Software engineer, NZ → UK. Notes on code, AI, and building a word game on the side.https://arunstephens.com/https://arunstephens.com/blog/credit-where-credits-due-but-what-about-the-devs/https://arunstephens.com/blog/credit-where-credits-due-but-what-about-the-devs/My team, along with a couple of other teams, recently released a new feature at work. This is a cause for celebration! The release was marked with some…Mon, 25 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/viral-times-at-hang-five/https://arunstephens.com/blog/viral-times-at-hang-five/It's been a busy week at Hang Five. I've written about this a little in the Hang Five newsletter (yes, there's a Hang Five newsletter, please subscribe) but…Fri, 26 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/some-stats-about-hang-five/https://arunstephens.com/blog/some-stats-about-hang-five/I thought I'd quickly share some stats about Hang Five. We are now at game #100. It's actually our 101st game, because we started at 0! In the past 100 days…Tue, 14 Nov 2023 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/introducing-hang-five/https://arunstephens.com/blog/introducing-hang-five/My wife Amy and I recently went to Indonesia on a trip around Bali, Flores and Lombok. Amy bought a few word puzzle books at the airport in Wellington. We…Mon, 28 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/will-metas-threads-be-successful/https://arunstephens.com/blog/will-metas-threads-be-successful/📅They seem to have brought the launch forward. It's now saying Thursday 11am NZT! On Friday at 2am (NZT), we'll get to see Meta's not-that-long-awaited…Wed, 05 Jul 2023 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/how-to-find-all-the-repos-that-reference-a-specific-contract-using-github-cli/https://arunstephens.com/blog/how-to-find-all-the-repos-that-reference-a-specific-contract-using-github-cli/If you work with a large codebase that spans multiple repositories, you might have encountered the problem of finding all the places where a certain contract or interface is used.Tue, 27 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/will-ai-kill-factual-writing/https://arunstephens.com/blog/will-ai-kill-factual-writing/We've been living in a post-LLM world for about 6 months now. Some are saying that the hype is dying down. Search trends for ChatGPT are dropping the same way…Tue, 27 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/exploring-native-aot-in-dotnet/https://arunstephens.com/blog/exploring-native-aot-in-dotnet/Before code written by a programmer can be executed by a computer, it needs to go through a process called compilation. It takes what a human (well, some of…Mon, 19 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/cheating-at-work-with-chatgpt/https://arunstephens.com/blog/cheating-at-work-with-chatgpt/My first recorded chat with ChatGPT was on 9 December 2022. I asked it to "Write a prequel to Humpty Dumpty". It was pretty good, telling me that: Humpty…Mon, 01 May 2023 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/switch-expression/https://arunstephens.com/blog/switch-expression/A recent introduction to the C# language is pattern matching. It was added in C# 7.0, which came out in March 2017, along with Visual Studio 2017 and .NET…Sat, 22 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/a-newsletter-journey/https://arunstephens.com/blog/a-newsletter-journey/Hi! I've decided to give the blog a revamp, and actually relaunch it as a newsletter. I'll be writing about software development and general technology things…Wed, 19 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/whats-new-in-net-7/https://arunstephens.com/blog/whats-new-in-net-7/.NET 7 was released a few months ago, and it brought many exciting new features. As a .NET developer, I am particularly interested in the changes that affect…Thu, 16 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/whats-inside-my-vaccine-pass-part-1/https://arunstephens.com/blog/whats-inside-my-vaccine-pass-part-1/When they were talking about how vaccine passports might work, I had an idea of how I’d make such a system. A QR code with some information about each person…Mon, 06 Dec 2021 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/why-does-docker-restart-all-containers-regularly/https://arunstephens.com/blog/why-does-docker-restart-all-containers-regularly/For as long as I can remember, every now and then, all my Docker containers restart. I had no idea why. I am running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial). I got the exact…Sun, 08 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/view-a-config-file-without-comments/https://arunstephens.com/blog/view-a-config-file-without-comments/Sometimes you have a config file that has is heavily annotated (which is great). But sometimes you just want to see the actual configuration without all that…Sat, 25 Jun 2016 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/importing-maildir-using-dovecot/https://arunstephens.com/blog/importing-maildir-using-dovecot/I’m looking into using Dovecot as a way to store all my old emails (I have emails going back 20 years would you believe!) Before I commit to it though, I am…Mon, 30 May 2016 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/re-signing-an-ios-app-if-provisioning-profile-or-certificate-expires/https://arunstephens.com/blog/re-signing-an-ios-app-if-provisioning-profile-or-certificate-expires/If you have an in-house app that you’ve distributed across your organisation as part of the iOS Enterprise program, you may find that the app stops working