It seems UK manufacturers end up paying tax on components, but if they get the [...]]]> The exciting Raspberry Pi project is nearing fruition but it seems their attempts to boost the UK economy by getting the boards made over here has been thwarted by lead times and an insane tax law.

It seems UK manufacturers end up paying tax on components, but if they get the boards made overseas and then shipped over then that’s ok because they’re completed products rather than raw materials. Bottom line is that this insanity means that foreign outsourcing of manufacturing gets even more attractive.

So in these times of austerity it would seem the sensible thing to do to support UK manufacturing by lobbying for a change in those tax laws. We have a lot of manufacturing talent in the UK and we should be supporting it.

If you want to support a lobby on this issue there’s an e-Petition been set up to register your support at http://submissions.epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/27158

I’m currently coding [...]]]> Some of my colleagues have been applying the Pomodoro technique to their pair programming of late, so I thought I’d give it a try. I’m trialling a combination of tools which now integrates my Pomodoros more with my daily working life and I’ll set them out in this post.

I’m currently coding in XCode on a Mac so I discovered the Pomodoro app (available via AppStore or source code) which adds a countdown timer to my status bar at the top. It’s got a range of good features to it that brings it well above just being a glorified egg timer. The two features I’m liking the most are the GTD (Getting Things Done) and Calendar integration.

In the GTD section, the Pomodoro app sets my iChat status announcing my current Pomodoro and what time I’ll be done by. It automatically marks me as Busy during my Pomodoro and sets me back available afterwards and marking me as on one of my rest breaks. We’re using GChat more at work now so this is perfect because it can hopefully guide people who want to contact me on to the best time to do so.

In the Calendar section, I’ve set it up to log my Pomodoros to iCal. I’ve linked iCal to Google Calendar following a guide from Google’s help pages on how to use CalDAV to sync the two. I changed my Google Calendar’s notification settings to stop adding Email/Popup notifications for each Event by default. Before I’d done this iCal was alerting me to Pomodoros I’d already completed which was pointless.

So I can now embark on a fresh Pomodoro with a simple click or keypress, enter the description for the Pomodoro and know that my colleagues can see my current status and know that I’m tracking my own Pomodoro progress in my calendar at the same time.

I’ll let you know how the experiment continues, but at the moment it’s proving a positive way of focussing intently for a fixed period. The integration from using the Pomodoro app with iChat and iCal does provide a very immersive Pomodoro experience.

With an increasing amount of technology to help you communicate, the job of keeping your multiple contact lists up-to-date across these devices and services has mainly fallen to you.

Contact information lurks in many places and is often locked to serve one purpose. Whether it’s contact details in your mobile phone; on the [...]]]>

With an increasing amount of technology to help you communicate, the job of keeping your multiple contact lists up-to-date across these devices and services has mainly fallen to you.

Contact information lurks in many places and is often locked to serve one purpose. Whether it’s contact details in your mobile phone; on the address book in your email client at work or the list of friends you’ve built up on social media.

This post introduces Portable Contacts as a solution to getting access to these distinct collections of your contacts to avoid needing to duplicate them.

Importing leads to duplication

On-line services can often encourage you to import your contacts from other services so they’re available to use with their service. Making it easy for you to import contacts seems helpful as you can start to use your contacts in new ways. At the same time duplicating your contact information in yet another place means that the maintenance task to keep everything in sync increases. Importing contacts in multiple places can lead you to experience these services as separate ‘boxes’ instead of being really interconnected on the Internet.

Portable Contacts is an open standard which has a simple goal to

“make it easier for developers to give their users a secure way to access the address books and friends lists they have built up all over the web” – portablecontacts.net

Instead of forcing you to duplicate your contact information, Portable Contacts allows you to unlock your information and share it in a controlled and secure way. If your friends and family are stored in one place and your work contacts in another, if you could access them elsewhere via Portable Contacts then you only have to make edits in one place.

A secure way to share

A service that implements Portable Contacts uses OAuth to control access to any contact information to be shared. OAuth is increasingly used in services to allow 3rd party services to interact with them. Twitter uses OAuth to give you the choice of allowing other applications to ‘tweet’ on your behalf. Sharing contacts with OAuth also stops you needing to share the security credentials to get access to your contacts. Usually websites that offer to import your contacts on your behalf will blatantly ask for your username and password details which, for the ease of use, users freely share.

Easy to consume

Portable Contacts shares information via HTTP operations and supplies the information in either JSON or XML formats to applications which want to use them. This approach is widely used in modern APIs and makes the contact data easy to consume in many programming languages.

The Portable Contacts’ wiki page shows some of the services using the open standard at the moment. Since the driving force behind Portable Contacts, Joseph Smarr, now works for Google it’s no surprise that they have continued their support for exposing Google Contacts in this way.

There are a few libraries to help developers integrate Portable Contacts in applications: a Java library called jpoco and a Ruby client too.

Sociable

Another open standard, OpenSocial, is compatible with Portable Contacts. OpenSocial has been adopted by sites like LinkedIn, MySpace, orkut, and Yahoo!. As Joseph explains on the Portable Contacts website:

“The OpenSocial and Portable Contacts communities chose to wire-align our respective specs in order to maximize widespread adoption of a single API for accessing people data.” – Joseph Smarr

Portable Contacts might not be widely known yet but the opportunities to access your contact data without duplicating it is increasing.

The domain had previously shown as ‘Ready’ in the control panel and I was able to set the server and mailserver for them using 1&1′s nameserver.

The gotcha is that [...]]]> In the process of moving a .co.uk domain over to 1&1 for someone this week, I encountered the undocumented status code of ‘Domain Update Done’.

The domain had previously shown as ‘Ready’ in the control panel and I was able to set the server and mailserver for them using 1&1′s nameserver.

The gotcha is that during the ‘Domain Update Done’ status you can’t swap the nameserver settings. You can still get to change the A and MX records with 1&1′s Nameserver but if you wanted to point it to an external nameserver you’ll have to wait until this status clears.

The official word I got from 1&1 support says : “Domain Update Done status means that a domain is already on its last phase of propagation and normally, this will take 24-48 hours.”

So just be warned that if you want to change your initial settings when transferring a domain, you might get locked out while the domain is being finalised on your account.

Select / Read operations seemed to work fine but when it attempted to use an UPDATE method in a transaction, it [...]]]> I’ve been chasing problems with MSDTC today. We were trying to get one machines on a different domain to use MSDTC through COM+ to talk to a remote SQL Server on a different domain.

Select / Read operations seemed to work fine but when it attempted to use an UPDATE method in a transaction, it failed with an exception saying

COM+ was unable to talk to the Microsoft Distributed
Transaction Coordinator (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8004E00F)

The following information describes my eventual journey to success.

The first thing to try is DTCPing. I found a Microsoft Knowledgebase article that takes you through checking firewall permissions and checking the MSDTC ports. Get this working from both client and server ends first.

The second utility to try from Microsoft is DTCTester. There’s another useful Microsoft Knowledgebase article which takes you through how to run it. One thing I had to do before running this was create an ODBC System DSN entry from the client computer to the server for DTCTester to use. This isn’t how I was connecting to the SQL Server but was necessary to test.

In the midst of all of this the Distributed Transaction Service decided to crash and uninstall itself on the client machine. If this happens try the following on a command line prompt:

• msdtc -uninstall
• msdtc -install
• msdtc -resetlog

Check that the DTC service has been reinstalled and has the Network Service permission.

Running DTCTester.exe resulted in

tablename= #dtc29131
Creating Temp Table for Testing: #dtc29131
Warning: No Columns in Result Set From Executing: 'create table #dtc29131 (ival
int)'
Initializing DTC
Beginning DTC Transaction
Enlisting Connection in Transaction
Error:
SQLSTATE=25S12,Native error=-2147168242,msg='[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver]
Distributed transaction error'
Error:
SQLSTATE=24000,Native error=0,msg=[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver]Invalid cur
sor state
Typical Errors in DTC Output When
a.  Firewall Has Ports Closed
-OR-
b.  Bad WINS/DNS entries
-OR-
c.  Misconfigured network
-OR-
d.  Misconfigured SQL Server machine that has multiple netcards.
Aborting DTC Transaction
Releasing DTC Interface Pointers
Successfully Released pTransaction Pointer.

There were several other investigation paths which bore no fruit so I’ll just cut to the solution; one of which included creating a VPN tunnel from client to server.

I found a blog post after searching for the keywords “dtctester sqlstate=25S12″. One of the solutions was to turn the MSDTC security down to requring No Authentication instead of Mutual Authentication Required. This makes sense as the fact both client and server computers were on different domains, I suspect authentication requests from either end were failing because of this.

• Open Component Services (Administrative Tools -> Component Services)
• Expand the Component Services tree and the Computers tree to see ‘My Computer’
• Right click on My Computer and select Properties
• Select the MSDTC tab
• Click on ‘Security Configuration’ in the bottom left hand corner Transaction Configuration section.
• Change the Transaction Manager Communication from Mutual Authentication Required to No Authentication Required.
• Click OK out of all dialogs

Running DTCTester again now results in the following:

tablename= #dtc6875
Creating Temp Table for Testing: #dtc6875
Warning: No Columns in Result Set From Executing: 'create table #dtc6875 (ival i
nt)'
Initializing DTC
Beginning DTC Transaction
Enlisting Connection in Transaction
Executing SQL Statement in DTC Transaction
Inserting into Temp...insert into #dtc6875 values (1)
Warning: No Columns in Result Set From Executing: 'insert into #dtc6875 values (
1) '
Verifying Insert into Temp...select * from #dtc6875 (should be 1): 1
Press enter to commit transaction.
Commiting DTC Transaction
Releasing DTC Interface Pointers
Successfully Released pTransaction Pointer.
Disconnecting from Database and Cleaning up Handles

The application that had previously failed now works and happiness has returned to the land of MSDTC and COM+ (as much as the land of COM+ can be happy!)