Monday 31 March 2008

Where to put pspvice on your psp

I'm running 3.90 M33-2. Make sure you have the 1.50 addition. PspVice goes in psp/game150. I use stylemo's excellent guide to upgrading.

now for a bit of C64 Kickstart pleasure

Sunday 30 March 2008

Flickr photos now in planetnomad

Flickr photos are now arriving in planetnomad.com. There's still some style settings to correct in regards to their size in the gmap marker htmlwindows but i'll fix that any day now. It's surprising how many photos are loaded onto Flickr without decent names or descriptions but nevermind, that's what ppl do.

Just like any other feed, e.g. Reuters News Service or Road Traffic News, users can set up to receive emails on new objects as they arrive in a certain area.

Tuesday 25 March 2008

Generating HTML emails using c#.net

This missed me for days. My code was generating html which i placed into the body of an email. Problem was that the html was appearing as, well, html rather as text even though i had set the content-type as text/html. Found out this weekend that i was missing a single line of code;

MailMessage.isBodyHTML = true;

fixed.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.net.mail.mailmessage.isbodyhtml.aspx

PlanetNomad accepts all UK road traffic data

Planetnomad.com now takes in all rss streams from the UK highway agency and maps them. I noticed the main rss feed didn't contain all the regional lower-graded road data and therefore was incomplete.

I now get a lovely email sent to me each morning detailing any trouble on my route into work.

Sunday 16 March 2008

New Line in c# Textboxes

Use: static string nl = Environment.NewLine;

Yes, a complete personal reminder.

Saturday 15 March 2008

Planet Nomad now receives UK Highway traffic feed

www.planetnomad.com now receives UK highways traffic data - detailing all problems on the major routes in the UK. If you're a registered user planetnomad will send you an email every morning listing problems along your route into work.

I'll be looking into SMS reporting soon. That would be rather cool for some. I generally check emails before txts so emails came first.

Sunday 9 March 2008

Installing MySQL ODBC Connector 3.51 on win64

There's no installer for this so the easiest way of installing is unpacking it to c:\Documents and Settings\User and run your Dos prompt. Once there run "Install.bat 0" and it'll work like a charm.

Thursday 6 March 2008

Replacing double quotes in VB strings

If you're forced to use VB and some of us occasionally you'll end up at some point wanting to get rid of the double quotes in a string. More as a note to myself this one but here's the help..

The way to do that is replace instances of " with "".
Sample code -

Dim str As String = "I ""love"" VB"
Console.WriteLine(str)
Console.WriteLine(str.Replace("""", ""))

now relax, job done, compile and move away.

What is Social Media?

My good friend Ruth has a piece on Social Media here. Well worth a read with plenty of references of how we're all exchanging info these days. Personally i use a pigeon. He's reliable and cheap to run on birdseed.

Tuesday 4 March 2008

Setting up an email server at home on a dynamic IP address

Being a tight arse i was hoping for a free way of doing this but ended up paying a little to get this working. Here's the situation: i'm on BT broadband in the UK and all their dynamic IP addresses are blacklisted automatically. But i want to run a smtp server at home which will spit out emails once a day to users of my beta site: www.planetnomad.com when they request it.

I purchased a Mail Outbound service (from dyndns.org) and Postcast Professional Server - $15 a year and £48 respectively. Postcast allows you to enter a Smtp gateway server which will act as a hop to get your emails out there. Dyndns gives you the server details and once entered you can create emails and send them to your heart's content.

www.planetnomad.com is a google map app. that will send out emails to users notifying them of new information in a specified location. For me, i've got it sending out emails detailing new stories from Reuters news service that occur every day in Europe. To try it yourself just register and set up a favourite view.