I’ve been thinking of giving TV another shot, especially if I can get a lot of free channels and PVR functionality with no subscription. I’ve been looking about at the current state of television out here:

Free but a mere four channels and no apparent plans to give us even channel Five.

Apple have announced the fifth generation of iPod. Improvements include better battery life, a thinner enclose, better screen and now in both black and white.

But not everything is peachy. Gone is the FireWire support, the remote socket and there is still no sign of Bluetooth. Quite how you are supposed to switch tracks without pulling your iPod out your pocket I’m not sure.

Abhinaba has blogged on the painful C# operator overloading experience.

The basic problem that is if you want to overload one, you soon end up many of the tests including == != < <= > >= Equals, Compare and probably CompareTo via IComparable when it turns out one function can provide everything needed in general use.

I’m just back from another trip to Germany, this time by way of Gatwick and on to Munich by redeeming some BA miles that had accumulated.

I thought about writing another little travelogue but then it wouldn’t make much sense as my previous trip to Höchstadt is still undocumented – I left readers wandering around the outskirts of Paris. So here’s the short version…

Having now spent the best part of a month beneath the shadow of Dell’s 24″ wide-screen LCD behemoth, the 2405FPW, I thought a mini-review might be in order.

Twenty four inches might not sound big for a monitor when compared a TV but bear in mind you’ll be sitting only a couple of feet away. It will take up most of your vision without moving your head. In fact RSI of the neck could become an issue here if you are not sitting far enough way to take it all in one go.

Update: This behavior is as expected according to the .NET team but it's probably unexpected for most users.

I encountered a strange problem this week when a conditional operator appeared to be evaluating the false expression contrary to the C# documentation. The line looked like:

Back in ’98 I was developing an extranet site for a local company when I realized that it would be open for exploit if somebody put single quotes in text fields. It was early in the development cycle so I fixed it and moved on, unable to find out how other people were avoiding the problem.

It turned out many were not and it became a well-known exploit called SQL injection. Unfortunately there are many developers who don’t know or appreciate the problem, and it is this:

This week is the annual Battle of Britain week here in Guernsey and today sees highlight of the weeks events, the air display. Alas, I missed the a chunk of it but managed to catch the star attraction The Red Arrows. As always it was most impressive, dives banks and turns at low altitude while retaining perfect form in an number of geometric shapes. The weather was less impressed and the low cloud ceiling canceled out the various cross-overs we are normally treated to.

Today sees the completion of Cable & Wireless Guernsey’s free ADSL upgrade from 512KB to 1MB. My parents and friends got theirs earlier but even mine was enhanced this morning. If yours is still running at 512KB give them a shout.

I recently ran into a problem while debugging inside Visual Studio 2003.Net. Google couldn’t find me an answer, only a few other people with the same problem. Here’s my solution in the hope it might save somebody else some time.

Whenever debugging a specific VB.NET application that used a C# class library I would receive the following error certain objects in the C# class library:

Apple hosted a media event yesterday, here’s my usual opinionated commentary.

iTunes 5 is now out – ditching the scrappy brushed-metal look in favour of the Apple Mail inspired ‘platinum’ look even on Windows. With luck we can expect the next major release of Mac OS X to take this theme across the board and finally kill off the aqua stripes and brushed metal. Let’s just hope they keep the older sane toolbars and not the Safari/Mail abominations.