Micheal Long

Posted on 25 January, 2013 by Bazmech

Just started watching knight rider on lovefilm last night, after not seeing it for some years. Not lost any of its charm and quite frankly I could not see the guy’s arms that was driving the car when kit was meant to be driving himself even thought his arms where covered with the same material as the car seat.

I digress.

Still very good and, one man against evil, that can only be compared in greatness to the A-Team.

Only watched the double pilot episodes so far but I cannot wait to see all the way through all the series. Thank goodness for lovefilm.

There are other subscription services out there of which I may review, at least blink box as I have that one, but for the time being lovefilm us working for me very nicely.

Posted in Flim Reviews, Good | Leave a comment

Beatles album collection

Posted on 13 September, 2012 by Bazmech

Finally today I have completed my collection of Beatles albums.
I now have all 6 at some considerable cost I might add. The first two cd’s where simple enough to find and at only £45 each “a great bargin” I hear you say and I would not aggree more.
Albums 3 and 4, aptly named ‘Album 3′ and ‘Album Quattro’ took a little more detective work and several hundred pounds to pay for an investigator to find and by on my behalf. Still worth it in the end.
The fith and unnamed album took six months for the investigator to purchase for me and at a snip at just under the 2 grand mark. This is now my fav cd.
The ‘My Last’ album was in the loft so job done.
I am now a happy bod with a collection that know one can match.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Ikea product presentation

Posted on 18 June, 2012 by Bazmech

Interesting product presentation by Ikea Leeds.

As I walked up to this I thought that I must have been in the deep south.

Joking asside it just goes to show how wrong something can go from not being a little thoughtful as we all know “presentation is everything”.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

My new mobile the HTC Desire HD

Posted on 28 January, 2011 by Bazmech

Its being a while coming, over 2 years out of contract, but I finally made the plunged and got myself a new phone.

The HTC Desire HD Android controlled mobile

After a couple of months of looking I finally decided on the HTC Desire HD. As always when I get a new phone I was worried about making the switch and having to get used to a new phone and since I have always had a Nokia before moving to a different make and operating system was a little worrying. Well what was I worried about because the phone is fantastic and does an amazing amount of things that I can now not do without. The whole thing is well packaged and after a day or two it feels like I have been using it forever.

One of the features that I did not think could be improved from my old phone, Nokia E65, was the predictive text while composing text messages but it is much better and a dream to use. There are many other features that I am finding all the time so I will post as and when.

The phone itself is a good start but then you have a plethora of apps that you can download to use and the vast majority are free. The one application/game that you should have is Angry Birds. A very good and addictive game that you can download via the Market so give it a go and see how you do. Once I have a better collection of apps and games I will do my ‘Top N’ app/games that I would happily recommend.

I got my phone off the website mobiles.co.uk will in fact me and misses both got our phones from here as it was the best deal that I could find. If you do find this information useful or just want to be nice and find yourself a good deal from mobiles.co.uk then please use the following link to go on to the site and then make your purchase on line.

http://www.mobiles.co.uk/refer.aspx?refer=cust1381550

This is basically a referral offer where I get a cheque back so if you can use it please do. Once you have ordered you get your very own cheque back link to give to all your friends so please share the wealth.

Posted in Mobile Phone | Tagged large screen | Leave a comment

3D or not 3D, Tron Legacy is the question

Posted on 20 January, 2011 by admin

Well not quite but I did find myself coming out of Tron Legacy with one major question,

Was any of that film in 3D?

I am assuming the answer to be yes as I paid over the odds to watch it in 3D and an extra quid for the ever so stylish spec’s. There was a disclaimer at the beginning stating that some scenes where in “2 dimensions” as this was the way that director had envisaged these to be viewed. That did ring alarm bells at the time but I thought little of it as I was still expecting a massive Hollywood spectacular that would blow my mind away with the 3D playing a major part.

So now I am spending most of my time looking for the 3D parts of the film and although I could pick out a few I would suggest that less than 20% of the film was actually in 3D. This made the whole experience less than impressive and as a consequence of me looking for the 3D effects I was not really watching the film. Apparently though my fellow film watchers assured me that I had not missed much as far as the film itself so no loss there, except for the £11 that we had all forked out.

The evening was not a complete loss though as we all then went out and had a lovely Cantonese meal. For those that would like to visit the restaurant,

King’s Cantonese
1 King St
Drighlington, Bradford BD11 1LW
0113 285 4815

Film toss but nice nosh.

Posted in Awful, Flim Reviews | Tagged 3D, awful, flim | Leave a comment

Remove duplicates and sort a string array

Posted on 2 December, 2010 by Bazmech

I nice quick and easy one here but very useful all the same.

The problem is simple. You have an array full of items that have been pulled from lots of locations and what you need is a clean array of distinct values that is also sorted. I thought this was going to be a bit of a pain but worked out that it is in fact quite simple and here’s an example of how it can be done.

