Ross Hawkins - November 2008 Entries

November 2008 Entries

Mac Stuff

I haven't written much about my Macbook Pro as yet, however after a few months of fairly heavy use I'm finding it a very nice piece of kit for running both OSX and Windows. There are quite a few people in the land of .NET who have switched to Macbook (*.*)'s and written about it, so I'll skip that, but there are a few things I did want to write about quickly. When I first got my Mac I noticed that what OSX and Windows refer to as hibernation is slightly different. The default in OSX is to suspend...

posted @ Sunday, November 23, 2008 10:02 PM | Feedback (6)

Irony

One of the ironies about having "a personal site to which you post semi regularly", is that when you get incredibly busy with life then the lack of posts to your site makes it look like the exact opposite is true.

posted @ Sunday, November 23, 2008 9:32 PM | Feedback (0)

Gmail Themes

Sometimes Google can be a little slow to get things done, but when they get around to doing something they usually do it well. Gmail's user interface is a good example. Until recently your only option to improve Gmail's visuals was running Greasemonkey along with a Gmail specific script - not an overly portable solution, and if you didn't run Firefox then you were out of luck. Gmail Themes changes that, by adding a load of Theme options in your Gmail Settings. They've done a good job of covering all bases, including some pretty minimalistic themes in multiple...

posted @ Sunday, November 23, 2008 9:25 PM | Feedback (0)

Department of redundant comments

You're not going to die wondering with this Notes action button. This is the entire block of code in this action, so the comment increases the volume by 100%! REM {ACTION CLOSES WINDOW};@Command([FileCloseWindow]);

posted @ Thursday, November 20, 2008 8:59 AM | Feedback (2)

Clearing the cache of a LINQ to SQL DataContext

Clearing the cache of a LINQ to SQL DataContext sounds like a useful thing to be able to do now and again. Seems a bit of a shame that you need to use reflection to do it, but handy to know nonetheless.

posted @ Sunday, November 09, 2008 1:53 PM | Feedback (0)

8.02 clients falling like Dominoes

Over the past couple of weeks I've done 2 Domain upgrades to From Domino R7 to R8. Both experiences have been a great reminder about what a great server product Domino is, and go a long way to explain why Domino Administrators love the product - much to the bewilderment of their users who just don't get the attraction. The upgrades just worked – no hassle, no problems, just Then there's the R8 client. I'm just not that impressed. I did a bit of testing with the R8 client betas, testing both the basic and Godzilla standard versions,...

posted @ Tuesday, November 04, 2008 11:50 PM | Feedback (0) Filed Under [ Notes/Domino ]

The future of LINQ to SQL..

Last week the ADO.NET team posted an Update on LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Entities Roadmap, and since then there have been a lot of reaction postings popping up all over the place – followed of course by reaction postings to the reactions. The original post is pretty typical management speak (except for the fact that it doesn't use the word 'Synergy' anywhere), but if it doesn't seem overly sinister to you then you apparently need to read between the lines. Hmm. This sort of sibling rivalry between LINQ to SQL and the Entity Framework was always going...

posted @ Tuesday, November 04, 2008 12:02 AM | Feedback (0)

About me

My name is Ross Hawkins and I'm a developer, consultant, business owner and writer based in Auckland, New Zealand (pictured below!). My current work revolves around ASP.NET, C#, jQuery, Ajax, SQL Server, and a mix of other Microsoft development technologies.

I also have about 15 years of experience with IBM Lotus Notes/Domino and associated technologies. While Notes/Domino is no longer my primary focus I still like to dabble and keep my skills up to date.

I own and run 2 businesses - Hawkins Consulting Services, and Ignition Development.

Bethells Beach, located in sunny West Auckland, New Zealand

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