A year or so ago I picked up a secondhand Bosch PCM-8S compound mitre saw for my workshop. Handy little saw, handles most things I need to do. One thing I accepted at the time was the built in Led lights and laser didn’t work. Didn’t think much of it given that most of it was chock full of sawdust.

Today though, curiosity got the better of me and I decided to find out if it was fixable. I’m not going to list in detail everything I did, but needless to say I started in the wrong place and ultimately found the issue in the last place I looked (and last place I expected):

I’m a big fan of .NET console applications. They’re a really quick way of getting something functional up and running fast without wasting loads of effort on user interfaces. (Hey, I’m a developer, OK… not a designer. Function over form and all that.)

I also make heavy use of the built-in app.config / settings functionality so that I can control functionality at runtime. One thing I wanted to do recently was to output the configured settings to the console window so that I could eyeball all was well before going ahead.

Yep - tech 2010! Continuing my tour of strange facets of old SharePoint technology, here’s something new I tried to do today that took a lot more effort than it should.

The objective was simple: create a new list, based on an existing list.

This is reasonably easy to do using List Templates… when you know how of course.

So the steps are:

1. Save a copy of your current list as a template
2. Create a new list based on that template.

The main issue is the way SP stores the custom list template when you’ve created it.

A quick video showing that it’s possible to replace an electric window motor on a Subaru Forester (in my case a 2003 Subaru Forester XT SG Turbo ABC Etc. without totally taking the whole car apart. Who knew?!

(Well no-one, apparently, hence why I made the video. Duh.)

Full schematic of the window mechanism available here.

Update: Wunderlist is no more - it got acquired by Microsoft :( The domain is also broken but I’ll leave the code here for funzies.

So I’ve been working on a simple application at home, part of which I want a list of items, which I want to be able to control from Wunderlist. As a relative novice to Python, I was looking around for some pre-built library that I could just plug in to my existing code. A few things do exist - there’s some sample code at Github and there’s even a basic API wrapper called wunderpy2.

You’re unlikely to be reading this is if you haven’t heard of Surf Snowdonia. But if you haven’t - it’s the world’s first commercial inland wave adventure parc. Or in other words, it’s a surfable wave in a lagoon nowhere near the sea. The park opened in 2015 to much fanfare but closed again after less than a season due to mechanical issues. But over the winter it’s had some investment (£1m if you believe what you read) and it’s open again.

To surf there, you have four options… IE where in the lagoon you can surf. Beginner, improver, intermediate or advanced. The website has a description of what you can expect from each and the sort of skills you should have. It’s advisable to book ahead. Not really knowing what to expect, I booked an hour on the intermediate wave which included board rental.

The wave itself is relatively simple in concept - it’s an oval shaped lagoon with a structure in the middle. Every 90 seconds an arm dredges from one end to the other creating a wave in its wake… Well, in front of it. Not in its wake. That’d be behind.

Anyway. Each of the four sections should give something to all abilities. There is plenty of white water for beginners to play in with the advanced take off points should give experienced surfers something challenging. I’ve been surfing 20 odd years - on and off - I’ve surfed some great waves around the world but I am by no means an expert. My quiver consists mostly of longer boards 6'7″ upwards but most importantly, whilst my surf fitness is quite high, I’ve not actually surfed in a while (young family has rather got in the way!) so felt that an hour on the intermediate wave would be a good starting point.

So here are my 10 key thoughts and observations about Surf Snowdonia

Hurrah! Long gone are the days of frantically worrying whether or not your flashy new website is going to display nicely in IE5 and Netscape (‘Nutscrape’ Lolz) and the heady days of Firefox (you know, before it became total bloatware.) HTML5, CSS3.0, frameworks like Bootstrap and even - would you believe it - some form of agreement amongst the browser manufacturers on what should work irrespective of what you’re viewing it in means that a lot of the old challenges are gone.

Below follows some notes on an issue I recently encountered and spent best part of a day troubleshooting. This was occurring in a small SharePoint environment but I suspect it could occur in any environment which has some sort of distributed call to a SQL Server.

TL;DR - it was the Dell KACE Agent. See the end of the article for more.

In this case though, there was a SharePoint application server, and a SharePoint WFE that every half hour was showing an error in their event logs with EventID 3351. I noticed the errors were staggered - i.e. one server was at 15 and 45 minutes past the hour and the other was at approx 20 and 50 minutes past the hour.

Ah, the danger of the Internet. I hit this problem - trying to update a field built-in to a content type (the Title field) so that it was hidden from the UI. Easy I thought, get the SPWeb, get the SPContentType, find the field (ct.Fields[“Title”]), set it to hidden and update it. Nope.

Exception: This functionality is unavailable for fields not associated with a list

Engaging my brain / memory resolved this, but not before I encountered numerous “helpful” posts on the web about how what I was trying to do was not possible. One such example here, which categorically stated…

This is a fun one. In some of our Visual Studio solutions we use the period character - “.” - for project naming which broadly reflects the namespaces in use.

However, this causes issues for Visual Studio namely in the ability to rename features. So when you create a feature, it will adopt a default name of Feature1 and it’s not possible to rename it directly from within the solution.

Fortunately, there’s a nifty workaround that does appear to work, without having to redo your solution/project structure and naming convention. Found via this post: