things out of a hat anymore, do they?). Today I’m enjoying Young’s Christmas Pudding Ale, which is 5.5% ABV according to the bottle but only 5.0% according to the website—don’t believe everything you read on the web, eh? ...

Here’s a damn useful piece of information which should be in the armoury of every modern codemonkey: In Java, if it is required to round up the result of dividing m by n (where m and n are integers), one should compute (m+n-1)/n Source: Number Conversion, Roland Backhouse, 2001 I’ve used this deliciously elegant result in production J2EE code in the past, but it’s equally valid in C#, as long as you can make the additional assertion that m/n is positive. This is because whilst Java treats integer division by rounding to zero, C# merely truncates the result (in an unchecked context). In my experience, the most frequentuse for this result is the deft answering of questions such as “if I have x items in my dataset and I display y per page, how many pages do I have in total?”, where it is obviously safe to make the assertion of a positive result. ...

Some days I feel like I’m spitting in the wind. It amazes me that the following ten concepts, websites and applications aren’t more widely used: RSS Feeds – why waste your time repeatedly trawling dozens of sites looking for new content? Let it come to you! Flickr – practically everyone I know has a digital camera, but still relatively few have a Flickr account. Share your photos, don’t keep them unseen on your hard drive! GMail – by far the most effective web-based email. FireFox – if only for the tabbed browsing. But really, it’s so much nicer than IE6, and a myriad of different extensions are available. OneNote – so much better than scraps of paper. Desktop Search – I don’t care which desktop search program you use, but please install one! You’ll find it so much easier to find old emails and other files. del.icio.us – access your bookmarks anywhere, and share them with friends. ClearType – if you have a flatscreen monitor, you should turn ClearType on. Period. Virtual PC – there’s no need to test beta software on your main machine, or keep several differently-configured computers around the house any more! SyncToy – this is a great little app for synchronizing and backing-up folders; it’s really useful for combining media folders, and for synching files with a portable hard drive.

Isn’t it funny how one’s tastes change as maturity progresses? I used to spend my summer holidays at the sea-side, playing in arcades and seeking the perfect milkshake (lime); more recently I’ve been spending them in the highlands, playing on the hills and seeking the perfect dram (lagavulin). Hmmm… I think I may have mentioned that the wife is away in the States for a while. At the start of this period of solitude, I panicked, wondering whatever I could do with myself, and came to the conclusion that it would be a good idea to buy a computer game to while away the hours. After all, I spent much of my formative years killing time on a variety of computer and console games, so why not rekindle that prior love affair? So it was that I bought The Sims 2, a truly excellent game, and had an enjoyable evening trying to motivate my wee Sims to improve their skills, better themselves, and generally enjoy life. All good harmless fun. ...