Monthly Archives: October 2008

TC Electronics – Who writes your manuals?

October 26, 2008UncategorizedGuitar, Music, technologyMarc

Yesterday I succumbed to temptation and upgraded my guitar rig with a TC Electronics Nova System. I’m extremely impressed with pretty much everything about the unit itself, but I have a problem.

As with most electronic deices these days, you really do need to be able to refer to the manual to make the most of it. Unfortunately, the manual for this device (you can find a download on the link above if you want to take a look) is pretty near incomprehensible. It was obviously adapted from the G Major manual by someone who knew the system inside-out. As a result there are lots of assumptions made about the depth of the users’ knowledge. That’s where it falls down. I just don’t have that knowledge and so I can’t make much sense of what’s written there.

Come on, TC – you’ve made an excellent product but it is sadly let down by the manual. Please re-write it so the average user can understand how to make the most of the device.

HTTP Error 407 – Proxy authentication required

October 6, 2008Uncategorized407, authentication, configuration, proxyMarc

Recently I deployed an application into the live environment at work and all was running smoothly until a proxy setting change suddenly stopped the app being able to talk to the outside world. I didn’t much fancy having to rework the code to allow proxy authentication, so I did a bit of searching on Google, and came up with the following block to go into the app.config file.

<system.net>
  <defaultProxy enabled="true" useDefaultCredentials="true">
    <proxy bypassonlocal="True" proxyaddress="http://proxy"/>
  </defaultProxy>
</system.net>

Adding the section to the config file instructs the assembly to provide the default credentials to the proxy when requested, and saved me having to recompile and go through the system test phase or of product lifecycle. Hopefully it might save someone else the pain, too.

Programming Quotes

October 1, 2008UncategorizedMarc

I like these…

“Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.” (Damian Conway from the book Perl Best Practices).

and

“Before software can be reusable it first has to be usable.” (unknown)