Kirkstall Festival was fantastic this year, and we had good weather for possibly the first time this summer. I'd helped Pyramid of Arts' Youth Group make an armada of sea creatures for the parade. We joined various other groups and schools from Leeds marching through the streets of Kirkstall. Everyone’s work was fantastic, and we were particularly pleased to be given the best group prize for our underwater parade creatures.

I'd gladly volunteered to play a giant drum in the parade. I like making a lot of noise, but I didn't realise how much pain a drum can cause repeatedly hitting your legs. …

I've made a 3D model of Pyramid of Arts' sculpture at Thwaite Mill. Pyramid of Arts is an arts charity bringing together artists with and without learning disabilities to work on large scale arts projects.

I wanted to have an experiment with creating 3D models in Sketch-up and see if I could get it added to Google Earth. Google Earth is a program by Google that displays pictures of the whole world and 3D models of some of it.

Pyramid made this sculpture about 3 years ago and had just finished it when I joined. It's Pyramid's first permanent work, so it would be really nice if it could be …

The weather in Leeds lately has been very random. Sunny one minute, torrential rain and thunder the next.

To help others know what weather I'm experiencing, I've made a handy ASP.NET control that displays the weather in Leeds. It shows a picture of me experiencing that weather and can also tell you the weather in several other places I've been to.

It can also change how the whole site looks based on the weather, but it doesn't do this at the moment. You can see this control on the right hand side of my blog's homepage.

Went to geekUp Leeds last night. Had a lot of fun and met some interesting people, although I've forgotten all their names.

There were a lot more people than I expected. Who would have known there were so many geeks in Leeds. Guess we normally hide away.

I wasn't able so stay long, so I didn't get to chat to most people. Hopefully I'll get a better chance at the next one.

In my drive to sort out my development processes there are a few things I want to do. Top of my list is proper automated testing and creating automatic documentation.

Doing these steps every time I compile my site (or application) will add a lot more steps, so I thought it would be better to learn how to automate the build process first.

I'd heard that NAnt was the tool I should be using, but I found it a little bit overwhelming.

NAnt is a program that follows a list of instructions in an XML file called a build file. These instructions are used to do a series of tasks like the following: …

In my first job out of university my assigned mentor Alex always had a copy of The Mythical Man Month on his desk. He urged me to read it and said that the world would be a better place if everyone in charge of projects had read it.

That was almost six years ago, and I've just got round to it. I went through a period after uni where I'd had enough of reading text books. I've recently felt quite a strong urge to learn more, and this book seemed like a good place to start.

The author Frederick Brooks talks from his experience of working for IBM in the 1960s. In some ways this book is timeless. …

I wanted to pass a list of user IDs into a stored procedure. What I really wanted was to be able to pass an array, but you're not able to do that because it would be too easy. It took me quite a while to figure this out, but now I know how, it'll be easy next time.

There's a nice set of functions that allow you to get values from an XML string and treat the set of values like a table. Just what I wanted from arrays really.

Here is the XML string that I used:

<users>

<user id="24" />

<user id="27" />

</users>

And here is the relevant part of the stored procedure I …

In my last job I worked with a team of about 50 other developers all working on the same project. A senior developer had set up a source control system that allowed us all to play together without overwriting each other's code.

When I moved to my current, much smaller team there was no source control system. We didn't seem to need it, except the few small times a month when we did. None of these moments seemed big enough to warrant setting up a proper source control system. However, when you add them all up, we could have saved ourselves a lot of heart ache.

I decided I wanted to fix this, …

I've just recently started leading another art project. This time I'm working with the adult group from Pyramid of Arts. The BBC have very kindly leant us some sound recording equipment. We've used this to record some sounds and we're going to splice them together into something musical.

We spent the first few weeks of the project exploring sound. Making it, listening to it, drawing it and recording it. We've just got back from a sound recording trip to Thwaite Mill. We recorded a huge array of sounds made by the mill and pretty much anything else we could find that made sounds.

So, now we' …

This isn't really a project, but it's been a problem that's bugged me for a while. When I download lots of pictures from my camera, how can I rename them all to something more suitable than IMG_0564.

I like to give my camera pictures a descriptive name followed by a number if it's one of a set. I've wasted a lot of time in the past renaming them all by hand. This morning I finally got round to working out a better and much quicker way.

There will be lots of ways to do this, but I've wanted to try a language called Powershell for a while. Powershell is an extension to Windows and is like DOS, …