Simple create a button and textbox on your form and then apply the following code,

private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
	string[] myArray = new string[] { "qwe", "wer", "qwe", "w", "4gfg", "nhhg", "4gfg", "wer" };
	string[] secondArray = RemoveDuplicates(myArray);
 
	foreach (string item in secondArray)
	{
		textBox1.Text += item + "\r\n";
	}
}
 
public string[] RemoveDuplicates(string[] myList)
{
	System.Collections.ArrayList newList = new System.Collections.ArrayList();
	foreach (string str in myList)
	if (!newList.Contains(str)){
		newList.Add(str);
	}
	newList.Sort();
	return (string[])newList.ToArray(typeof(string));
}

A few examples that I found used Linq and hash expressions, which is fine, but these did not work in DotNet2 whereas this example does.

Bish, bash, bosh. Gripped

Posted in .Net | Tagged array | Leave a comment

IE conditional commenting in XSLT

Posted on 24 November, 2010 by Bazmech

It was meant to be an easy task. I had a menu template built in html and all I had do was move the formatting and structure into an XSLT document and then use this is display my XML data. You are all now shouting “Simples” or “Easy peasy”, as I did, but then I came across a stumbling block.

The problem was that the html that was produced for me contained Internet Explorer specific formatting like,

<ul class="level1">
<li><a href="/" title="Homepage">Home </a></li>
 
<li><a class="fly" href="/resorts.aspx" title="Resorts">Resorts<!--[if gte IE 7]><!--></a><!--<![endif]-->
<!--[if lte IE 6]><table><tr><td><![endif]-->
<ul>

At this point I was still thinking ‘no problem’ as I just need to escape it or CDATA the text. No luck and the more things I tried the closer I got to having no solution.

At this point I thought that I would turn to my old friend Google and after a bit of searching I finally found the correct search string and came across XSLT – How to get IE consitional statements working in an XSTL on stackoverflow. Well I was of course overjoyed and put into the place the solution and a little while later all was done.

Bish bash bosh. Baked

XSLT – How to get IE consitional statements working in an XSTL

Posted in XSLT | Tagged conditional, formatting, html, ie, xslt | Leave a comment

What a stinker the Skyline film is

Posted on 21 November, 2010 by Bazmech

Well although the title just about explains it all I must just stress that you should not pay money to see this film and even if you can see it for free you are better off continually jabbing your arm with your finger for an hour and half as you will feel more satisfied at the end.

Like many others I saw the trailers for this film and thought WOW I gotta go see this as finally something decent to go watch at the cinema and like for many others the reality is hard to endure.

Basic storyline is that robot aliens come to Los Angeles kill a load of people and transform the rest into more robots by ripping out the brains/spines and putting them into robot carcases. One other thing that plays a big part is that all the robots are self repairing from the mighty mother-ships in the air to the little drones that forage around the apartment block. When a limb is chopped off they simply get near it and the limb reattaches. Every small victory for the humans is soon turned and the dull story line is resumed.

Now there was one point when I thought the film was going to get interesting and this happens when the main characters, sorry forgot his name, has being affected by the robots and nearly taken over a couple of times but then when he gets angry he starts to change and gets super strength. I thought here we go but then he just got slapped down by a weak-ass self-repairing robot.

Production and editing was not that good either as you would go from a torrent of symphonic sound on an action scene to a quiet subdued scene where they are all hiding. Now I am not saying that this sort of scene transition should not be done but its like telling a joke at a party with the stero on full blast and shouting out the punchline ‘small cock’ just as the music stops.

Bish, bash, bosh. What a load of tosh.

Posted in Awful | Tagged awful, do not watch, flim, review, rubish, weak | 1 Comment

Visual Studio formetting shortcut key conbinations

Posted on 19 November, 2010 by Bazmech

An old favourite of mine but well worth knowing.

These are simple key strokes to make your day to day programming run smoother, well at least thats what I tell myself.

The one the I use all the time is CTRL + K followed by CTRL + D. This set of key strokes works in code view and html view and it simply tidies your code up by putting in sensible line breaks and tabbing nested content. Now if you are a tidy programmer you will probably not need this but if you are picking up someoneelses code then it helps you save a lot of time.

There are of course other shortcut keys that are usefull and 10 of these can be found on Dev 102 website. Many more exist and a full list will be out there somewhere but right now I am happy with the ones that I know about.

Bish, bash, bosh. Score

Posted in .Net | Tagged html, shortcut | Leave a comment

Trim text to next space after X number of characters in XSLT

Posted on 19 November, 2010 by Bazmech

This was a requirement that I had recently and after having fought with it for a while I found the solution.
In my example below I am testing the length of string to see if it is over 65 characters. If it is under then it simple displays the string but if it is over 65 characters it then looks for the next space character in the string then trims everything after it and puts ‘…’ on the end to denote that there is more content. The name of the string is ‘Teaser’.

<if test="string-length(Teaser)>65">
	&lt;xsl:value-of disable-output-escaping="yes" select="concat(substring(Teaser, 1, 65), substring-before(substring(Teaser, 66), ' '), '...')"/>
</xsl:if>
<xsl:if test="string-length(Teaser) &lt;= 65">
	<xsl:value-of disable-output-escaping="yes" select="Teaser"/>
</xsl:if>

Now there are ways to improve this like changing the hard coded value for the number of characters to test for into a variable or even an input parameter but that will wait for another day

Bish, bash, bosh. Success

Posted in XSLT | Tagged concatination, substring | Leave a comment

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