London C# Developer Brad McAllister » Recommendations

Now I know I have reliable web hosting…

Brad — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 12:35:12 +0000

I fancy moving from windows 2003 to windows 2008 for my private VPS… trouble is I couldn’t remember the name of the host as I never have to contact them.. sites area always up!

After minutes of wrecking my brain… it’s EUKHost… give them a try then you will have nothing to worry about either

Post from: Personal Blog of Brad McAllister

Now I know I have reliable web hosting…

Convert youtube videos to MP3

Brad — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 09:56:41 +0000

I found a new artist I really like the sound of and already had a few of his tracks in my favourites so didn’t really want to go hunting around for them again to download them. A quick search for a no-nonsense conversion site brought up http://www.youtube-mp3.org/ no ad rubbish or infected downloads and super quick – it certainly does the trick.

Post from: Personal Blog of Brad McAllister

Convert youtube videos to MP3

Want to get Firefox 8 a day before it’s released?

Brad — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 21:52:47 +0000

Released officially tomorrow, but on their FTP servers today… right here.

On a completely different note, I opened a competition on one of my sites as Groupon UK kindly offered me a bunch of vouchers to give as prizes, no takers so far ( only been two days), so all you really need to do is have a go and you could be sure to win… find the competition here.

Post from: Personal Blog of Brad McAllister

Want to get Firefox 8 a day before it’s released?

Open DNS impressive number

Brad — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 22:31:32 +0000

Apparently open DNS are handling around 34 BILLION requests each day lately, that’s f€%king awesome :)

I used to have open DNS on my computers now I use google DNS, another free service I make use of that I massively recommend if you have websites is cloudflare, king of free caching, minifying and geolocation based IPSec.

Post from: Personal Blog of Brad McAllister

Open DNS impressive number

SQL Method to avoid procrastination

Brad — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 14:31:59 +0000

“When do you go running?”

“When the time is right.”

“When is the time right?”

“When it’s a nice day, and I’ve finished my work, and I haven’t just eaten, and I’m feeling energetic.”

“Repeat that last sentence, changing ‘and’ to ‘or’.”

“When it’s a nice day, OR I’ve finished my work, OR I haven’t just eaten, OR I’m feeling energetic.”

“That sounds like a better plan.”

Got a list of conditions you need satisfied before you do something?

Try changing and to or.

Nicked from here

Post from: Personal Blog of Brad McAllister

SQL Method to avoid procrastination

The importance of user friendly interfaces on web-apps!

Brad — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 08:58:53 +0000

Check this out, it’s hilarious and illustrates why site owners need to make the user experience a little more streamlined.

I got the usability book “Don’t make me think” pretty much when it came out and think it’s a great read for any application developer that acts as a user interface.

Post from: Personal Blog of Brad McAllister

The importance of user friendly interfaces on web-apps!

Save SQL Server login details in SQL Management Studio

Brad — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 11:29:04 +0000

Today I found out something that I found out years ago, if you like me need to use multiple SQL servers but can’t remember things by IP address or would prefer not having to type login information every time you want to connect then use registered servers.

Registered servers allow you to easily check if a server is running, create groups of servers, use user-friendly names for your servers, and import/export your registered server groups.

To view and add a registered server, start up SQL Server Management Studio go to View > Registered Servers. Then in the Registered Servers pane, right-click Local Server Groups and click New Server Registration. Alternatively if you already have them open right now you can just right click the instance and select register then enter your friendly name… super easy!

Then just enter the server name, select the authentication, key in the User name and Password if necessary, and check Remember password.

Now each time you start up SQL Server Management Studio, your registered servers will be viewable in the Registered Servers pane. Simply double-click the server you wish to navigate and that server will be opened within the Object Explorer.

Now I need to find out how to make this the default view when opening SSMS..

Post from: Personal Blog of Brad McAllister

Save SQL Server login details in SQL Management Studio

Check out this BRILLIANT speech by Steve Jobs from 2005

Brad — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 07:39:30 +0000

Last week I resigned from a job I have had for the past 9.5 years, today is my final day there, I have two weeks with my lovely family then I start a new job with an exciting company and one of my good friends who played a major part in me getting hired.

I started my day coming across this speech that Steve Jobs gave at a Stanford graduation ceremony and you found the three stories he tells to be particularly moving. If you have a spare 15 minutes then listen to the stories for yourself, you can even put it on in the background.

Post from: Personal Blog of Brad McAllister

Check out this BRILLIANT speech by Steve Jobs from 2005

Steve Sanderson tutorial on Knockout.js

Brad — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 13:29:40 +0000

The part of the guathon presentation I went to a couple of months ago in Leicester square that went right over my head was one by Steve Sanderson on a JavaScript framework called Knockout, it’s obviously a presentation he has delivered many times as I have seen from one of the mix recorded presentations you can check it out and see how much you can absorb at the initial speed.

I emailed Steve to get the presentation slides afterwards which he kindly sent over, however he just took time out one weekend to publish a really nice tutorial section at learn.knockoutjs.com if you want to get your head around a framework that can observably bind text and form elements to update in real time on the client without AJAX then have a look at the tutorials which make far more sense than the super fast presentation!.

I need to update my AutoHotKey library now to get some of these useful snippets in there (text expanders are a bit lazy but so much more efficient than remembering everything and repetitive typing)

Post from: Personal Blog of Brad McAllister

Steve Sanderson tutorial on Knockout.js

Coming soon to public transport near you

Brad — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 09:40:22 +0000

Since having our son Theo 2 years ago I have rediscovered the fun of going down slides, imagine this at your tube/train station, would you use it? – of course you would :), some lucky people can already use this at a tube station somewhere in Holland.

Post from: Personal Blog of Brad McAllister

Coming soon to public transport near you