Direct links to all DevDays’09 videos

I’ve created a list of direct links to the videos taken at the DevDays’09 in The Hague. The list was created by parsing the devdays session timeline. Unfortunately Silverlight is needed to watch the videos, and many videos are still not uploaded

Thursday

• The Azure Services Platform: A Perspective
• The Microsoft Application Platform: A perspective
• What’s new in WC/WCF 4.0
• Building Line of Business Applications with Silverlight 2
• C# 4.0 / The Future of C#
• Fastest To Market: RAD Web Applications with ASP.NET Dynamic Data and Entity Framework
• How to leap over the parallel chasm: Using the Intel® Parallel Studio to develop, test and tune parallel code.
• Taking Efficiency One Step Further - F#
• Web Content Management with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 
• Web Services Interoperability using WCF and Project Metro
• Power training: Creating Responsive Pages by Using Client-Side Technologies
• Compu’Train: LINQ
• Lunchsessie: mooi, snelle gebruikersvriendelijke….
• Whats new in Silverlight 3 part 1
• Visual Studio IDE Tips
• Future directions for Microsoft Visual Basic
• Attack and defense: Securing ASP.NET applications
• A Lap Around Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team System 2010 Team Foundation Server
• Production debugging of ASP.NET applications
• SQL Server Spatial data types
• Administration revised: Policy based management
• BizTalk 2009 & ESB Guidance 2.0 gebruiken in een Event driven Architecture
• Power training: Administering and Customizing Process Templates in Team System 2008
• Sogeti: Visual Studio Team Architect Extensibility
• Introductie Design by Contract in .NET
• Claims-Based Identity: An Overview of “Geneva”
• De Ultimate Windows 7 Overview
• Building Better User Interfaces
• Declarative Database Development
• ASP.NET AJAX 4.0
• Building Activities in Windows Workflow 4
• Getting your code to run faster than your competitor: Tuning your parallel applications using the Intel® Parallel Amplifier
• Application Lifecycle Management voor BizTalk Ontwikkelaars
• Koffie verkeerd? Interoperability tussen Java en Azure .Net Services
• Power training: AJAX & Single Page Interfaces
• TamTam: Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS)
• TDD and SOLID, two ingredients for high quality software
• Whats new in Silverlight 3 part 2
• Introducing .NET Services: Moving .NET to the Cloud
• Tasks and Threading in .NET 4.0
• Navigating through the hypes, Software architectures and patterns to help avoiding your projects to crash.
• Rule the World with the .NET Micro Framework
• Creating Location-Aware Applications for Windows Mobile Devices
• Dynamics NAV 2009 Web Services en .NET gebruiken voor integratie van NAV met CRM en Sharepoint
• Building reports the easy way: Reporting Services 2008 
• Power training: DSDM voor kleine projecten
• Achmea IT: Sharepoint intranet voor 22000 medewerkers. Standaard of maatwerk?

