Knowledge server down…

Other companies might call them web servers… not Three.

Administrator  Sep 28, 2016 Technology

I’ve subscribed to a new podcast recently.  I go through periods of engagement and disengagement with genealogy, and at the moment i’m pretty engaged – probably because my Ancestry subscription is about to renew.

Anyway I received an email from Ancestry last week telling me that they had developed a podcast show with Tony Robinson, and that the first few episodes are available to download.  So I fired up my trusty podcatcher software – BeyondPod – and hunted around looking to subscribe –

The page for the podcast is here.

I thought I’d look at the instructions to subscribe to the podcast through this handy YouTube video that ancestry has thoughtfully put on the page.

But as an android user it seems that I had to download a podcast tool called Stitcher.  Really all I wanted was the RSS address – so I tweeted ancestry, as I couldn’t find the address anywhere.

@computa_mike Good to see you found the feed & thanks for letting us know about the missing mobile icon. We'll fix this pronto.

— Ancestry UK (@AncestryUK) September 13, 2016

I then browsed the site using a laptop, and lo and behold : RSS icon.  As Ancestry UK says – it looks like the RSS icon is missing from the mobile interface.

Viewing the page on deektop – RSS icon

RSS icon missing when viewing the page in mobile

I’ve downloaded the episodes – and I’ve listened to episode 3 so far on my way into work so far.

I did spot that there were issues with Tony’s script though – at roughly 25 seconds in :

“…It would be unusual to read anything about the drive for voting rights for women in Britain without seeing mention of the Pankhurst name.  That’s not just down to sisters Christabel,  Sylvia and Adela though. Their mother Emmeline was the founder of the women’s social and political union and she lead the British suffragette movement in the early 1900’s.  Their Mother Emmeline was the founder of the women’s social and political union and she lead the British suffragette movement in the early 1900’s.”

Looks like there was an editing issue with episode 3.  The audio quality for episode 3 certainly seems lower than the other episodes.

Nice touch though : Mark Hamil is in Episode 4 !!!

Mike  Sep 20, 2016 Podcasting, Technology

I’m currently doing research and revision for my 70-487 exam – Developing Microsoft Azure and Web Services.  I was doing some reading and I encountered some information about hosting WCF Data Services and OData.  It wasn’t something I had encountered in so far – so it has been an interesting and exciting prospect to look into.

I found a wonderful step by step tutorial into creating and hosting a WCF Data Service on MSDN, so I went through it.

First problem : I need some data.  I’m quite getting into LocalDB at the moment – I’m thinking about the possibility of creating a developer database through migration scripts – so that a developer could clone a Github repo and run the project.  The Database would be automatically created for them, and populated with sample data (if appropriate) – meaning that developers could run this project without a dependency on a database or fancy storage like that.

I managed to get the SQL Scripts for Northwind from codeplex – but with almost everything that Microsoft does these days being on github – going back to codeplex seemed old and outdated.

I followed through the instructions and ran the project.

OData seems to be very similar to REST – except that the url used are representative of the entity structure(rather than hiding behind controllers), and query like operations can be passed through to the server – giving maximum flexibility in terms of usage.   So – anyway… I ran my project from Visual Studio 2015.

Metadata from my WCF Data Service

And then this happened :

Customers can’t be downloaded?

Loading the Same OData service on Chrome reveals lots of lovely data.

Acessing the OData Service on IE does present data – which IE interprets as an RSS feed.

Requesting the OData Service is stuck at Pending

Accessing the OData Metadata on MS Edge does seem to return (response code 200)

Mike  Aug 24, 2016 Programming, Technology

I needed to sign the agreement for my home insurance – so I popped onto mypremiumcredit.com

Signing a credit agreement on PremiumCredit

I wanted to read the terms and conditions, so I clicked on the terms and conditions link…

Whoops – Now – that looks like JSON.

Will be letting the technical contact for the site know.

Mike  Jul 20, 2016 Technology

A display stand containing only things that cause long term health problems…. Cigarettes and Windows…. Cant help thinking that Oasis might have had more success with that instead of Cigarettes and Alcohol.

Thanks to roving error reporter Adam Cutler for this!.

Mike  Jul 11, 2016 Technology, This Modern Life

Spotted Anglia Ruskin University 9/7/2016

Dave  Jul 11, 2016 Technology, This Modern Life

Ohhh…blue screen of despair…

My pc is so sad….

My pc crashed …never seen a windows crash screen on windows 10 before

Mike  Jun 29, 2016 Technology

Just thought I’d pop this here. I’m working on a snap.svg application that allows the user to drag staff members between desks. I’ve got the dragging working, just need to figure out how to snap to elements.

Mike  Jun 23, 2016 Uncategorized

You don’t see a youtube 500 server error every day…

and if you’re interested – here’s the text of that error.

500 Internal Server Error

Sorry, something went wrong.

A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation.

If you see them, send them this information as text (screenshots frighten them):

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Mike  Jun 22, 2016 Technology