or…Tue, 26 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/setting-up-ssl-on-an-aws-elastic-load-balancer/https://arunstephens.com/blog/setting-up-ssl-on-an-aws-elastic-load-balancer/Here’s how to get an SSL certificate (from DigiCert) and install it on your AWS ELB. Step 1: Create the CSR SSL is a form of PKI (public key infrastructure)…Mon, 11 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/dos-to-unix-line-endings-with-bash/https://arunstephens.com/blog/dos-to-unix-line-endings-with-bash/This is a command that works in Git Bash on Windows to recursively replace \r\n line endings with \n. It uses Perl. There’s probably a version that uses sed…Fri, 11 Dec 2015 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/replacing-a-domain-name-in-wordpress-with-sed/https://arunstephens.com/blog/replacing-a-domain-name-in-wordpress-with-sed/I often need to do this, but always forget the syntax. So this is more for my reference than anybody else’s: sed 's/<OLD DOMAIN>/<NEW DOMAIN>/g' <INFILE>.sql >…Wed, 04 Nov 2015 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/samsung-s4-browser-slow-bad-performance-force-chrome-android/https://arunstephens.com/blog/samsung-s4-browser-slow-bad-performance-force-chrome-android/The stock browser on the Samsung Galaxy S4 (launched with the “Internet” icon) has notoriously poor performance, particularly with JavaScript. In my particular…Fri, 06 Dec 2013 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/core-data-validation-errors-appearing-twice-multiple-times/https://arunstephens.com/blog/core-data-validation-errors-appearing-twice-multiple-times/Stupid thing really. I’m using validation in Core Data for the first time. I have a managed object, it fails validation, which is good. I fix it, and save…Mon, 02 Sep 2013 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/what-can-i-do-on-windows-3-1/https://arunstephens.com/blog/what-can-i-do-on-windows-3-1/I installed Windows for Workgroups 3.11 over the weekend. Finally got networking up today. I’m writing this post from Netscape 3.0. I tried to install IE5.01…Tue, 08 May 2012 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/facebook-contacts-privacy-implications/https://arunstephens.com/blog/facebook-contacts-privacy-implications/There’s been a bit of news about Facebook’s new (or at least newly publicised) Contacts feature. The gist of it is that when installing the mobile app, you can…Thu, 11 Aug 2011 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/where-are-the-home-and-end-keys-on-a-chromebook/https://arunstephens.com/blog/where-are-the-home-and-end-keys-on-a-chromebook/I’m writing to you on my shiny new Samsung Series 5 Chromebook, which I was sent by Google after the Google I/O conference in San Francisco earlier this year…Thu, 11 Aug 2011 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/the-ovh-kimsufi-ubuntu-kernel-doesnt-support-nfs/https://arunstephens.com/blog/the-ovh-kimsufi-ubuntu-kernel-doesnt-support-nfs/That is kind of annoying. I am going to follow the instructions from http://neuro.me.uk/2009/09/20/revert-to-standard-ubuntu-kernel-on-ovh-or-kimsufi-servers/…Fri, 29 Jul 2011 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/odd-bug-with-inheritance-and-objective-c-synthesized-properties-with-solution/https://arunstephens.com/blog/odd-bug-with-inheritance-and-objective-c-synthesized-properties-with-solution/This is a weird one. I have a class. And it has a subclass. I kept getting error: 'psc' undeclared (first use in this function). Strangely, it would only occur…Thu, 28 Jul 2011 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/apis-and-dates/https://arunstephens.com/blog/apis-and-dates/Time for a rant. If you are building an API, whether it is for public consumption or not, you should make sure you communicate dates in an unambiguous way. You…Sun, 24 Jul 2011 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/facebook-asking-you-to-rate-places/https://arunstephens.com/blog/facebook-asking-you-to-rate-places/I just noticed this, not sure if it’s new or part of their A/B testing. They’ve got a box on the right hand side asking which of two places I have previously…Wed, 06 Jul 2011 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/core-data-not-returning-a-custom-concrete-class/https://arunstephens.com/blog/core-data-not-returning-a-custom-concrete-class/Ever had a problem when you’re fetching something from an NSManagedObjectContext, and you’ve set a concrete class in your model, only to find that it is an…Wed, 13 Apr 2011 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/temporary-nsmanagedobjectids/https://arunstephens.com/blog/temporary-nsmanagedobjectids/I’ve run into a problem where I insert a managed object into a managed object context, in a separate thread, and then return the object ID to the main thread…Tue, 08 Mar 2011 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/binding-not-implemented-for-this-sqltype-7-core-data-and-iphone-os-3/https://arunstephens.com/blog/binding-not-implemented-for-this-sqltype-7-core-data-and-iphone-os-3/*** Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSInternalInconsistencyException', reason: 'binding not implemented for this SQLType 7' That’s not something you…Sat, 05 Mar 2011 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/azure-full-iis-roleentrypoint-runs-in-different-process-to-web-app/https://arunstephens.com/blog/azure-full-iis-roleentrypoint-runs-in-different-process-to-web-app/I just found this one out thanks to this post from the Azure team. Basically, I was configuring Table Storage (as you