There is a new search engine on the block, you've got to admire someone who's got the balls to take google on!

Check CUIL out.

My first impressions are that it's fast, it doesn't have a geographical filter like google which might make looking for online stores in your country a problem, unless it handles this behind the scenes.

As you would expect it's index is not as complete as google, I have a three websites and it only found one of them but it may just take some time to get round to the others.

I'm hoping it will be Bot unfriendly, last time I trawled my weblog's live search was referring very open ended searchs to my site, i'm guessing this is bots submitting search words from a dictionary and then working through the list of results, but i'm not sure. One thing I know is that google does not show up in the logs in this way.

One thing I know is competition is healthy if this new site can steal some market share from google it will help to keep google honest.

Robert Scoble has posted on his blog about it.

Entity Definitions
==================
Center - An organisation that runs courses
Center Admin - A course administrator
Center Instructor - A course instructor
Organisation - An organisation that sends people on courses
Organisation Admin - An administrator at an organisation that sends people on courses
Attendee - A person that attends a course
 

Complete First Aid Course Bookings
==================================
- These will be administered by ProHealth to begin with
- Add certification duration to Course Types
- Add course attendee certificate issue date / expiry fields - This should be the same date that is on the certificate and will be used to trigger reminders to be sent out.

Nice to have's
==============
- Course Search Form - Search by category / date / type / status
- Upcoming Course list - set max in list / period i.e 3 months / both
- RSS / Email Notifications for upcoming courses
Enquiry form
- filled out by PH admin when enquiry is received by phone / email / fax
- Should allow searching for repeat bookings by existing customers by post code / company name
- Will track enquiries as they become bookings
- Sends an email to prospective customer containg a link to book on line / pdf to faxback
- PDF contains enquiry ref will be keyed by ph admin when fax is recieved will save time.
  
Expiry Tracking System
======================
Because a company would be nuts if it didn't chase repeat business
- Inteligent tracking of certificate expiry dates
- Issue reminder letters, calls, or emails to org's, companies and individuals.
-- Currently this is done once a year
-- Organised companies book an entire year in advance
-- Disorganised companies book at the last minute.
-- The system should try and make life easier for both types of company
- Optout/in facility will allow reminders to be turned off

Company Portal
===============
Will follow when all in house admin functionality is complete
- Customer will be issued a login and password

I wanted a way to get into the guts of monorail so I offered to create a website for the occupational health company that my mum works for. It is very much a work in progress, you can check it out here ProHealthUk if you want to see the CRUD click the admin link. When the site goes fully live you will have to login but for the time being you can edit data.

So tonight at about 8pm I sit down on the couch with a beer when I hear a knock at the door. When I answer it there two ladies and a gent all smartly dressed in suits. The woman asks me to confirm my name and address as shown on her clipboard she then starts a vauge diatribe about how I could save money on my energy bills. At no point did she identify that she was from nPower. I learnt this from looking at the logo on her Id badge.

The lady's sales pitch continued for about a minute until I twigged what was going on. I asked her straight out "Are you offering to change my provider?" she seemed disinclined to answer the question so I asked it again. She said yes to which I replied I am not interested in changing my provider. She asked if it was due to the hassle, I said no I just do not want to change. That was the end of it.

What annoyed me was the underhand way in which the salespeople misleadingly explained their presence on my doorstep. If they had identified themselves as N-Power and offered to quote me a price for supplying fuel I would have given them a chance. I like the next person would always rather pay less for my fuel but I felt like they were trying to con me into changing without even realising I was doing so. I am now very unlikely ever to contemplate using n-power in future. They should stop this practice as they will get some very negative pr from people like me. IMHO door to door sales is about as low as it gets anyway.

Rant over. 

I am building a course booking system in monorail and in the process of uploading the source to google code. This is basically a way for me to understand the MVC approach to building websites using the castle monorail project. I figured the code may be of use to others tackling similar tasks or who just want to hack around with existing code to see how it works. I am not by any means a monorail expert so some of the approaches I have taken may be wrong or ill advised but that is kind of the point learning by experience is my favourite approach. Let me know if you spot any. All help gratefully received.

This will be a system designed to help administrators organise training courses. The initial need is for it to be able to handle first aid courses run by a health clinic.

The system will be used by non-technical admin staff who are familiar with email and basic word processing on windows pc's.

The development of the project uses the .net framework 2.0 and an MVC pattern with the Monorail Castle framework. It makes use of the Active Record ORM to handle data access. SQL Server is used for the database. I have elected to use nVelocity for the view templates. I have also elected not to write tests and use tdd. I know I should it's just that my brain cannot absorb that many new things at once.

The system allows new courses to be setup, new course types to be configured. Courses can be managed with new attendees booked on to courses.

If the courses are for certification purposes if an attendee passes the course the certificate issued can be tracked so renewal notification can be sent out.

