This year I broke with my life-long tradition and spent Christmas not at my parents house with my family but with my girlfriend and her family in Germany.

The flight there was uneventful but dull thanks to Aurigny’s one-flight-per-day to Stansted at mid-day. This means 5 hours + of milling around. Thankfully Stansted isn’t quite as bad as I recalled and there are a few book and game shops to browse around in and I managed to keep my shopping down to a mere 3 books… Shame I already had 3 in my backpack.

Breaking bad news to clients is always tricky but a bit of intelligence might be able to soften the blow. A few days ago British Airways sent me an email to let me know that the Gatwick-Munich route I use (indeed their only route I’ve used lately) is to be axed from the start of the 2006 summer season.

While this is incredibly annoying at least I know about it. In the next paragraph they try to soften the blow by letting me know that there are going to be additional flights from Heathrow. intelligence fails them however because I don’t have access to Heathrow and their database already knows this.

Last week I was at the Apple Store UK ordering a universal dock connector for my iPod. Unexpectedly the the shipping address was not accepted – it claimed they were unable to accept orders from my post-code.

This was a strange turn of events – I’ve ordered a PowerBook G4, iLife, Apple Pro Keyboard, 20GB iPod and various other accessories in the past. I’ve not changed address or post-code for over a year so what’s the problem?

Questions stolen from the same source as the last one ;-)

[)amien[)amien

My little brother just decided he’d like to merge his November birthday present and his Christmas presents in the hope I’d get him a Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP).

I decided to beat the seasonal rush and get one now and checked out my usual on-line suppliers of merchandise… Amazon, out of stock despite their Google advert claiming otherwise, Play and MX2 out of stock (Play now have it back in stock for £179.99 including Donnie Darko UMD). A few other stores I’d not used were also out of stock or rather vague on the whole issue.

It’s been quiet here of late and while I did want to post I didn’t have anything ready nor did I want some whining apology with no content.

For the last few weeks I’ve been a recluse getting my Open University TM427 project wrapped up and delivered and now that’s out the way I’ve been kicking back and relaxing with a few games and a bit of retro computing.

A few changes from the various players so a quick run-down.

While local ISPs could argue their bandwidth is limited they have no such excuse for charging 3x the price of a UK outfit for IP addresses as Newtel are doing in both islands.

One of the things we are taught in object oriented design is that the outside world should not be exposed to the complexities of how our object achieves their goals. Other developers are busy, don’t care and really don’t need to know. It is a sound idea and goes hand-in-hand with ease of use.

Televisions used to expose the implementation with a single tuning knob that had to be adjusted every time you wanted to watch another broadcast. With time engineers replaced this with an interface that hid the implementation, specifically the concept of channels where each one could be individually tuned and switched between on a whim. Implementation no longer exposed.

In my early .NET days I ran into a problem many developers integrating with other systems do. Unlike XML with it’s xsl:nilxsl:nil or database fields with <null><null> the standard .NET value-types don’t support the concept of null for missing values. It’s such an important omission that Microsoft implemented it in .NET 2.0 (now gone RTM and up on MSDN) with a generics class named Nullable<T>Nullable<T> and a little syntactic sugar to help it go down smoothly.

For those of us still working with .NET 1.1 the NullableTypes project provides null-capable versions of all your favorite .NET types and unlike the SqlTypes included in .NET these match the System types for precision and provide support for .NET remoting and web services.

Well obviously the hot item for the next major release of Mac OS X will be Intel compatibility but I’m hoping they’ll get a chance to squeeze some new features in too. Here what I’d like to see next:

Apple’s new iMac-only media centre interface seems to gave garnered quite a bit of a attention. So much so that enterprising individuals have hacked it onto their Mac. Apple should make it available to non-iMac users, possibly as part of 10.5, the next iLife or maybe even bundled with the optional remote control.