Yesterday my beloved John’s Background Switcher got picked up by one of the big techie news sites – digg.com – the net result of which was that I had more visitors to my site in a day than I’ve had over the last 5 months combined! And more importantly well over 2000 downloads of the installer. I don’t know how many people are actually using it – I don’t go in for all that usage tracking spyware type stuff – but it’s safe to say that my user base has increased significantly (I normally get around 10 downloads a day).

I’ve been blown away by the amount of positive feedback from people out there! Reading comments like “This is probably the coolest tool I’ve found in the last couple years aside from Flickr” after I’ve poured in a lot of hours and late nights (just ask my girlfriend) makes it all worth while. I write software for a living and I can honestly say that creating JBS and giving it away for free is infinitely more rewarding.

What’s also been interesting is that only 4 crashes have been reported [so far] – I’d expected more with such a high increase in users. If the software crashes it gives you the option to send me a crash report which details the last few method calls so I can work out what happened. It’s completely anonymous although sometimes I wish it wasn’t – it would be handy to email the person and ask them what they were doing at the time – but anonymity rules. I’m close to releasing the next version which has given me the chance to fix the lot (which are all .NET issues – I thought .NET was supposed to run consistently across all machines?!).

As always, any and all suggestions are most welcome – just go to my Support Forum. While I come up with a fair number of the features, the people who’ve been using it up until now have suggested most of them and while I can’t do everything on the list – I do my best! So thanks to all those who took the time to try it out and suggest how I could make it better (oh yeah, and especially to Ian who suggested the whole Flickr thing in the first place!).

Now, if I can just get this much interest in my photography…

I went to my first beer festival on Saturday – the Bradford Beer Festival to be precise. Well, it’s not that precise, it was actually in Saltaire but that’s near enough to Bradford I guess! It was pretty much how I expected it to be: you get a glass, go into a large hall and then drink a lot of beer. Lovely!

Since moving to Yorkshire I’ve developed a taste for Real Ales which is lucky because there are a lot of quality ones around. When you’ve grown up being subjected to Tennents Special and Export then find yourself drinking beautifully smooth ale that massages your throat as you swallow it – you won’t want to go back!

Oh, and on Sunday I finally got around to taking a proper waterfall picture where you leave the shutter open and capture the water flow – not bad I thought!

It’s Posforth Gill near Bolton Abbey in case you were wondering. My friend Ade wasn’t so lucky, he keeps saying he needs a new tripod and I found out why. He paused to answer the call of nature and his tripod and camera fell over and into the river. And we’re not talking a cheap camera with cheap lenses either. Ouch. May his faithful 10D rest in peace…

One of the things I like about my current job is that it involves a 40 minute drive in the morning and evening (except Wednesdays). You might think this is a pain but if you’re a serial singer like I am then it’s great!

It’s a well documented fact that I like singing and especially when I’m driving. If they handed out record contracts for effort rather than talent I’m sure I’d be mid-way through a world tour. Actually, they do that already – maybe I’m just not good looking enough… But anyway, I’ve heard my singing and while I can sing some songs in key, I’m certainly not going to be putting myself forward for the next series of X Factor. As an aside, most of the people who go to these talent shows need to realise two things:

1. Enthusiasm doesn’t make up for a lack of talent.
2. Shouting isn’t the same as singing.

I think 40 minutes is about right for a drive to work. That’s a total of 80 minutes which is just a bit longer than the average length of a CD – this means I can listen to the whole CD and have time to flick through my favourites on the way home. I can then change CDs for the next day and the cycle continues. Any less and my voice doesn’t get the chance to get properly warmed up in the morning (some might argue that it never does get going). And more means I’m in danger of playing a CD to death and considering – I dread to say this – turning the radio on.

My in-car singing has some interesting side-effects though. Firstly, when I’m playing some 80s power ballad I’ll naturally want to look to the heavens, close my eyes and clench my fists to really hit the high-notes (think of the chorus to any song by Spandau Ballet). This is not a good idea when you’re either driving at high speed or nosing through traffic – I’m pretty sure there’s a section of the highway code on the subject. Secondly, there’s the possibility of an audience. When I still lived in Scotland I was once stuck in traffic in Dundee. I was on a filter lane to get onto the Tay Bridge and was signing my heart out as usual. I had this strange urge to look to my right and saw a car full of girls watching me and laughing at my performance. I just smiled at them and carried on – I believe the song was coming up to the chorus and there were some high notes! Yep, if you’re going to do something you might as well go all out for it – there’s no sense holding back.