may have guessed, if you’ve read my other…Sun, 16 Jan 2011 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/microsoft-windowsazure-storageclient-is-not-actually-on-azure/https://arunstephens.com/blog/microsoft-windowsazure-storageclient-is-not-actually-on-azure/And neither is Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Diagnostics. It’s ironic that the diagnosis of Windows Azure roles failing to start up is that the Diagnostics assembly…Sun, 16 Jan 2011 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/running-asp-net-mvc-3-on-azure/https://arunstephens.com/blog/running-asp-net-mvc-3-on-azure/If you have successfully installed an app running MVC 2 on Azure, and then try to upgrade it to MVC 3, you might run into some troubles. What might help is to…Sun, 16 Jan 2011 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/jquery-posting-arrays-and-square-brackets/https://arunstephens.com/blog/jquery-posting-arrays-and-square-brackets/This is old, but new to me. I guess it shows that I haven’t been doing a lot of front-end work lately. I am trying to post an array to a server, using jQuery…Fri, 14 Jan 2011 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/you-cant-use-google-analytics-on-wordpress-com/https://arunstephens.com/blog/you-cant-use-google-analytics-on-wordpress-com/I wish I knew this before I spent $12 on a custom domain for blog.zoopcast.com. You can’t use Google Analytics on a WordPress.com site. I think the advantages…Thu, 13 Jan 2011 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/azure-1-3-rewrite-faulted-servicechanne/https://arunstephens.com/blog/azure-1-3-rewrite-faulted-servicechanne/I recently updated to Azure SDK 1.3. Then I tried to debug my solution locally. This is where the trouble began. The problem was that I was using the IIS…Fri, 07 Jan 2011 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/images-showing-on-iphone-simulator-but-not-device/https://arunstephens.com/blog/images-showing-on-iphone-simulator-but-not-device/If you’re working on an app (Zoopcast, say) and you’re finding that images that you’ve got in your application bundle are showing up when you’re running in the…Tue, 04 Jan 2011 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/wcf-adding-trailing-slashes/https://arunstephens.com/blog/wcf-adding-trailing-slashes/I’ve run into some weird issues, which I’ve finally figured out, when building the Zoopcast web service, which will eventually become the REST API for Zoopcast…Thu, 09 Dec 2010 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/cllocationcoordinate2dmake-is-new-in-ios-4/https://arunstephens.com/blog/cllocationcoordinate2dmake-is-new-in-ios-4/I hadn’t done any Core Location work before iOS 4 came out. But now I am. And I ran into a very odd EXC_BAD_ACCESS bug when running on an iPod touch that’s…Sat, 27 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/nexus-one-update-trashes-twitter/https://arunstephens.com/blog/nexus-one-update-trashes-twitter/Here’s a weird one. I have just updated my Nexus One to build FRF83D. And the official Twitter app has disappeared. Completely. I had to reinstall it from…Mon, 22 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/to-three20-or-not-to-three20/https://arunstephens.com/blog/to-three20-or-not-to-three20/My answer, and one I wish I came to a bit earlier, is not to Three20. And the reason is this. It is a completely different architecture to the native UIKit…Fri, 05 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/facebook-places-has-launched-in-the-uk-the-end/https://arunstephens.com/blog/facebook-places-has-launched-in-the-uk-the-end/At the risk of turning this into a blog that’s exclusively about Facebook Places, I figure I should write a very short piece about Facebook Places actually…Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/is-the-international-facebook-places-launch-imminent/https://arunstephens.com/blog/is-the-international-facebook-places-launch-imminent/I hadn’t checked into my home office with Facebook Places for a few days, so I decided to fire up the proxy server and check in tonight. I was pleasantly…Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/facebook-places-in-london/https://arunstephens.com/blog/facebook-places-in-london/Right now, Facebook Places is only available in the United States. Well, that’s not entirely true. It’s only available to United States IP addresses. And they…Sun, 22 Aug 2010 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/new-server/https://arunstephens.com/blog/new-server/I just moved my blog to a new server. I also installed WordTwit, which is supposed to send blog updated to Twitter. And this is a test of it. And in theory…Tue, 27 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/really-not-looking-forward-to-travelling-ryanair/https://arunstephens.com/blog/really-not-looking-forward-to-travelling-ryanair/Apart from the early flight, I was taking a look at their cabin baggage policy: We reserve the right to cancel your reservation without refund and to deny you…Tue, 27 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/iad-in-the-uk/https://arunstephens.com/blog/iad-in-the-uk/In my (it seems) continuing series on things that work in the US but not in the UK, Apple’s new iAd network doesn’t seem to be serving ads to people in the UK…Thu, 08 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/google-com-from-the-uk/https://arunstephens.com/blog/google-com-from-the-uk/Today is 4th of July. There’s a Google doodle for it, but you wouldn’t know if you’re from the UK. Google.com is completely different if you