Consultant’s Rule 1: If It’s Not Broken, Don’t Fix It
As a software contractor – or as I say to my parents, consultant – I’ve discovered several natural rules over the years. You can learn them the hard way, or you can read my blog.…
Web Summit Talk 2014
On Tuesday 4th November I gave a talk on the People’s Stage at the Dublin Web Summit. ‘The Dos and Don’ts of Consulting’ was my theme. After nearly twenty years at the coal face, I…
C++ Nerd
In 2005 I had the good luck to be the first to spot a minor error in Scott Meyers’ classic book ‘More Effective C++’. He keeps meticulous records, so you can see the details here…
Can’t install templates in Joomla! 1.5 after website move
I had this problem after we lost a domain name for a Joomla! site. I copied the Joomla! site back onto the server using a new domain name, which allowed us to use the same…
Error message adding MailChimp API key in WordPress
I want to allow eager readers to sign up on my website to receive emails from me. I have a MailChimp account and my WordPress expert told me it would take five minutes to install…
TopCoder Arena – TZTester doesn’t work
If you compete in the TopCoder SRMs, the TZTester plugin is very useful. It calls all the tests for you and displays the results, saving valuable minutes in the arena. I used it with my…
TinyMCE control not visible
If your TinyMCE control isn’t appearing and just looks like an ordinary text area, check the tinyMCE.init({ syntax. Missing or extra commas or other syntax errors here will cause the init to fail.
Error using Decimal value with MailChimp and PerceptiveMCAPI
When calling the MailChimp listBatchSubscribe method via PerceptiveMCAPI in ASP.NET, I got the followng error: “A parameter is of, or contains an instance of, type CookComputing.XmlRpc.XmlRpcStruct which cannot be mapped to an XML-RPC type” I…
asp:button broken in IE9
My ASP webpage containing a TinyMCE control worked in Chrome but was broken in IE9. Clicking the ‘Send’ button simply didn’t trigger the sendnow_click event, which I verified by putting a breakpoint in the debugger.…
SQL Server Express 2008 R2 – SQL Server (SQLExpress) wouldn’t start
When trying to start my server in SQL Server Configuration Manager as usual, I got the message: “The request failed or the service did not respond in a timely fashion. Consult the event log or…