The Buck Starts (and Stops) Here

As the Blogosphere winds down towards Christmas I'd like to wish everyone who supports the Free World a very Merry Christmas and the Happiest of New Years - May all the rest burn in Hell and leave the rest of us in peace.

It's funny how September 11th really clarified things you're either for us or against us , the liberals can't really cope with that though, they believe everyone is good and even if stabbed by a mugger will worry about his upbringing. Sadly the liberals have been in control for a long time and have weakened the western world maybe 2005 will see some changes.

Woke up to a real hard frost (by yorkshire standards any way about -5 , I know if you live in Alaska that's a heatwave) , had a great walk with Niki and the dogs , saw 3 roe deer and now it's snowing - if it can just keep it up until Boxing day !

I've been putting a toe in the water of the contract market again here in the UK as I have a number of delayed projects and a gap in January and February , it's a few years since I did any contract stuff and I've noticed quite a few changes;
LOW Rates - much lower than 5 years ago and apparently they're better than the last couple of years!
Slow speed of response from clients - every requirement is *urgent* yet the agents are tearing their hair out trying to get responses out of clients.
Odd combinations of skills required complete with long experience - Eg my client requires strength in application servers JBoss, Weblogic , WebSphere and Tomcat together with lots of C++/C# ? no mention of Java at all ! C# is fine as it can be assumed most Java developers will easily pick up c# but C++.

I'll let you know how things progress.

I've been using Nunit and the Nunit addin for quite a while now (and Junit for years) - It's great to see a lot of the open source/Java world stuff coming into the visual studio world which used to be so self contained.

Anyway Nunit addin is now Testdriven.net which also supports Mbunit and Team system testing , I've not tried the latter two yet ,but I can say that the install removes the old Nunit addin neatly before installing itself and it makes a lot of sense having one add-in for all testing frameworks rather than several. To check it out hit the link on the blog sidebar.

I've been using the Google desktop search for a few weeks now and have to say it has become an essential quicker than anything else I have used for years, how many times have you spent ages looking for an old word doc or an email and been frustrated either by your poor memory for directories or how slow windows search is (and no it isn't any easier under linux unless you are very good with grep etc.).

Contrary to some reports GDS *will* search on network drives if you apply the registry fix detailed here see 'files on mapped drives' . It'll take a while as it is careful not to hog your machine but leave it overnight and you'll be able to search your network and machines as easily as the web - sounds weird saying that it should be the other way around that has resonance - but for getting on for 10 years now the web has been a doddle to search unlike the desktop!

I've just rescued Hugo our 10 week old cocker spaniel pup from his two big 'sisters' (two full grown Springer spaniels) after he'd just bitten himself a mouthful of their whiskers - they weren't amused. The joys of working from home you get to babysit puppies !

I'm a developer so the first post has to be "hello world" and no the next one won't be foo something or other.