are coming from a…Sun, 04 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/nexus-one-froyo-build-number/https://arunstephens.com/blog/nexus-one-froyo-build-number/I have been wondering what the actual build number of Froyo (Android 2.2) on Nexus One was. It is the FRF number that you can read under “About phone” in…Sun, 04 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/ubuntu-annoyances/https://arunstephens.com/blog/ubuntu-annoyances/For some strange reason, the Ubuntu people decided that the latest release should mimic Mac OS as much as possible. The default background is now purple…Sat, 03 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/fruits-of-the-iphone-posts/https://arunstephens.com/blog/fruits-of-the-iphone-posts/An avid reader of this blog (i.e. no one) will have noticed that lately there have been quite a few posts about iPhone development. Well, I am pleased to…Sun, 28 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/modal-view-controllers-and-recursion-causing-stack-overflow/https://arunstephens.com/blog/modal-view-controllers-and-recursion-causing-stack-overflow/Ironically, it was this post at Stack Overflow that helped me solve this problem! There appears to be a bug (either in the iPhone SDK or my understanding of…Thu, 18 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/openid-and-iphone-apps/https://arunstephens.com/blog/openid-and-iphone-apps/I am trying to find an OpenID implementation that is similar to the way that Facebook Connect’s login mechanism works on the iPhone. I can’t find anything…Wed, 17 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/skype-for-mac-mood-message-feed/https://arunstephens.com/blog/skype-for-mac-mood-message-feed/Why isn’t anybody writing about the “Mood Message Feed” in Skype for Mac 2.8? This version appears to have been out for a month now. I Googled it to see…Fri, 12 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/why-is-the-escape-key-labelled-esc-on-the-mac-keyboard-but-as-a-circle-with-an-arrow-pointing-out-of-it-in-menus/https://arunstephens.com/blog/why-is-the-escape-key-labelled-esc-on-the-mac-keyboard-but-as-a-circle-with-an-arrow-pointing-out-of-it-in-menus/I have reluctantly bought a MacBook Pro so that I can develop iPhone applications as well as Android, and was searching for this mysterious key so that I could…Fri, 12 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/entity-framework-4-many-to-many/https://arunstephens.com/blog/entity-framework-4-many-to-many/I had another problem with EF4 today. Code that worked fine in .NET 3.5 didn’t work after I regenerated the entity model using Visual Studio 2010. I found an…Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/1-0-or-1-relationships-in-entity-framework/https://arunstephens.com/blog/1-0-or-1-relationships-in-entity-framework/I came across this problem today when migrating a project from VS 2008/.NET 3.5 to VS 2010 RC1/.NET 4.0. I don’t actually think it’s a VS 2010 thing, though. I…Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/width-of-grouped-uitableviewcell/https://arunstephens.com/blog/width-of-grouped-uitableviewcell/I am working on some iPhone development at the moment. I have built a cell for a UITableView in Interface Builder. The cell was a bit too wide for the cell in…Sun, 07 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/tab-bar-and-navigation-bar-on-iphone/https://arunstephens.com/blog/tab-bar-and-navigation-bar-on-iphone/Today I am starting to write my first iPhone application. I have finally finished reading Neal Goldstein‘s book iPhone Application Development for Dummies…Sun, 21 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/seo-is-important-even-for-a-unique-name/https://arunstephens.com/blog/seo-is-important-even-for-a-unique-name/My company is called Zemobo. It has a web site, which is currently a very basic portfolio and has a little bit of information about the free Android…Sun, 24 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/using-the-android-accelerometer/https://arunstephens.com/blog/using-the-android-accelerometer/I am building my first real Android application. It is a Hindi flashcards application. It works already (in that it will shows the different Devanagari…Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/pngs-in-ie6/https://arunstephens.com/blog/pngs-in-ie6/My preferred way of dealing with IE6’s limitations on transparent PNGs is to use conditional comments and the AlphaImageLoader filter. This is because it…Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/annoying-spacing-problem-with-flash-objecttag/https://arunstephens.com/blog/annoying-spacing-problem-with-flash-objecttag/Not sure if this is SWFObject-related or Flash-related or tag in general-related, but I was working on a page today and in Firefox a 4 or 5 pixel gap…Tue, 14 Jul 2009 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/sky-in-the-uk-when-youve-only-got-one-satellite-feed/https://arunstephens.com/blog/sky-in-the-uk-when-youve-only-got-one-satellite-feed/So I recently moved flat and used to have Sky+ in the old flat. Sky+ (which is the same as MySky in NZ) needs two feeds from the satellite dish, so you need a…Mon, 30 Mar 2009 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/ajax-history-with-aspnet-ajax-10/https://arunstephens.com/blog/ajax-history-with-aspnet-ajax-10/If you are still using the original ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 release, you may be looking for a way to use .NET 3.5 SP1′s “history” feature of the ScriptManager…Fri, 27 Mar 2009 