Richard – RichardFawcett.net

Microsoft Family Safety on Windows 8

Before I get started, yes, I admit it. I am quite a Microsoft fanboy. Apart from Internet Explorer, of course. But for me to put pen to paper and sing their praises publicly means that I really like something. Last night, I created a user account on my Windows 8 machine for my daughter. “Is this account… Continue reading Microsoft Family Safety on Windows 8

Review of Pimoroni’s Pibow Timber

I got myself a Raspberry Pi last Spring, played with it a bit, and then put it away back in its packaging, in a drawer, where it has languished ever since. I think the problem was that as it’s a bare board, it’s not really practical to leave it out. So, last week, I decided to get… Continue reading Review of Pimoroni’s Pibow Timber

ServiceStack JSON Deserialization vs DataContractJsonSerializer

I used to have this horrid piece of code to deserialize a license stored as JSON: Along came ServiceStack.Text, and now I have this beautiful one-liner: Or using an extension method ServiceStack provides results in even clearer code: The simplicity and elegance of this just blows me away. What were Microsoft thinking when they came up… Continue reading ServiceStack JSON Deserialization vs DataContractJsonSerializer

Act While the Window is Open

An eloquent way of saying ”carpe diem” … The lessons of history would suggest that civilisations move in cycles. You can track that back quite far – the Babylonians, the Sumerians, followed by the Egyptians, the Romans, China. We’re obviously in a very upward cycle right now and hopefully that remains the case. But it… Continue reading Act While the Window is Open

jQuery Event Binding – OMG What Happened to live()?

One idle Tuesday, I decided to update jQuery from version 1.8.2 to the latest version, v1.9.1. I love new shiny things, and the jQuery team do a consistently awesome job of bringing new performance improvements with every release. So, just change 1.8.2 for 1.9.1 in the CDN’s URL, and I’m good to go, right? NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!… Continue reading jQuery Event Binding – OMG What Happened to live()?

Investigating How MongoDB’s “Majority” Write Concern Works

Introduction I’ve recently been studying an online MongoDB course from 10gen, the developers of MongoDB. MongoDB is a NoSQL database which offers a ton of features, including replica sets with automatic failover. This isn’t a beginner’s HOWTO on MongoDB; for that, head over to mongodb.org and hit the “Try It Out” button. Instead, the article… Continue reading Investigating How MongoDB’s “Majority” Write Concern Works

Using URL Rewrite in IIS7 to have all Requests Handled by a Script

In my post last year about setting up Mercurial on IIS, I left it as an exercise for the reader to allow it so that index.py could be left out of the URLs. As an example, we want to be able to write http://myserver/myrepo instead of http://myserver/index.py/myrepo. Enter URL Rewrite! The easiest way to get… Continue reading Using URL Rewrite in IIS7 to have all Requests Handled by a Script

Just Installing VS2012 Can Break VS2010 Websites

Last week, I installed Visual Studio 2012, to play around with new features. We’re probably not ready to move our production code to VS2012 yet, but I just wanted to see what’s new. I should probably have installed it in a virtual machine, but hey, this is a well tested, production ready Microsoft product …… Continue reading Just Installing VS2012 Can Break VS2010 Websites

Estimating Effort

A few years ago, a former manager of mine taught me a valuable lesson about estimating the time it will take to complete a task in order to best meet expectations. Having done a significant amount of estimation recently, it brought the thought to the forefront of my mind. The tl;dr version is: Guess how… Continue reading Estimating Effort