Doodle Graphics

Ok, for some reason this was a lot harder than it should have been, mainly (i guess) because of some ambiguity around installers and the like.

It is the way the PHP documentation states:

Windows Installer (PHP 5.2 and later)

The Windows PHP installer for later versions of PHP is built using MSI technology using the Wix Toolkit (http://wix.sourceforge.net/). It will install and configure PHP and all the built-in and PECL extensions, as well as configure many of the popular web servers such as IIS, Apache, and Xitami.

First, install your selected HTTP (web) server on your system, and make sure that it works. Then proceed with one of the following install types.

Normal Install

Run the MSI installer and follow the instructions provided by the installation wizard. You will be prompted to select the Web Server you wish to configure first, along with any configuration details needed.

Neil asked his readers to do a small favour for him, so here it is. He's been doing some work with Penn Jillette (of "Penn and Teller" fame, among others)...

Ok, the last thing I needed to do was address the issue of the columns where short posts needed some extra line breaks to ensure that the Footer appeared below the navigation.

Well, thanks to A List Apart's latest article Multi-Column Layouts Climb Out of the Box, it looks like I might have fixed it! Thanks Alan.

Sweet, it would appear that I can indeed post blogs from my windows mobile phone, from Opera Mini which I have to say also rocks.

Just a lack of wysiwyg controls, and some of the more important symbols missing from the keyboard; like < and >!

In what is probably a new record for me, I've managed to get an entire site up and running over the weekend.

My wife and a friend are setting up a business together putting on music classes for babies and toddlers along with their parents.

Hmm, that's quite impressive. We only launched doodleTunes, Music for the Under 5's last week, and we're already the top result in Google for "Music for the under 5's" and "Music for the under 5's Beckenham". Who say's we don't know what we're doing here?

Wow, how time flies, and how technology improves...

Only two and half years ago, the best we could really hope for for Zachary's scans where this:

We've just had a twenty week scan of our new baby, and got a "4D" scan - these were being touted at the Baby Show's we went to before Zach was born, for at least £150:

And not just the facebook one.

I mean, come on, I fit the requirements - I have broadband, that supposedly runs fairly close to 8Meg, I've got IE installed somewhere, and I have Windows XP still - I know, luddite.

Well, as many other people have pointed out, you can import your blog into facebook as notes - it's quite clever an puts them all in the right place based on date.

Last time I tried this, I ended up with duplicate notes when I wrote a new blog post, so this is mostly to prove that it does that, or that something's changed and facebook no longer duplicates them.

Don’t look now, but I think this might actually be a technical posting!

So, I’ve finally had an excuse to start playing around with LINQ – some data clean up tasks that I could have done by hand, but it’s always more fun to throw together a little app or two than spend your life in Enterprise Manager (or SQL Studio).

This is a test, please ignore it.

Basically, we should now have pingback functionality here, and to prove it, here's a link I made earlier:
Facebook Blog Import

And there was much rejoicing! Samuel William was born at 21:35 on 17 October 2007, weighing 7lbs 10oz. Mother and baby doing well, pictures to follow - I'm off to bed.

As promised yesterday, the pictures are now online, and can be found here: Samuel William's First Day

Well, finally, we get some guidence on the DataSources for LINQ in Windows Forms applications.

This seems better than my hack of editing the generated partial class that I posted about in September (Playing with LINQ For SQL in a Windows Forms Application).

So, Visual Studio 2008 is now in RTM, which also means that LINQ has moved out of Beta. Yay.

However, I've found some breaking changes between the Beta 2 and RTM bits:

1. Table<t> no longer has a method Remove() - this has been renamed to DeleteOnSubmit(). This apparently is to "better convey that the updates are deferred until the call to DataContext.SubmitChanges()" (MSDN Forums)
2. The XML declaration of the .DBML file has changed, in Beta 2 this was:
   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?>
   In the RTM this has changed to:
   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
   Curiously, this UTF-16 caused VS to complain about unicode support, and wouldn't open the design surface. Changing it to UTF-8 fixed the issue.