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/removing-the-send-feedback-link-on-windows-7-beta/https://arunstephens.com/blog/removing-the-send-feedback-link-on-windows-7-beta/I accidentally keep clicking on the Send Feedback link that appears next to the minimise button on Windows 7 Beta. It actually appeared in the Windows Vista…Mon, 02 Mar 2009 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/google-has-a-new-favicon/https://arunstephens.com/blog/google-has-a-new-favicon/In an attempt to get to the top of people’s blog search results (give me a job, I’m a web developer in London), I thought I would point out that Google has a…Sun, 11 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/making-your-own-virtual-machines-for-vmware-player/https://arunstephens.com/blog/making-your-own-virtual-machines-for-vmware-player/VMware Player is a free, cut down version of VMware Workstation which enables you to run virtual machines created with other VMware products. But you can’t…Sun, 11 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/vmware-server-20-using-your-own-ssl-certificate/https://arunstephens.com/blog/vmware-server-20-using-your-own-ssl-certificate/The default installation of VMware Server 2.0 uses a self-signed certificate for the web-based management console, VMware Infrastructure Web Access. (Notice…Wed, 24 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/cloning-vmware-machines-loses-network-connection/https://arunstephens.com/blog/cloning-vmware-machines-loses-network-connection/I have been setting up a whole swag of virtual machines to do my bidding. Ideally I would use ESXi but it doesn’t support my choice of server – my old laptop…Tue, 23 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/phone-fire-eagle-google-maps-high-tech-spy-tracking-system/https://arunstephens.com/blog/phone-fire-eagle-google-maps-high-tech-spy-tracking-system/Fire Eagle is a service from Yahoo! that gives you access to location information. It’s not very sophisticated. You tell Fire Eagle where you are, and then…Mon, 01 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/facebook-lost-some-data/https://arunstephens.com/blog/facebook-lost-some-data/I’m not sure how widespread this was, but I got an email from Facebook saying: Subject: Please reset your email notification settings. Unfortunately, the…Sun, 30 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/windows-azure-development-storage-with-real-sql-server/https://arunstephens.com/blog/windows-azure-development-storage-with-real-sql-server/I don’t have SQL Server Express, I’ve got the real deal. Development Storage for Windows Azure assumes you are using SQL Server Express with the instance name…Fri, 28 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/declarative-data-binding-on-user-controls/https://arunstephens.com/blog/declarative-data-binding-on-user-controls/I had this problem a few years ago and figured that there was no good solution, but I am older and wiser now so figured it’s time look for a better solution. I…Fri, 21 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/ssh-slow-to-login-disable-reverse-dns-lookup/https://arunstephens.com/blog/ssh-slow-to-login-disable-reverse-dns-lookup/By default in Ubuntu (and probably other distributions), when you log into the SSH server, it will do a reverse DNS lookup of the client for security reasons…Fri, 21 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/objectdatasourceselectcountmethod-wants-an-int/https://arunstephens.com/blog/objectdatasourceselectcountmethod-wants-an-int/I have been working with the GridView ASP.NET control today, bound to an ObjectDataSource. This is to do with my experiment with DBMail that I mentioned the…Tue, 18 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/stop-x-from-starting-when-booting-ubuntu/https://arunstephens.com/blog/stop-x-from-starting-when-booting-ubuntu/This is nothing new, but I wanted to stop X from starting on bootup with Ubuntu Desktop 8.04. I would prefer to start it using startx. The easy solution, from…Tue, 18 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/entity-framework-part-2/https://arunstephens.com/blog/entity-framework-part-2/I have been reading a bit of the documentation about the ADO.NET Entity Framework. There are a few passages that relate to my previous post: Because referenced…Mon, 17 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/mail-archiving-with-dbmail/https://arunstephens.com/blog/mail-archiving-with-dbmail/I have been looking for a SQL-based way to store all my old email messages. I think I may have found it. There is an email system called DBMail that stores…Sun, 16 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/linq-to-entities-my-first-steps/https://arunstephens.com/blog/linq-to-entities-my-first-steps/I have had little bit of experience with LINQ to SQL, but recently read that Microsoft is instead concentrating on LINQ to Entities. I have just started a new…Fri, 14 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/my-time-in-london-is-coming-to-an-end/https://arunstephens.com/blog/my-time-in-london-is-coming-to-an-end/Hello, I haven’t written on here for a very long time. I have been in London now for just over 6 months. I have just over 4 weeks left before my visa expires…Sun, 27 Jul 2008 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/observations-at-auckland-airport/https://arunstephens.com/blog/observations-at-auckland-airport/Hello. I am at the airport. I am actually on the last flight out of Auckland tonight, to Singapore. What have I observed? Well, British people tend to look at…Sat, 19 Jan 2008 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/the-gmail-trash-is-now-called-the-bin-at-least-in-some-locales/https://arunstephens.com/blog/the-gmail-trash-is-now-called-the-bin-at-least-in-some-locales/I host my some of email using Gmail with a custom domain. I have two domains with Gmail. I just noticed that for the domain that ends in .co.nz, the Trash is…Sat, 12 Jan 2008 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/looking-for-work-on-the-internet/https://arunstephens.com/blog/looking-for-work-on-the-internet/It’s obviously a slow news day again, because the Herald has written an article about being careful when posting things on social networking sites if you’re…Thu, 10 Jan 2008 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/my-far-too-liberal-facebook-friend-policy/https://arunstephens.com/blog/my-far-too-liberal-facebook-friend-policy/I have 197 friends on Facebook. I don’t think I have 197 friends in real life. When I first signed up to Facebook in the northern autumn of 2006, I had less…Wed, 09 Jan 2008 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/my-first-blog-spam/https://arunstephens.com/blog/my-first-blog-spam/Wow. I must be semi-important. Someone wrote a spam comment about credit cards on a seemingly unrelated post. How exciting. I’ve deleted it though. In other…Sat, 05 Jan 2008 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/my-trip-to-ronchamp/https://arunstephens.com/blog/my-trip-to-ronchamp/Back in February, I went to visit one of my friends who lived in Belfort, France. We went on a day trip with one of her friends to this small town (about half…Sat, 05 Jan 2008 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/announcing-zemobo3/https://arunstephens.com/blog/announcing-zemobo3/This is for the more technically minded of you, because Zemobo3 is in a very very early stage. There a quite a few web sites that I contribute content to…Tue, 11 Dec 2007 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/ie-compatibility/https://arunstephens.com/blog/ie-compatibility/I have just installed the Tiger administration plugin for WordPress. It’s quite nice. But the one thing that annoys me about it is that it doesn’t support…Tue, 11 Dec 2007 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/whats-up-with-journeyman/https://arunstephens.com/blog/whats-up-with-journeyman/I seem to be getting a few hits about Journeyman (the show that is under threat of cancellation!) so I thought I’d write a bit more. The people over at…Tue, 11 Dec 2007 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/i-have-a-question-for-you/https://arunstephens.com/blog/i-have-a-question-for-you/So please head over to my poll at http://localhost:8080/poll. I have decided to do some market research.Thu, 29 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/ie-compatability-issues-with-wordpress/https://arunstephens.com/blog/ie-compatability-issues-with-wordpress/There are a few problems with WordPress when working with IE. They’re kind of annoying, so I will look at fixing them when I can be bothered. One I noticed…Wed, 28 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/journeyman-didnt-come-last-last-night/https://arunstephens.com/blog/journeyman-didnt-come-last-last-night/According to the overnight ratings at Zap2it, Journeyman didn’t come in completely last place last night. CSI: Miami won the night, but Journeyman came in…Wed, 28 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/below-the-queens-head/https://arunstephens.com/blog/below-the-queens-head/A while back I noticed that the initials IRB appeared below the portrait of the Queen on recently-minted coins. It turns out that those are the initials of of…Tue, 27 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/i-am-the-worlds-authority-on-brazilian-european-monetary-relations/https://arunstephens.com/blog/i-am-the-worlds-authority-on-brazilian-european-monetary-relations/It seems so, anyway. I wrote an article in March about finding a coin from Brazil that was similar to a 5 cent euro coin. If you search for “brazilian money…Tue, 27 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/the-end-of-some-of-my-sports-picks-applications/https://arunstephens.com/blog/the-end-of-some-of-my-sports-picks-applications/During the Rugby World Cup, I stared an application on Facebook: France 2007 World Cup Picks. It had that stupid name for trade mark reasons. (Another app…Tue, 27 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/perhaps-wordpress-mu-needs-too-much-customisation/https://arunstephens.com/blog/perhaps-wordpress-mu-needs-too-much-customisation/After a bit more experimentation, it looks like I might need to hack around with WordPress MU a bit more than I originally thought. Which suggests that perhaps…Mon, 26 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/customising-wordpress-mu/https://arunstephens.com/blog/customising-wordpress-mu/Last year, before my trip to France, I thought about starting a web site where anyone can set up a blog about their travels. Plenty of them exist already. None…Sun, 25 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/save-journeyman/https://arunstephens.com/blog/save-journeyman/Journeyman is a new show for NBC this year, airing Monday nights at 10:00, after Heroes. It’s about, Dan Vasser (Kevin McKidd, Rome), a reporter for the San…Sun, 25 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/sudo-for-windows-vista/https://arunstephens.com/blog/sudo-for-windows-vista/If you’ve ever administered a UN*X box before, you’ll know that you should never log in as