titaniumbunker.com

I have been ‘studying’ for an exam, and I’m glad to say I passed. The exam was the 70-480 Microsoft exam.  Interestingly I used the Microsoft Press Training Guide for this exam, and I have to say that I’m disappointed.  There are issues and flaws with this book that – quite frankly when you consider the price (£19) just shouldn’t be there.

Microsoft also seem to have radically changed the way that they do errata.  Visiting the Microsoft Press page for this book provides NO information about errata already submitted for this book – which is strange because I submitted an errata about a broken table of content through twitter – no mention of it there – and no further feedback…

https://twitter.com/MicrosoftPress/status/469161257849720834

I would have tried to fill in the errata submission form, but there’s a pesky bug in the book – it’s missing an ISBN number.  Way back on 21/05/2014 I received email confirmation from MS Press that they were indeed aware that there is no ISBN number for the ebook and therefore errata cannot be submitted for this book – but as of yet no response.  Given that ISBN is a required field for submitting errata, it must therefore mean that there can be no errata submitted for this book.  I predict we’ll hear nothing about any bugs or issues with this book, and MS Press will just quietly issue a 2nd edition.  Leaving all of us with this version of the book with the option of paying to receive mostly the same book again.  Then again I have been wrong before.

Now the web page for this book does give 2 numbers next to it, so maybe they’re supposed to be the isbn numbers for the different formats of the book.

The apparent ISBN number for the Ebook (978-0-7356-7433-2) does seem to validate using isbn-check.de, and gives instructions to search amazon for this ISBN number .

so I did just that…

So – to be fair I tried picking a book off my office desk and searching for that ISBN number 978-1-849-90328-8.

It’s a match – so it would seem to suggest that this ISBN number is not registered properly, and the other ISBN does seem to find the paperback edition of the book.

Anyway – if you’re interested here are my comments on the book – These may seem confusing because I’m not able to provide any context about what I am referring to – the Copyright of this book prevents me from reproducing any part of this book without the permission of the publisher.

Mike  Jun 25, 2014 Technology, Uncategorized

I attended last year at the Novotel, Bimringham – this year, the venue was theStudio Birmingham. I’d like to say a big thank you to the staff at the studio, who looked after us for the whole of the Saturday – I’m happy to report that the facilities are excellent, the staff were great and it’s a great location. The wifi worked like a dream, and I was able to live post onto facebook all the talks that I saw. I’d suggest that if you’re a local company looking for meeting space that these guys may not be a bad choice.

I’d also like to say a big thanks to Quentin Wright  and the representatives of Floss UK

I proposed a talk about the Ubuntu Ebook template, but unfortunately due to time constraints I was unable to present.

Group Discussion on : NSA Security Stuff

There’s no photo for this, as this was a session that we sort of went straight into.  Given the current news articles about NSA security, and the abilities.  We tried to limit ourselves to 30 minutes – however with such a wide ranging and encompassing topic the conversation did (on occasion) meander towards very similarly related topics.  The conversation was ‘chaired’ or managed (if you will) by Tony Brookes, who had a history exposed to military security, and network ‘stuff’.

Mark Johnson on : OggCamp

Mark gave a very quick presentation about the history of the OggCamp un-conference.  There’s not much you can really say about it – hopefully lots more people know about OggCamp.

Ron Wellstead on : Software Defined Radio

Ron Wellstead – local Wolves Lug Hero, attempted to give a talk about Software Defined Radio.  unfortunately Ron had some issues with X and projector compatibility – Similar to the issue that Dave had during OggCamp 2013.  Ron had to abandon this talk, but popped up later.

Jon Knight on : Captive Portals (bumps in the wire)

In this presentation Jon spoke about how he put together sign in systems for wireless access points.  This system allows you to have an open network, but at the same time have some element of audit regarding the usage.  The basic principle is to use a multi homed system and use MAC based routing to identify devices, and then use an authentication system to allow that device to route through to the wired network, and hence the internet.  Jon mentioned chillispot as a potential project to use.  His system was based on the same principle, but also linked to ownership information stored in an external database.

Tony Brookes on : Qgis

This talk examined the package Qgis.  Rachel’s Father is a keen surveyor, and when he worked, did a lot with the local councils to analyse the local geography.  He was a mineshaft surveyor and has a hobby of plotting the historical mine shafts against the current modern maps.  This tool would be an ideal benefit for him, as he currently uses paint.net to trace and convert his maps.  I’ll be experimenting with this to see what it can do, and hopefully it might be of benefit for him.

Mark Johnson on : OwnCloud

Mark gave a talk very similar to this at OggCamp.  in this discussion mark spoke about the challenges he faced when setting up his own cloud, hosted on his own hardware – including the challenges associated with Dynamic IP allocation, port forwarding and cname records.

Ron Wellstead on : Software Defined Radio

Ron finally managed to give his talk about software defined radio.  The big takeaway for me was that the barriers to entry are getting lower and lower all the time.  It occurs to me that if someone wanted to set up a secure private network, that a radio based transmission network, where both ends are configured for encryption this might not be a bad way to go.  I wonder how Teresa May would deal with that?

Chris Ellis on : Postgress

Chris Ellis – who now works on conjunction with Transitiv Technology gave a talk extolling the virtues of postgress as a replacement to MySQL.