The other problem comes when I get to the office and listen to more music through my headphones. I’ve just spent the last 40 minutes straining my vocal chords and I have to remember to not burst into song in an office full of people. You can get away with it in a car – at least the people outside can’t hear you killing Tony Hadley’s finest hour…

Another of my favourite types of photo are reflections. You know the type: a beautiful mountain scene in the background, a perfectly still lake in the foreground filled with the reflection of the aforementioned mountains. Well, given the absence of mountains and clear, mirror-like lakes this was the best I could come up with around Leeds last night:

I must confess that it took a few attempts to get the shot centred and lined up – I think my neck must be crooked or something because it looked fine through the viewfinder but completely squint on the screen after the shot was taken!

Can anybody understand what the following sentence means?

Ian found this one in a journal and it was just the summary! Not surprisingly neither of us bothered to read the article…

I’ve just spent the last week or so doing some testing on our ASP.NET application. We’re in the process of porting it from ASP.NET 1.1 to 2.0 and it’s been an intriguing voyage of discovery so far. But after a random period of time the software would stop working – page postbacks would fail, data we were storing in the cache was disappearing and it was driving me crazy! The only way to get things working was to reboot my machine. One step forward, two steps back.

I eventually figured out what the problem was (I had several red herrings to work through first as is always the case in such things). I put a callback onto inserts into the cache to determine why items were being cleared out of it and interestingly at certain points I’d add something and it would be removed immediately with a reason of “underused”. This is ASP.NET’s memory collection at work deciding that as my machine is so low on resources it would try and save as much as possible. The following change to web.config (in the System.Web section) sorted it out:

<caching>
  <cache disableMemoryCollection = "true"
    disableExpiration = "false"
    privateBytesLimit = "0"
    percentagePhysicalMemoryUsedLimit = "90"
    privateBytesPollTime = "00:02:00"/>
</caching>

The reason I was getting the problem so often was that my work laptop died and the one I’m using until I get it fixed is far less powerful and has a lot less memory. So it was happening frequently on my machine, less frequently on everyone else’s, even less frequently on our test server and very rarely on our live server (the problem also effected our ASP.NET 1.1 version). Still, it’s a nice feeling to have figured it out.

Of course the real problem wasn’t the cache recycling at all – it’s perfectly natural that the cache should clear itself out when it wants. The problem was that when a particular object was no longer found in the cache by our software, the code wasn’t properly re-populating it from the database. So with that fixed we shouldn’t need to turn off the memory collection at all.

And to think, if it wasn’t for my laptop expiring this would probably have remained a random, undiagnosed crash for quite some time yet. It’s a tricky old game this debugging one…

I spent last night out with my friend Ade standing around in the freezing cold taking photos of passing cars. One of the types of photos I’ve always wanted to take is the long exposure, “car lights passing by” shots and here’s one that turned out okay:

The main things I took away from the night are that I’ve got a lot to learn about photography! But the best way to learn is with practise so that’s what I intend doing (combined with a lot of reading).

The second thing I learned is that when you’re standing on a motorway bridge with a camera on a tripod, well over half the cars that drive past you will slow down and have a really good look at what you’re doing. I’m not sure what they’re expecting to see. Maybe they’re bored and want something else to look at, maybe they’re nosey, or maybe their brains are befuddled and they just don’t understand what they’re seeing – that’s what the vacant expressions most of them (that I bothered to look at) gave the impression of.

People are strange. But then they probably thought the same thing about us…

I spent the weekend up in Scotland. Normally my girlfriend would go with me but she deserved a few days to herself so for the first time in a long time I got to spend some quality time with my father talking, taking photos and reminiscing. It was one of the nicest weekends I’ve had in a long time (and the sun was shining – something I haven’t seen in Yorkshire for a good while).

I’ve been thinking about time a lot lately. I look at my girlfriend and know that I want to spend the rest of my life with her. But I realise that much though I’d like to stop the clock and stay as we are forever, it ain’t gonna happen. Time will pass, we’ll age, get old and eventually die. It’s an inevitable aspect of life that I’m all too aware of but sometimes it saddens me. Youth is wasted on the young and wisdom is only earned by the old. Oh, to wind back the clock! Having said that, sunsets are the most beautiful parts of the day:

There’s no stopping the march of time, only making the most of it. The trouble is, most people don’t truly understand it until it’s too late.