root, but rather log in as a normal unprivileged user and use sudo…Fri, 23 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/an-update-on-zemobo/https://arunstephens.com/blog/an-update-on-zemobo/The reason I came back to New Zealand was to work on my own business, Zemobo. At the time, Zemobo was going to be an event-based social network. While I had…Mon, 19 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/stuff-that-nobody-else-seems-to-have-noticed-about-tv/https://arunstephens.com/blog/stuff-that-nobody-else-seems-to-have-noticed-about-tv/Two things that I noticed and searched on the web for to see if anyone else noticed (and found nothing). Spoilers to follow for those who aren’t up to date…Mon, 19 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/death-proof/https://arunstephens.com/blog/death-proof/I’m having a field day with writing stuff today aren’t I? I’ve obviously got nothing to do, or something else to do that I don’t want to do. I saw Quentin…Sun, 18 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/i-like-linq/https://arunstephens.com/blog/i-like-linq/LINQ stands for Language Integrated Query, a new feature of the .NET Framework 3.5. And it’s cool. I have used LINQ to SQL on the My Flatmates Facebook…Sun, 18 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/its-been-a-while/https://arunstephens.com/blog/its-been-a-while/That’s the name of a song, isn’t it? I have been neglecting this blog for a while now, so I thought I’d write something new. Here is a bit of an update of what…Sat, 17 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/political-bandwagon/https://arunstephens.com/blog/political-bandwagon/Soon the media won’t be able take the piss out of politicians. That’s a bit of a broad statement but that’s what they’re saying. Currently media can’t take…Tue, 26 Jun 2007 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/windows-live-writer/https://arunstephens.com/blog/windows-live-writer/Have you heard of this? Well, I just found out about it. It’s quite cool. It’s a client for blogging, and you can even use it for Blogger blogs. It seems…Wed, 20 Jun 2007 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/google-live-search/https://arunstephens.com/blog/google-live-search/Ever done a search for “search” on Google?Tue, 12 Jun 2007 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/it-turns-out-my-theory-was-wrong/https://arunstephens.com/blog/it-turns-out-my-theory-was-wrong/Hardly anybody turned up here after I wrote my little news report. So I am a little sad about that. Never mind. I don’t really have anything else to talk about…Fri, 25 May 2007 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/ctrlshiftq/https://arunstephens.com/blog/ctrlshiftq/I haven’t said anything useful for a while. And this is no different. I just noticed that when you type Ctrl+Shift+Q in Word 2007, it changes the selection to…Mon, 21 May 2007 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/news-update/https://arunstephens.com/blog/news-update/As I just said, whenever I write about news, my visits spike. And often there is a corresponding increase in ad clicks. So I will write about some stuff in the…Mon, 21 May 2007 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/iis7-on-vista-and-languages/https://arunstephens.com/blog/iis7-on-vista-and-languages/I installed IIS on Vista the other day, but haven’t done anything with it yet. But today I was visiting a poorly configured site that redirected to localhost…Mon, 07 May 2007 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/zemobo/https://arunstephens.com/blog/zemobo/What is Zemobo? It’s something new and exciting that I’m working on, and I’ll be sharing more about it with you here. A bit cryptic, I know, but good things…Mon, 07 May 2007 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/im-back/https://arunstephens.com/blog/im-back/Hello. I am back in New Zealand now. Got back on Thursday morning. That’s all I have to say about that for the time being.Sat, 05 May 2007 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/election-results/https://arunstephens.com/blog/election-results/I just wrote a whole lot and then Internet Explorer crashed because the Flash plugin crashed. That was annoying. I got a screenshot of most of it though…Mon, 23 Apr 2007 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/teaching-life-skills-via-the-oc/https://arunstephens.com/blog/teaching-life-skills-via-the-oc/That might sound like a strange title, but it’s what’s happening on France 2 in twenty minutes. They are showing Newport Beach (as it’s called in French) every…Mon, 23 Apr 2007 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/election-day-in-france/https://arunstephens.com/blog/election-day-in-france/Today is the first round in the French presidential election. A candidate has to get a majority (i.e. > 50%) in order to win. If nobody gets over 50% today…Sun, 22 Apr 2007 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/more-on-zooomr/https://arunstephens.com/blog/more-on-zooomr/Bloody Microsoft Word! I had actually written this whole post out in Word. And then Word crashed. For no reason. I didn’t even get a chance to take a…Thu, 29 Mar 2007 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/my-flight-to-san-francisco-12-aug-2007/https://arunstephens.com/blog/my-flight-to-san-francisco-12-aug-2007/Hello. Finally I am going to write to you about my trip. I was going to just backdate the articles but that’s just going to get confusing as you won’t know…Thu, 29 Mar 2007 