There was a dream draw for my team Middlesbrough today as they avoided the "Big Four" in the fifth round of the FA Cup. As an added bonus, Man. Utd. have been drawn to play Arsenal :)

A good cup run could really boost the season but wouldn't it be typical if Robbo spoilt the day by putting one over us!

If we beat Sheffield Utd. and get another lucky draw, you never know....... 

UPDATE: Sheffield Utd vs Middlesbrough is to be shown live on Sunday 17 February (1400 GMT) on BBC1

Whatever happened to who? I hear you say! Let me explain...

It seems like ages ago since I first discovered Luke Toms. I was sent a circular email promoting this new artist, I suspect as a result of being on the mailing list for The Feeling. Anway, he looked interesting (if not a bit eccentric!) so I went over to his website http://www.luketoms.com/ and had a listen to some of the tracks. I liked what I heard and loaded up iTunes and bought five or six tracks. There was no debut album yet, but the website promised it to be "Coming Soon".

Over the coming months, I kept checking back at luketoms.com and at iTunes to see if I could buy the album. There was still no update to I did some google searches and found plenty of reviews, many of which implied that the album was already out. It appeared that it was due for release on one of several different dates, but each of these had passed and it was still not available to buy anywhere.

I eventually managed to buy a promo copy of the album via E-Bay for the grand sum of £2.50. The whole thing is really odd. His website hasn't been updated for the best part of 8 months and although his myspace site shows him active in the past fortnight, there is still no official word as to when the album comes out.

The stupid thing is, it's a really good album!

Luke, if you read this, please update your website! and release your album. I like it so much, I'd even be willing to buy a proper retail version just so you get your royalties!

If you know where Luke is hiding and/or what the deal with the album is, I'd love to know! 

http://www.luketoms.com/

http://www.myspace.com/luketoms/ 

Here's the video of one of the tracks from the album. Have a listen and see what you think. 

[youtube:mFD1Fa8_wNU] 

 

UPDATE:

I managed to track down Luke Tom's PR company and according to them, he's split from his record company and that's why there has no album release. They didn't have any further details and he is no longer their client. 

I've recently been working on a fairly large Visual Studio Web Project for a client. As I was sharing the coding with a colleague, and because we wanted to track changes to our code, we decided to use SVN, an Open Source source control system.

The client component of Subversion is a piece of software called TortoiseSVN. This works really well, and integrates nicely with Windows explorer. Because TortoiseSVN was not designed specifically for Visual Studio, there is no direct integration and instead you have to keep swapping back and forth to Windows Explorer to Commit, Update, etc. This was a little painful to say the least as it is difficult to remember what new files you need to add to source control.

A quick google search later and we discovered a piece of Software called Ankh SVN. This nifty little utility is a Visual Studio Addin, which automatically tracks changes to your projects and adds the appropriate files into source control. This was just what we where looking for as it allowed TortoiseSVN operations to be ran from inside the IDE. To some extent it was good at automatically adding new files to the repository, but it did have problems when renaming files. This required a commit if there were changes in the file, before it could be renamed. Not a big problem, but it caused unnecessary revisions.

All in all, this worked rather well until the new version of Visual Studio 2008 was recently released. AnkhSVN was not compatible out of the box, although we managed to find a Registry hack which at least allowed it to load into VS 2008. There was a problem though, it had to be ran in Admin mode, DEP has to be disabled for it to work, and an error was thrown when launching a project if IE debugging was turned on.

I therefore decided to look for another solution and found VisualSVN. This is a commercial product but is reasonably priced at $49 and you can even get a free copy if you are working on an Open Source project

There are options in the plugin to push a solution into a new repository, and to pull a solution from an existing repository, as well as all the normal stuff you would expect. It's easy to see the status of a file as they are overlayed in solution explorer with either a green (unmodified), amber (modified), or red (clashed) icon.  They seem to have implemented file renames better as you can now do this without an interim commit.

Because this also works alongside TortoiseSVN, you can easily access the nice tools to resolve file conflicts right from inside the IDE. Great Stuff.

They have even packaged up a free product which installs all of the components required to host your own SVN server. This requires almost zero configuration other than to choose a username and password.

I was impressed with AnkhSVN, but VisualSVN is on another level in terms of usability and in my opinion is a bargain at $49. Well worth a look out.

http://www.visualsvn.com/

http://ankhsvn.tigris.org/ 

I first heard one of their tracks on Radio 1 (Elvis aint dead) a few days ago and had to get the album. They have a very distinctive, bouncy, sometimes a little repetitive style, you'll either love them, or hate them! Personally, I think they're great! Make sure you listen carefully to the lyrics of the songs, they're a bit silly, but very clever! Click on the album cover to see the details in Amazon. http://www.myspace.com/scoutingforgirls

I've just moved over to a new platform for managing my website, the wonderful blogengine.net!

While I'm in the process of tidying everything up, you may notice on or two dead links on the site. I am aware of these and will be working to tidy them up as time permits.

Paul.

I've been listening to the latest James Blunt album in the last few weeks and really liked it. So much so, I bought the sheet music so I could have a go at playing some of the songs myself.

It amuses me how people can be so passionate about hating the guy. What did he ever do to them! If you don't like him, don't listen to him, simple as that :) It would be a boring world if everybody had the same taste in everything.

Anyway, here's my interpretation of "One of the Brightest Stars", played on the Tyros 2.

I mutlitracked this one over a few records. Firstly I layed down the backing track, I then recorded the guitar section for the verses and the chorus, and then finally, the piano track which you can hear if you listen closely.  

Hope you enjoy it.

Click here to download as an mp3.

If you use Visual Studio 2005/2008 then may have noticed that when developing websites using the filesystem, your application starts in a sub-directory which equals the project’s root directory name.

i.e. http://localhost:8080/tumelty.com

This can be extremely annoying if the final application is to be deployed as a top-level application

i.e. http://www.tumelty.com/

The static URL's will end up in local as

http://localhost:8080/tumelty.com/files/download.zip

and in production....

http://www.tumelty.com/files/download.zip

This means that all of the links to static files will have to be manually fixed up before deployment. This causes a problem.

A quick google search which brought up the following solution which I'd like to share here for anyone having the same problem.

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2005/11/21/431138.aspx

Thanks to Scott Gu!

As you are receiving e-mail, it's wise to remember how easily this wonderful technology can be misused, sometimes unintentionally and with serious consequences.

Consider the case of the Illinois man who left the snow-filled streets of Chicago for a vacation in Florida. His wife was on a business trip and was planning to meet him there the next day. When he reached his hotel, he decided to send his wife a quick e-mail.

Unable to find the scrap of paper on which he had written her e-mail address, he did his best to type it in from memory. Unfortunately, he missed one letter and his note was directed instead to an elderly preacher's wife, whose husband had passed away only the day before. When the grieving widow checked her e-mail, she took one look at the monitor, let out a piercing scream, and fell to the floor in a dead faint. Hearing the scream, her family rushed into the room and saw this note on the screen:

"Dearest Wife, Just got checked in. Everything prepared for your arrival tomorrow.

P.S. Sure is hot down here!"