The system allows attendees to be moved from one course to another and for their booking to be cancelled.

The system will produce reports for invoicing, courses and reminders for expired certificates.

You can find the project here:

http://code.google.com/p/centro/

I was having difficulty getting to sleep last night and started wondering what happens to a persons blog when they die.

Currently this blog lives on my server at home so I wouldn't reckon on it lasting too long after my passing should I be struck down by a Bus or Psyclist in london.

Most folks who blog use a company that they pay to host or will host for free, I wonder what there policy is.

Then I got to thinking wouldn't it be nice if there was a website that offered to host blogs of the deceased.

On the face of it this would seem to be an altruistic service but I sure there is a VC out there trying to figure out the ad revenue business model.

I'm going to do some google based research and report my findings here, watch this space.....

Every now and then I have a half baked idea for a new kind of Gizmo, today I was staring at the mess of cables on my desk and thought up this.

A device that replaces the multitude of cables that inhabit the back of your desk with one single fat cable for neatness.
Could also develop a wirless version using wimax technology.
Including:
- 2 x A/C Power for monitors
- 2 x DVI / VGA for Dual screen
- 1 x USB (built in powered hub
-- Four ports for:
--- Keyboard
--- mouse
--- Other peripherals

So I am relatively new to using merge tools. I have been developing with them for about a year. Merge tools become a necessity if you are developing in a team, or working on branches in your source control system. You do have to be ultra careful when you are merging against another developers changes. The merge tool you use for this is key, a good tool will help you quickly assess the differences and let you combine them quickly and accurately.

Tools that cost $$$

At work we use Araxis Merge and it is a great tool, it is a very polished piece of software it makes merging files easy, it supports three way merges and has a fast folder comparison utility. It is relatively expensive at $79 but represents good value for money.

Jeff Attwood wrote an article on his blog about Beyond Compare, I am going to try this out as I need a tool for my dev work at home and this is only $30 according to Jeff it is every bit as good as Araxis and a lot cheaper.

Tools that are free

Scott Hansleman has written about free Diff Tools on his blog his pick of the bunch is WinMerge some of the others he mentions are KDiff3 and  DiffMerge .

I always try and avoid using these keywords when naming objects in SQL Server:

ADD	EXCEPT	PERCENT
ALL	EXEC	PLAN
ALTER	EXECUTE	PRECISION
AND	EXISTS	PRIMARY
ANY	EXIT	PRINT
AS	FETCH	PROC
ASC	FILE	PROCEDURE
AUTHORIZATION	FILLFACTOR	PUBLIC
BACKUP	FOR	RAISERROR
BEGIN	FOREIGN	READ
BETWEEN	FREETEXT	READTEXT
BREAK	FREETEXTTABLE	RECONFIGURE
BROWSE	FROM	REFERENCES
BULK	FULL	REPLICATION
BY	FUNCTION	RESTORE
CASCADE	GOTO	RESTRICT
CASE	GRANT	RETURN
CHECK	GROUP	REVOKE
CHECKPOINT	HAVING	RIGHT
CLOSE	HOLDLOCK	ROLLBACK
CLUSTERED	IDENTITY	ROWCOUNT
COALESCE	IDENTITY_INSERT	ROWGUIDCOL
COLLATE	IDENTITYCOL	RULE
COLUMN	IF	SAVE
COMMIT	IN	SCHEMA
COMPUTE	INDEX	SELECT
CONSTRAINT	INNER	SESSION_USER
CONTAINS	INSERT	SET
CONTAINSTABLE	INTERSECT	SETUSER
CONTINUE	INTO	SHUTDOWN
CONVERT	IS	SOME
CREATE	JOIN	STATISTICS
CROSS	KEY	SYSTEM_USER
CURRENT	KILL	TABLE
CURRENT_DATE	LEFT	TEXTSIZE
CURRENT_TIME	LIKE	THEN
CURRENT_TIMESTAMP	LINENO	TO
CURRENT_USER	LOAD	TOP
CURSOR	NATIONAL	TRAN
DATABASE	NOCHECK	TRANSACTION
DBCC	NONCLUSTERED	TRIGGER
DEALLOCATE	NOT	TRUNCATE
DECLARE	NULL	TSEQUAL
DEFAULT	NULLIF	UNION
DELETE	OF	UNIQUE
DENY	OFF	UPDATE
DESC	OFFSETS	UPDATETEXT
DISK	ON	USE
DISTINCT	OPEN	USER
DISTRIBUTED	OPENDATASOURCE	VALUES
DOUBLE	OPENQUERY	VARYING
DROP	OPENROWSET	VIEW
DUMMY	OPENXML	WAITFOR
DUMP	OPTION	WHEN
ELSE	OR	WHERE
END	ORDER	WHILE
ERRLVL	OUTER	WITH
ESCAPE	OVER	WRITETEXT