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/rugby-world-cup-2007-broadcasters/https://arunstephens.com/blog/rugby-world-cup-2007-broadcasters/I’ve been trying to find out what channel the Rugby World Cup would be broadcast on in the UK because that’s most likely where I’ll be when it’s on. It’s been…Thu, 29 Mar 2007 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/adnon-sense-photos-and-other-stuff/https://arunstephens.com/blog/adnon-sense-photos-and-other-stuff/So I have had AdSense running on this site for a few days. Whenever I look at it, the ad is usually India-related. Which is quite strange because my Indian…Mon, 19 Mar 2007 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/posting-from-word/https://arunstephens.com/blog/posting-from-word/Apparently you can blog from within Word. I am going to try it out. I have nothing to say other than that though. Looks quite cool. Word has switched to a…Mon, 19 Mar 2007 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/kiwi-food-in-france/https://arunstephens.com/blog/kiwi-food-in-france/Yesterday I made bacon and egg pie. Nobody over here has heard of it. Well, I haven’t really asked that widely. Here is a photo: Tonight I made roast lamb. The…Sun, 18 Mar 2007 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/brazilian-moneys-similar-to-euro-money/https://arunstephens.com/blog/brazilian-moneys-similar-to-euro-money/Hello. I found a 5 entavos coin from Brasil in my change today. As you can see, it’s very similar to a 5 euro cent coin. Almost the same size, and even the 5…Sat, 17 Mar 2007 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/ive-given-up-waiting/https://arunstephens.com/blog/ive-given-up-waiting/So, I’ve given up waiting for Zooomr, and have put a whole swag of photos up on Flickr. Flickr’s also got this neat little Flash thing that you can see on the…Sat, 17 Mar 2007 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/check-out-my-photos/https://arunstephens.com/blog/check-out-my-photos/I gave up waiting for Zooomr to come back online and have put some of my photos up on Flickr. I found out that using “sets” lets me organise the photos in the…Fri, 16 Mar 2007 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/blogger-and-google-and-my-search-for-a-photo-sharing-site/https://arunstephens.com/blog/blogger-and-google-and-my-search-for-a-photo-sharing-site/So, I created this blog yesterday. Already if you search for “arun blog le” in Google it comes up with this site. Google must have very tightly integrated…Thu, 15 Mar 2007 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/blogger-not-bad/https://arunstephens.com/blog/blogger-not-bad/Hello again So, I created this blog this morning at school. I have been playing around with it this afternoon and have come to the conclusion that Blogger‘s…Wed, 14 Mar 2007 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/hello-and-welcome/https://arunstephens.com/blog/hello-and-welcome/So, I am finally getting around to posting stories about my trip to the other side of the world and my time in France. I tried writing my own blog engine to go…Wed, 14 Mar 2007 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/nouvelle-star-my-audition/https://arunstephens.com/blog/nouvelle-star-my-audition/So, a couple of weeks ago Nouvelle Star, the French version of Pop Idol, started on M6 with the auditions in Marseille, which I attended. Unfortunately I…Wed, 14 Mar 2007 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/where-is-brian/https://arunstephens.com/blog/where-is-brian/Gad Elmaleh, a French stand-up comic and movie star, did a show in Lyon that’s on DVD now, called L’autre, c’est moi. All the kids have seen it here. Well…Wed, 14 Mar 2007 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/salon-dauto-a-geneve/https://arunstephens.com/blog/salon-dauto-a-geneve/I went to the Geneva Motor Show today. I took over 100 photos and didn’t see everything. But one of the first things I saw was the Jeep stand which had a…Sun, 11 Mar 2007 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/mont-blanc/https://arunstephens.com/blog/mont-blanc/This is the view from the top of l’Aiguille du Midi above Chamonix-Mont-Blanc.Fri, 09 Mar 2007 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/basilique-a-fourviere/https://arunstephens.com/blog/basilique-a-fourviere/Here is a photo I took at the Basilica at Fourvière in Lyon. It’s at the top of a hill near Vieux Lyon (the old town).Wed, 28 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/happy-new-year/https://arunstephens.com/blog/happy-new-year/(This was written on the old blog engine and I’ve copied it over to here for the sake of completeness.) I have finally gotten around to getting the blog part…Tue, 16 Jan 2007 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/welcome/https://arunstephens.com/blog/welcome/(This was written on the old blog engine and I’ve copied it over to here for the sake of completeness.) Hi, this is my first post on my new blog at…Thu, 02 Nov 2006 00:00:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/nouvelle-star-2/https://arunstephens.com/blog/nouvelle-star-2/(I wrote this in my hotel room on Word. It hasn’t been published before 14/03/07.) Right, I’ve got all that I needed to get done. In only 40 minutes too…Mon, 30 Oct 2006 00:01:00 GMThttps://arunstephens.com/blog/nouvelle-star-1/https://arunstephens.com/blog/nouvelle-star-1/(I wrote this in my hotel room on Word. It hasn’t been published before 14/03/07.) Hello. I have chosen something pretty big to open my blog with. I am sitting…Mon, 30 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT