http://www.lubasi.org/

Lubasi is an orphanage based in Livingstone, Zambia near Victoria Falls, they care for up to sixty children between the ages of 5 - 10 who mostly have become orphans because their parents died of AIDS. 33% of the population of Livinstone has AIDS and so the traditional extended family approach to looking after these children has become overloaded.

If you are feeling charitable and have a PayPal account you can leave a donation towards the cost of running the orphanage via their website.

Recently I heard a story on radio 4 where a man had died whilst out driving his car and the AA had refused to help his family get the car started when they contacted them. The man had been a lifelong member. The AA then issued a statement saying that their operator had acted against their guidelines. The whole story was a PR nightmare for the AA.

Then the other day I found out a friend of my Mum's called Joan recently has been going through some bad times. She is a 59 year old nurse and her husband had a heart attack and died a couple of weeks before christmas. She then was told by her landlady that she should find somewhere else to live. This was because Joan's husband used to do some chores every week to reduce the cost of the rent. So my mum offered to take Joan in for a few months till she is back on her feet.

Joan told me that when she contacted BT Yahoo about cancelling her broadband they said that if she didn't transfer her account to my mum's house she would be immeadiately liable for the remaining term of the contract (£280 approx). Now it seems to me that BT Yahoo are contractually correct but that they could show a little compassion as events beyond Joan's control have left her not wanting her BT broadband account.

I am going to contact BT directly on her behalf on monday to see if I can get some sort of compromise out of them.

UPDATE: Well I submitted the above to the BT Website and one of their customer care staff contacted me today asking if I could forward Joan's Account Details to see what he could do so fingers crossed.

My perception of hard drives is that they are slow, bulky, power hungry, put out too much heat, noisy, unreliable and prone to catastrophic failure instead of graceful degradation. Given a choice I'd rather not store my precious data on such a device.

I long for the day when an evil genius invents a solid state device the size of a matchbox that stores several TB's uses the same power as ram and will put those ancient spinning things to shame when it comes to reliability.

Anybody know of any solid state devices that are showing promise at the developmental stage?

Here's someone that agrees with me

I don't like my iPod or my iPod shuffle, I hate iTunes and can't find an alternative. I recently downloaded the latest version of iTunes and it spat the dummy when I connected the shuffle saying that the firmware needed updating.

I went to download the firmware at 53MB! for a shuffle firmware update Apple get my bloatware 2005 nomination.

I am quite particular when it comes to arranging my MP3 collection and so I would like to be able to transfer files to a portable MP3 player using Windows explorer and preserve the tree structure, again with apple ipods this is a big no no.

That said they do look great.

Scott Hansleman, Joe Stagner and Omar have put together a podcast with some useful insight on the DasBlog blogging engine. The quality is less than perfect but the content is great. Check it out if you want to learn more.

The short answer is if making changes to your production environment is costly then getting changes right the first time becomes vital. If your delivering software to a client then you will build confidence with the client if you deliver 'bug free' software. If you must peform business as usual testing or as some call it regression testing then a test driven development approach may lessen this burden with time.

An equally important question is when wouldn't you use test driven development? Well when there is relatively little expense in changing the production environment and when bugs making it into the production environment don't represent a disaster. Prototyping would not require it nor would temporary applications.

Do you need nUnit to do test driven development? No, all you need is to be able to create something that will test your code, this could be a vbs script, windows app or a keyboard macro. nUnit is just a tool that takes care of the more mundane aspects of TDD. Test Driven Development is an approach not a toolset.

To me it really comes into it's own when you are constructing components/services that will be used by other developers. The tests will serve two purposes they will prove your code works (hopefully) and they will be examples on how to use your components and services.

If you've ever wanted to use keyboard shortcuts for functions you would normally use a mouse for then look in Options > Keyboard. Here you can define your own personal scheme containing shortcuts you define. You can copy an existing scheme to base yours on.

I leveraged this to map Go To Definition on to CTRL+F which suits me fine because my favourite text editor that I use for a lot of Classic ASP work uses the same short cut to search for a highlighted word.

The list of actions you can map is extensive, but it would probably be folly to go wild and re-map everything, that said there is always one or two useful amendments that make life easier.

Whilst the IE team have expended vast resources to develop a Pop-Up blocker it seems someone forgot to tell the Windows Update team that people genrally despise things that go Pop. This wretched message keeps appearing on my machine and stealing the focus when it does so.

If would like to feedback information to the Windows Update team they operate a discussion forum on the Microsoft Site you can find it here: Windows Update Discussion

A colleague at work got this error message when using a piece of online banking software.