Exams are nearly over, which is a great relief and the sun is shining here in Norwich. Things can indeed only get better as in a weeks time I will be making my way to France for a holiday with my lovely girlfriend and my housemates who will all be graduating this year. Bon voyage!

For further information, see the new site in its all its tentative but nevertheless functional glory here:

Intelligent Architectures

Have a look and see if the suggestion in this link helps: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=2680b41d121dc73a&hl=en

(you may have to hunt for the directory in order to run the relevant file)

I became frustrated by this problem myself which has occurred several times now on my Vista laptop. The solution, which I haven’t really looked at in any detail, seems to involve forcing a rename of a google exe using the setup.exe

I suspect chrome fails to properly rename the relavent exe when it updates itself. Previously I went to the trouble of uninstalling then reinstalling the browser, now at least this provides a quicker solution. On uninstalling I provided feedback on multiple occasions that I was only doing it because the thing stopped working, and otherwise I was relatively satisfied with it !

I thought it worthy of a post to raise the profile of this obviously relatively common issue so that at least people can resolve it for themselves quickly. Hopefully though the chrome updating system will eventually be fixed so that this no longer occurs.

holiday snap of glenroy in scottish highlands

After taking a lovely relaxed break in Scotland, I’m back home for some serious work over the summer. I’ve been very fortunate in securing some interesting software development work at a company that deals with, to put it in an oversimplified form, automated financial transactions. So far so good, but as a result I anticipate I might not have much time in the coming weeks and possibly months to continue any posts relating to OpenLaszlo and my menu project. Hopefully I will have enough time to inject the odd snippet of information (including anything broadly related to my summer work, which isn’t confidential) that might be useful to someone out there reading!

In my opinion the query method which is currently documented and seems to be available to use is not actually as practically useful for web apps as the data method which is not yet documented.

It would be a very useful resource to integrate into an application where data on a specific subject such as statistics are required. For example the cities search on my website which simply queries an SQL database could be replaced with a Wolfram Alpha search allowing access to a much broader resource of information.

As the results are provided in XML format they will be easy to process using XML parsers or in the case of a platform like OpenLaszlo the data can be bound straight into the application.

Creating a page to display RSS feed information proved surprisingly straightforward with Sun’s RSS utils package available at http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/javaserverpages/rss_utilities/

Essentially RSS utils retrieves the XML page containing the RSS feed and processes it, allowing you to retrieve the feed by simply using the custom XML tag library provided. Of course you could go and create your own RSS parsing utility, however as Sun have provided this facility it seems like a wasted effort, particularly if you’re planning to use it to implement RSS feeds rather than just learning about XML itself. That said it is important to understand how XML files are structured as they are becoming more important in web programming.

My view on XML (eXtensible Markup Language) itself is that it can be both a blessing and a burden. For defining arbitary data instances [read: stuff] that needs to be passed around between other parts of a system it can be very useful. However there is a problem in that it can be used uneccessarily, probably mostly due to the fact that XML is basically nothing tangible.

In fact to prove this ask someone (or yourself) to define XML and its possible uses. You will probably find it is not that easy to articulate!

In essence XML is a building block, a foundation / specification. And there isn’t even that much to it in its raw form, XML states:

<house>

<window>Double glazed</window>

<door>Front door</door>

</house>

Obviously there is more to it than that, but that’s defined by what you want do with XML.

So just to re-iterate to anyone new to XML:

• You can’t compile XML – it’s not a programming language!

RSS is a format of producing snippets of information, which are often news articles and blogs containing links. An RSS feed is essentially a manually or dynamically updated XML file formatted in a specific manner.

Then I’ll look at the possibility of using RSS feeds for simple content management of web-sites. RSS should provide a reasonable platform for storing and retrieving simple text data in XML files. This may have some advantages such as the possibility of easily rendering the XML data in different ways for different clients. However it does require file I/O on the server side which may prove more complex than simply using an SQL database to store and retrieve content. Alternatively the RSS feed could be stored within an SQL database, however I haven’t yet considered if this would be advantageous or not.

I will start with a post about beginning to learn Microsoft’s ASP.NET platform with C# for web development for those with previous java experience.

It is a quick guide for those familiar with the Java web platform looking to extend their skillset or at least gain some understanding of how .NET operates on the web. Many people on university courses such as mine which favours Java for web apps may have little idea about Microsoft’s competing technology and how it can be used. I will attempt to be somewhat impartial in this explanation.