On Friday 5th December the Creative Jar, Creative Sharepoint & Creative Jar Technology teams donned our finest glad rags and headed to London for our Christmas party at this years venue of choice – The London Dungeons. After an interesting journey of rides and halls of mirrors we made it to the main room somewhat parched and keen to locate the bar and complementary champagne reception. All in all it was a great night enjoyed by all and a small selection of the photos (censored internally) can be seen below!

Microsoft have announced their latest competition for the Mix 2009 event in Las Vegas. 

They're running a competiton whereby you can submit a Silverlight app to their galley.  The only caveat is that all the source code and related files must all be under 10k in total.  Interesting challenge!!

We've submitted a Mandelbrot generator.  It's pretty heavy on the browser as it needs to generate around 100,000 points for the low resoltion version, but it's interesting what you can do with just 10k of code!!

http://2009.visitmix.com/MIXtify/TenKGallery.aspx

Check out the gallery.   There are some interesting ideas in there, some weird ones too!!

Dates are traditionally a nightmare. Is it US or English? 2 digit years or 4 digit?

To get dates into SqlServer isn't that tramuatic.  Give it to the server in ISO format (yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss) and all is hunky dory.  Or so I thought!!

We had an issue on a server that one of our client's maintain that has it's local set to "English (United States)" and it was giving us all sorts of date problems being it was in a differnt locale to our application.  Turns out there's a connection string property, which I'd never heard of, which can force the locale of your connection to something appropriate

language=British

sorted it out for us anyway.  Now, all locale specific information is set to the same as out app :¬)

So I bought a nice A5 graphics tablet off of one of our developers Ben the other day and after the novelty of writing my name over and over again in photoshop finally wore off I decided to see what it could really do and think about how it could improve our work flow.

To kick things off I got myself a trial copy of Autodesk’s Sketchbook Pro and started to have a play around. SBP is a basic program for sketching and although it isn't nearly as advanced as photoshop, it is very simple and easy to use and it makes it incredibly easy to just start sketching using your tablet and produces some nice results. I drew the Koi Fish in about 2 minutes, and best of all I didn't have to scan it in and use PS Levels to get it looking alright!

This got me thinking about possible uses for this technology in the studio. At CJ when we get animations in we do storyboards to illustrate how the animation will play out and what will happen. When we do these storyboards they are done by hand, normally by Greg and then scanned in and e-mailed over to the client.

This led me on to thinking if we did use this technology for storyboards, perhaps eliminating the need for scanning would encourage us to do a lot more sketching, and in my view this is no bad thing, as someone from Tricky Business once said at a user group, it's a lot easier to change a sketch than it is to change a photoshop file!

So I figure if we were all to do far more sketching at the early stages of a project and get everything laid out on paper (so to speak) before we even start designing then we could save ourselves a lot of back and forth between us and the clients and save ourselves a lot of time spent tweaking PS files here and there.

My thoughts - Get ya tablets on and start sketching!

I was getting a weird error in a site which is using WCF.  The application is silverlight and uses the WCF service for all it's data interaction.  However, while the Silverlight would load, any data access was failing.  A quick browse to the address of the service gave me the dreaded "Could not load file or assembly App_Web_yadayadayada"

Strange error really, giving that I never use the published site where the app_web_xxxxxxx dlls are generated, always plumping for the Web Deployment Project flavour of deployment as it's cleaner for uploading and quick aspx or code-behind changes as you don't have to upload the whole site everytime you publish

Turns out there's an attribute you can add to your web.config to stop all this recompilation stuff

In the compilation tag , add the following attibute.  Makes the site run a little faster due to not having to load debug symbols and also stops the batch recompilation of your bin folder when the AppPool recycles 

<compilation debug="false" batch="false"> 

Job done:¬)

This doesn't happen often, so I thought I would shout about it. But today sees a semi-release of a new search engine!

http://www.kosmix.com/

What makes this search engine different, is that not only does it give you the results you currently get from Google, but you also get related topics, wikipedia and videos if relevant.

In my example I have used 'chocolate cake' which can directly be linked to here http://www.kosmix.com/topic/chocolate_cake. The results returned are sectioned into news, recipes, wikipedia, results for similar keyword searches, videos, audio, shopping, the essential money spinner - google adwords and more.

This site has been created by some big players in the website world, so I expect it to have some legs. Strangely this kind of 'multi results' style search engine first came to my attention when www.a9.com was released, as you could choose any number of websites (that support Open Search) from which to pull back results. However, A9.com has since been rebuilt and is nothing like it's first version.

Give http://www.kosmix.com/ a go, you'll still get Google results and alot more too!