Friday

• Codename “Dublin”: Windows Application Server
• Development for Windows 7
• Windows Azure for Architects (1)
• How LINQ Works: Visual Basic 2008 Deep Dive
• Test Essentials 2010: The year of the tester
• Functional Programming in C#
• Expression Web - No Platform Left Behind
• Boost LINQ Productivity using a DRY Custom LINQ Provider
• Building a Social Computing platform with SharePoint
• SQL Server Kilimanjaro
• Power training: AJAX & Single Page Interfaces
• PDS: Windows Installer & Customactions (met Installshield)
• Mesh IT: Make your application’s data available anywhere and anytime.
• Building Controls in Silverlight 2
• Getting Started with .NET 3.5 in SharePoint
• Data Visualization and Dashboards
• Introduction to Claims-Based Programming and the Geneva Framework
• Pimp my workflow! Moving from WF 3.x to 4.0
• Unified Communication Development
• Building RESTful services with the ADO.NET Data Services
• Improvements in Windows Server 2008 and PHP 5.3 to make PHP great on windows
• Eliminate Build Breaks with Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team System 2010 Team Foundation Server
• Power training: Creating Responsive Pages by Using Client-Side Technologies
• Info Support: C# 4.0 New Features and Parallel Programming in .Net 4.0
• Lunchsessie: mooi, snelle gebruikersvriendelijke….
• Introducing the WCF REST Starter Kit
• Embrace Open Source on CodePlex
• An overview of the Oslo modeling platform
• Pimp Up Your SharePoint Site
• Make Yourself Rich with XNA
• From Concept to Production - Prototyping with Blend 3 & SketchFlow
• TFS 2008 Best Practices – 6 ways to ensure quality
• 10 Scenarios to call a WCF Service
• 5 Apps that work great on Windows
• 10 tips you can’t live without to build better Silverlight applications
• C# 4.0 New Features and Parallel Programming in .NET 4.0
• How Development is Done @ Microsoft
• Running outside the Cloud: How to use cloud services in your existing application
• Extending the Visual Studio 2010 enviroment
• Windows Azure for Architects (2)
• Beyond Silverlight with Windows Presentation Foundation
• Modeling that works with code
• IE8 en Web Standaarden
• SharePoint development wordt leuker met LINQ!
• Windows Server 2008, IIS and PHP applications
• WSS 3 Workflow Tools – Komt Vooruit met SharePoint Workflows
• Power training: Working with Web Services in BizTalk Server
• If you build it, you’ll ship it
• ASP.NET MVC Introduction
• When Testing meets the future
• The M language of Oslo
• WCF - Best Practices and Pitfalls Discovered
• ASP.NET Ajax Tips and tricks
• Surface Development
• Functional Programming in F#
• PHP and Silverlight
• Windows7 Application Compatibility
• Powertraining: Het gebruik van de .NET security features, Role-based security
• Creating a Web Desktop environment with Silverlight

Many of these videos can be downloaded from Channel9 in multiple formats

Greyscale Tweetie for Mac menubar icons

Tweetie for Mac has been released, a Twitter client with a simple, but still feature rich, user-interface.

Unfortunately the menubar icon uses a glowing blue icon to indicate new Twitter messages.

I’ve changed both icons to be greyscale and made them less heavy by making them an outline of the Tweetie dock icon. I’ve also added one pixel to their height to make it align better vertically.

Download the zip file containing both icon, copy them to

/Applications/Tweetie.app/Contents/Resources

and restart Tweetie to use these icons yourself.

Introducing www.sofinummer.com

In the first days of january Dreamhost ran a promotion where one could get two years of hosting for about 20 dollars on which I acted. As part of this package came a free one year .com registration. I used it to registrer www.sofinummer.com on which I intended to implement a tiny web application that can be used to generate and validate BSN/sofinummers

I have tried to keep the site as simple as possible. It shows an oversized text input field that is used for both validating and generating numbers and a message box that shows if the input field contains a correct sofinummer. After generating a number the contents of the input field are selected for easy copy/pasting.

Initially I wanted to use Ruby and learn a little about Sinatra and Haml. When I found out that deploying was quite hard I decided to rewrite it in Javascript.

The javascript has been split in two scripts. The first handles the user-interface and uses jQuery to add some event handlers and to show/hide the message boxes. The second script handles validating and generating numbers. I’ve implemented generating numbers by simply taking a random number, validating it and retrying if incorrect. In modern browsers Javascript is fast enough to make a few tries before arriving at a correct number and this has the advantage that the code is kept simple and that the numbers aren’t pulled from a skewed distribution.

I’ve used TDD and QUnit when creating the second script, and the test suite has really saved me a lot of times. To test the user-interface I’m thinking of using Selenium as I want to get some knowledge of it.

As dutch bankaccount numbers use almost the same check I’ve also registered www.banknummer.com to check bankaccount numbers that are 9 decimals large. Perhaps one day I’ll extend this to bankaccount numbers that are 10 decimals large, or to SEPA numbers

Grayscale Little Snitch Network Monitor

A great tool for Mac OS X is Little Snitch. It’s a tool that monitors all your applications network activity and lets you create rules to allow/disallow certain network activity.