Some Guy  on : Samba

I had popped out of the room to get coffee,and when I popped back in this guy (sorry I don’t know who you are) was giving a talk Samba.  I was flagging at this point so I didn’t really get what was going on – something about LDAP?

Pete Cannon on : Podcasting

So that’s community curmudgeon and podcaster of the Dick Turpin Roadshow talking about how podcasting works.

Alex Willmer  on : Bitcoin

Alex gave a talk on bitcoin and how it works. I’d seen a similar talk to this before a couple of years ago, and Alex has now updated his slides to show the progression of time for the bitcoin platform.

Following that we all retired to The Wellington to chat about technology and ITand drink beer, and Chris and I (well mainly Chris) got lumbered with the wierdo on the train – which for once wasn’t me

Mike  Jun 14, 2014 Articles, Technology

Tipp-Ex

I’ve been working on the Ubuntu Ebook Template – first of all – I should say that progress is – well – progressing nicely.  The System now allows an MP4 audio book, along with an Ogg audiobook to be produced when ‘reading’ the book.

So I thought I’d try it out on something more substantial – Charles Dicken’s Oliver Twist.

Throughout this project, when I have wanted a couple of chapters to check how paging would work on a physical device (for example) I would load up the Project Guttenberg website, and copy and paste some of the text for Oliver Twist.

This evening I was looking through the text on Project Gutenberg, and I was surprised to see the following, towards the end of Chapter 11

‘D—n me!’ cried the old gentleman, bursting out with the rage he had kept down so long, ‘d—n me! I’ll—’

End of Oliver Twist Chapter 11

I was thinking that I didn’t think that Dickens would censor himself – so where did the changes come from?  Initially I had thought it an attempt to censor some of the language – however this doesn’t seem to stack up with the other uses of “Damn” in the rest of the text.  Instead I believe this to be a transcription error.  When the transcriber was typing up that chapter he was unable to read those two words, and therefore signaled this with -.

What’s also interesting is that searching for “Oliver twist d–me” using Google returns the following book provided by Google Play Books.  The same ‘censoring’ appears in this book also.

And then there was the copyright page. Oliver Twist was written by Charles Dickens in 1838, so I was wondering what the copyright claim at the front of the book was far.  The bottom of page has the legend “Copyrighted material”, so does this copyright claim extend to the text?

I was (and am) confused by this, so I emailed Sovereign to try to get some clarity.

Hi -

I found your Book : Oliver Twist in the Google play store here : http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=-ecFAwAAQBAJ&vq=d–&source=gbs_navlinks_s

 and I was just wondering if someone could explain the Copyright of this book?

So the book was originally published in 1838 by Charles Dickens, and the text for this book is available from the Project Guttenberg site here : http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/730.

On the inside cover of your book you state Copyright 2014 Sovereign.

• Can you clarify what your copyright covers?  I’m guessing it is the original content (Inspiring Books) that you added to the end of the book ?
• ISBN Number 9781910150641 doesn’t seem to validate as a valid ISBN number – I’ve checked
  • www.amazon.co.uk
  • www.amazon.com
  • www.Lookupbyisbn.com
  • www.isbn-check.comBut none of them seem to return that number.

Thanks

Mike Hingley

I hope to hear from them soon, and will write an update when I hear anything.

Mike  Jun 3, 2014 Uncategorized

I like cooking, so, when the muse takes me, I will often attempt new recipes.  I use an android App Called Bites to store recipes. The main advantage of this is that there is a companion app called Trolly which can read in the ingredient lists as a shopping list.

So far so good. However I have a whole bunch of free recipe cards that you can collect from outside supermarkets. and instead of them sitting on my bookshelves, taking up space or worse still, being thrown away without trying it, what would be great, would be if there was a way to get these recipes into Bites.

This is where SousChef comes in. SousChefis a windows application that will create recipe files in a format that Bites can understand. The way I tend to use it is to make the recipe file on my desktop and then mail it to myself. It will appear in the inbox on my phone which I can then open it into Bites.

This is a V1.0 release. I will be making alterations to the code ,  but right now it works

The main UI for SousChef

zesty prawns in BITES

more information about Bites can be found here

more information about Trolly can be found here

download

Dave  May 24, 2014 Android, Articles, Technology, TweetUpdate, Uncategorized

Had to buy…

Mike  May 22, 2014 Uncategorized

Table of contents seems to be missing from Training Guide: Programming in HTML5 with Javascript and CSS3 by Microsoft Press

At least books created using the Quickly Ebook template have tables of contents built automatically as chapters are added.

I’ve reported this issue to Microsoft Press -

@computa_mike In most cases, the TOC is hidden under the Go To menu. On Kindle Cloud, the book icon at the top is the Go To menu.

— Microsoft Press (@MicrosoftPress) May 20, 2014

Mike  May 20, 2014 Uncategorized

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-27407502:

Dave  May 15, 2014 Art, Technology, TweetUpdate

Today I experienced the combination of 2 of my favourite things - Humble Bundle and Dr Who.

That’s right – for like $15, you can get your eager hands of a veritable shedload of comics!

Mike  May 14, 2014 Art, Dr who