HP/Compaq nw9440: the purchase, review, problems and solutions

In June 2006 I started working as a self employed software consultant. To mark this momentous occasion I decided to buy myself a shiny new laptop (as mentioned in an earlier post). After a reasonable amount of searching, including asking those I know who are knowledgeable about such things, I plumped for the HP/Compaq nw9440.

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Linkstation NAS Folder share with Windows Vista

I've just treated myself to a new laptop and one of the first things I found was that I couldn't access my NAS (Network Attached Storage) with windows explorer using Windows Vista Ultimate. Vista could see the NAS on the network but whenever I tried to access it I would get prompted for a password. However, I have no password set for accessing to the NAS. + = Why won't it work? So, after a bit of googling I came across a patch that updates a registry setting to allow Vista to navigate to network shares on the Linkstation NAS machine. I downloaded the patch for discontinued Linkstation because that's the model I have. Patches are also available for other Linkstation versions via the Buffalo download page. It's also worth noting that the best place for Buffalo downloads is the http://www.buffalotech.com/support/downloads/ url and NOT the http://www.buffalo-technology.com/support/downloads/ url. The first of the options seems to have more available; e.g. it has the patch for the Linkstation.

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.NET 2.0 Documentation Generation with Sandcastle

I've been aware of Microsoft's documentation generation system called Sandcastle for a while now but only recently have I had a chance to use it. With NDoc all but dead (see NDoc 2.0 Alpha) Sandcastle is now one of very few free alternatives that I could find to generate documentation from my coding comments. However, it did take a bit of searching and playing around to get things working.

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Report problems to your council with Neighbourhood Fix It

Rob of GIS Consultancy fame recently sent me a link to a website dedicated to tracking and fixing of neighbourhood problems. The Neighbourhood Fix It website is a great idea and it actually works. I reported the dumping of a load of newspapers and leaflets outside of our flat that were just waiting to be set on fire. That same day the Edinburgh "Rapid Response Team" had been out and picked up the papers and leaflets. Neighbourhood Fix It must have a mapping of post codes to councils and automatically inform the council of any reports in their jurisdiction. The site has been developed by mySociety who aim to "give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives". I think that Neighbourhood Fix It is a great piece of work and a great example. Read more on the launch of Neighbourhood Fix It.

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England Goals

With the reasonable success of Bring Back Beckham! I decided to push forward with my next project. The idea behind England Goals was to create a site that lists all the goals scored by the England football team and use the increase in the number of goals that can be found on external video sites to my advantage by embedding these user uploaded videos as content.

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Bring Back Beckham!

Back in October 2006 I had an idea for a website. I tend to come up with a variety of ideas for things, most of which I add a .com to the end of. This time my idea was based around the fact that the England football team were in terrible form having drawn 0-0 with Macedonia and that Steve McClaren, the England manager, was refusing to pick England's, and the world's, most recognised footballer, David Beckham.

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Mapping APIs

Mapping APIs have been around for ages now and all the big guns (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft) have thrown their hat into the ring.  You can even get a Google maps plugin for wordpress plugin to allow you to easily put a map in your blog. Wow, it's Edinburgh There's even an API that allows you to switch between using all three - but it doesn't look like it's been updated in quite a while. All these examples exploded onto the scene but haven't really made any major advances, that my naked eye can see, for quite a while. Why is this? Is it that they are as good as they can possibly get? Or is development stagnant for another reason? Maybe it's lack of data! Whilst people are forever creating mashups of this on top of that with a little bit of the other thrown in the unfortunate thing for me is that there hasn't really been anything that has blown my mind since the very early days of DHTML maps. Somebody please prove me wrong! Maybe it's time for the OS to start setting the data free so that people can actually benefit from the high quality data without paying through the nose - then maybe we'll see some great UK mashups.

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How much is your domain worth?

I came a across a fun little tool that estimates what your domain is worth. Microsoft.com was worth over $24,000,000 but Leggetter.co.uk was only worth only $36! Give it a go and see how much your domain comes in at. Enter Domain Name:

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Get Windows Temporary Directory

layout: post status: publish published: true title: “C# - Get Windows Temporary Directory” author: display_name: Phil Leggetter email: “[email protected]” url: “https://www.leggetter.co.uk” author_email: “[email protected]” author_url: “https://www.leggetter.co.uk” wordpress_id: 8 wordpress_url: “https://www.leggetter.co.uk/2007/02/02/get-windows-temporary-directory.html” date: “2007-02-02 10:25:48 +0000” date_gmt: “2007-02-02 09:25:48 +0000” categories: Technology tags: “C# Snippets” .NET Software Development “C#” permalink: /2007/02/02/get-windows-temporary-directory.html —

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