It comes with a small menubar application, Little Snitch Network Monitor, that shows the current network activity. The menubar icon uses red and green bars to show the amount of download and upload. This choice of color conflicts with Mac OS X Leopards system wide use of grayscale menubar icons.

I’ve changed the tiff files used by Little Snitch Network Monitor to grayscale pictures to make it more inline with the rest of my menubar icons. To do this yourself copy the files from the zip-file into /Library/Little Snitch/Little Snitch Network Monitor.app/Contents/Resources.

How to create a md5sum of a partial part of a file

At home I have a NAS that holds all my media files. Next to residing on my NAS these files are also backed up to dvd. To be able to move these files around while also changing their filenames I needed an way to fingerprint these files.

As I only needed the fingerprint to match files to each other, not to validate their contents, and as the files reside on an external disk I though that using md5sum would be too much. So I’ve created a small shell script that creates a fingerprint using only the first megabyte of a file.

The script md5sum_partial:

!/bin/sh

FILE=”$1” MD5=head -c 1M "$FILE" | md5sum | sed -e 's/ -//' echo “$MD5 $FILE”

To recursively run it on an entire directory and send the output the STDOUT run

find . -type f -print0 |xargs -0 -IF md5sum_partial F

Restoring a corrupt iTunes library

After inserting an external hard drive yesterday, my iTunes library became corrupt. It apparently saw the external hard drive as the location of my music, something for which I indeed used the drive eons ago.

After disconnecting the drive I noticed that some newly added songs would not sync to my iPhone. I reconnected the external drive, checked the location of my music (which as I later found out is only updated after relaunching iTunes) and used the _File > Library > Consolidate _ . When I noticed that it was copying all my music to instead of from the external drive I canceled the process. And so I ended up with an iTunes library that thinks that my music is split between two disks even when all the music is still available in its original location.

I’ve quit iTunes and tried to fix iTunes library. iTunes keeps its music library in the file ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Library and also exports it the XML file ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music Library.xml. iTunes directly uses ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Library and will only reconstruct it from the XML file when this file is corrupt (if it’s simply deleted iTunes will start with an empty library).

First I’ve made a backup of ~/Music as these steps might make the problem even worse.

mv ~/Music/iTunes Music Library.xml ~/Music/iTunes Music Library.xml.backup

Corrupt the database by replacing it with some data, I suggest

echo ‘stupid iTunes’ > ~/Music/iTunes Library

Then replace all occurrences to the external hard drive with the original location. In my case the external hard drive lives at /Volumes/Music/Music and the original location was /Users/ckuijjer/Music

perl -pe ‘s@Volumes/Music@Users/ckuijjer@g’ ~/Music/iTunes Music Library.xml.backup > ~/Music/iTunes Music Library.xml

Start iTunes and wait for it to import the XML file

Now lets see if all my iPhone applications are still there and that it still syncs with my iPhone. Also updating Time Machine as I had it configured to skip ~/Music. Changing that to skip ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music, e.g. skip the music files itself, but please, please backup iTunes library.

Moving a NTFS Windows XP installation to a new harddrive

This weekend I’ve been trying to move Esther her Windows XP installation from a NTFS partition to a new, larger harddrive.

Initially I tried doing this using a Clonezilla live CD, by letting Clonezilla create an image of each partition (the Windows XP installation, the rescue partition, etc.) to an USB drive. Restoring the images to the new harddrive failed because there appeared to be some bad sectors on the old harddrive.

After this I used SystemRescueCd to manually clone the Windows XP installation:

• Create an image of the Windows XP partition (in my case the 2nd partition, /dev/sda2) using --rescue to ignore bad sectors: ntfsclone --rescue --save-image --output sda2.img /dev/sda2
• Replace the old harddrive with the new harddrive
• Recreate the partition table on the new harddrive. Apparently Windows will not (easily) boot if the partition number or starting sector is different. As the 1st partition was only 100 MB large, and Clonezilla already recreated the partition table, I’ll restore the image to the 2nd partition.
• Restore the image: ntfsclone --restore-image /dev/sda2 sda2.img
• The bad sectors are also copied to the new harddrive, but do not exist there. Reset the bad sector list using:
  • ntfsinfo -i 8 /dev/sda2 and write down the “Allocated size” close to ‘$Bad’
  • ntfstruncate /dev/sda2 8 0x80 '$Bad' 0
  • ntfstruncate /dev/sda2 8 0x80 '$Bad' "Allocated size"
• Reboot into Windows and check the harddrive for bad sectors (by right-clicking on the harddrive, Settings, TODO
• Reboot into SystemRescueCd
• Resize the partition to cover the rest of the harddrive
  • Start fdisk: fdisk /dev/sda
  • Set the display units from cylinders to sectors: u [enter]
  • Delete the partition (in my case the 2nd partition): d [enter] 2 [enter]
  • Recreate the partition: n [enter] p [enter] 2 [enter]. By default the 1st sector is the 1st sector of the deleted partition, and the last sector the last sector on the disk, so [enter] [enter]
  • Set the partition type to HPFS/NTFS: t [enter] 2 [enter] 7 [enter]
  • Set the 2nd partition active, so that it will be booted: a [enter] 2 [enter]
  • Write the partition to disk: w [enter] and quit: q [enter]
• Resize the filesystem to fill the enlarged partition (by default the filesystem gets resized to the entire partition): ntfsresize /dev/sda2
• Boot into Windows

Moving from Google Reader back to NetNewsWire

On my daily commute I pass some spots where my iPhones reception is flaky at best. As this leads me to staring into the void of Google Reader trying to fetch some articles, I really want to use a feed reader that downloads articles in advance. Next to this I didn’t really like Google Readers interface on the iPhone (too much unnecessary links on the frontpage and the fixed viewport makes long lines of code to be cut off) and can’t seem to recall why I left NetNewsWire in the first place.

When comparing Google Readers OPML export to an old OPML export from NetNewsWire I noticed that quite a few feeds appeared in only one of the two exports. After googling for a way create an union out of more than one OPML file, and contemplating to make one myself using the XML::OPML CPAN module I settled for the following workflow to find get the feeds unique to Google Readers OPML export

Creating an OPML export out of Google Reader can be done in Settings and then Import/Export

In TextMate

• Apply a regular expression replace to both OPML files. Replace .*xmlUrl="(.*?)".*|.* with $1
• Use the Filter through Command sort|uniq on both files and save them
• Select both files in the Project Drawer and apply a diff to the selected files
• To only keep feeds unique to the first OPML file use the Filter through Command grep '^-'
• Apply a regular expression replace replacing ^(.*)$ with <outline xmlUrl="$1" />
• Add <opml version="1.0"><body> to the begin and <body/><opml/> to the end of the file and save the file
• Import the OPML file in NetNewsWire and refresh all subscriptions

Now lets hope that the web interface to NewsGator is as nice as Google Reader

Edit: Hmm, just thought that I could also do this by importing my old NetNewsWire OPML, replacing the NewsGator subscriptions with NetNewsWire, removing all subscriptions from NetNewsWire and then importing Google Readers OPML and merging NetNewsWire and NewsGator. But where is the fun in that :)

Googling for my domain name

While googling for www.kuijjer.com I found out that the Did you mean result gives a lot of insight in Googles pervasive knowledge. It even has knowledge of my family relations and shows the last name of my mother :)

Adding Google Analytics to DotClear

To add the JavaScript needed by Google Analytics to DotClear I simply added a text widget using the Presentation widgets menu option.

Keeping the Title empty makes the script appear invisible, and dechecking the Home page only checkbox adds the script to every page.