PS3 Hard drive installed

Blimey,  how easy was that!

The longest part was the actual backup and restore.

Flip off the flap at the side of the PS3, unscrew the screw with the arrow pointing to it, pull the HD & cradle out, unscrew cable attaching screws, pop in new HD, screw in the screws, slot it back it and boom thats it!

Thats the easiest hardware install I have ever done.

Upgrading my PS3 hard drive.

For whatever reason this has been on my list of things to do for  over a year and I have just not got arround to doing it.  Stupid thing is I have a 340gb laptop hard drive just sitting in a drawer waiting for me.

So,  supposed to be pretty easy and only takes 10 mins or so.

Basically,  I'll use my WD elements external HD (the one that hasn't died that isn't being used as a time machine backup drive)  to backup my PS3.  Following that I think I just have to open the HD bay, pop out the existing 60gb drive,  pop the new one in then restore my system from the backup.

Easy peasy lemon squeezy.  So lets get on an do it then….

Kapow Comic Con pt 2

Continuing my Kapow experience we attended a couple of the panels.  I think given more time I would have liked to have attended the Thor movie panel plus obviously it would have been nice to actually get in for the Marshal Law one but, never mind.

First panel was the Breaking into Comics the Marvel way which despite the lack of CB Cebulski was still a fascinating insight into breaking into comics in general.

The 2nd panel we attended was the Kapow Surprise Panel which was given by Noel Clarke,  who was a most interesting and enthusiastic bloke and throughly enjoyable panel.  We were all left trying to work out which former Dark Horse IP he had just got the rights to film.

My experience of Kapow was a great one,  some problems which I had expected to face were a bit of inexperience in terms of organisation and some issues with queue for panels which despite the confusion was negated by the fact that the panel areas were very sizeable.  Couple of things they could definitely improve on were simple ones:

• If you are going to have a panel, raise the panel area up so people further back than the first 5 rows can actually see the panel guests
• If you are going to have a large screen behind the panel guests  why not actually have it displaying a camera feed of the people talking as opposed to just the event logo!!
• Allow for more room to queue for the panels and the signing areas
• Perhaps have a larger less narrow area for the stands and perhaps next time scale it up a little bit so there can be more stall holders

All in all I thoroughly enjoyed the day and am looking forward to Kapow Comic Con 2012  being even bigger and better.

Kapow Comic Con pt 1

Bit of a late blog entry for this but, last Saturday I was in attendance and the 1st Kapow Comic Con.  The premise behind Kapow was to bring something of the SDCC and the other big US comic cons to the UK. Whilst we have some of our own shows such as MCM which is more gaming and Anime orientated and Memorabilia which is more …well memorabilia,  we do not have a proper London centric comparison to the US experience.

My experience of comic gatherings has been somewhat limited despite collecting for many many years.  Previous experiences have been a few Birmingham comic marts and the 2006 Bot Con  (yes it is a Transformers convention,  but myself and my mate went to meet one of our fave comic artists Mr Geoff Senior ->Who didnt show :( ).  So all in all this was pretty new for me.

Our plan was to go on the first day, show our support for comics in the UK, checkout the con, buy some merch/back issues and attend some of the panels plus avoiding the main cosplay day. (lol).  We aimed to get to the convention for the 10am Marshal Law panel (both being avid ML fans)…..first problem, bloody engineering works, we ended up taking a convuluted route to the Con but, still we got their with a bit of time to spare……enter the 2nd problem……the queue.  Despite being open at 9am  the queue was still huge  so by the time we got in we  were 26 mins late for the ML panel.

Not the best start to the event but, we were pleasently surprise by the venue and the setup.  The Business Design Centre has a slightly unusual layout with the main area of the Con above some central retail units  but, the stall holders were pretty good with alot of the major London stores there plus the stores we buy from on ebay.  In addition to this a 2000AD and Marvel/Panini stand to one side.  grrrr this was how my first money disapeared!  my first score was something of an impulse buy. When I looked through vol 1 of the ABC Warriors Volgon War in nice hardback format  I was so taken I bought the first 3 volumes.  (I'll probably talk more about that trade hardback in a later post).  

My next purchase was from the Marvel / Panini (oh how we all mis a proper Marvel UK) in the shape of the 2nd and 3rd trades of the excellent Captain Britain & MI-13  series. I was fortunate enough to meet the writer, the super nice bloke that is Paul Cornell later on in the day, sporting a beard grown for charity I made sure to tell him how great CB & MI13 was and to ask for some more please!

Paul Cornell

LINQ + Stored Procedure Optional Parameters

Whilst fixing a bug today I came across a nuance of LINQ.

One of our internal notification emails was failing to send emails to the relevent box.
Checking the error logs led me to discover it was failing on the CCAddress field.
Now,  this field is optional in the procedure  but, from the looks of it rather than it being null it was being set to "" (empty string).

A while back I had added a method to our Email.cs business object.  Simple enough a method to SendEmail using an existing stored procedure which adds all the data to the relevent  queue table.  I could simply have used LINQ to add another queue item but, to maintain consistency  I chose to simply call the procedure's data access object.

Apparantly  when you create your data access layer  the objects created dont take into account the fact that parameters can be optional.

Eventually thanks to the solution I found here :

I found the solution here:
http://www.hookedonlinq.com/CallingStoredProcedureUsingOptionalParameter.ashx

Basically you have to create an overload for the SP LINQ call.  No problem and easily done but, shouldnt this be create with the data objects automatically?

It's somewhat annoying, I mean this is hardly an unusual circumstance is it?

Arrrgh errata

Now I could of course claim I was testing you but the pure and simple fact is I got it wrong.

Whilst I was declaring
<code>FileInfo TheFile = new FileInfo(logoPath);</code>

I was actually then doing
<code>File.Delete(logoPath);</code>

Instead of
<code>TheFile.Delete();</code>

Perhaps this is a lesson to not blog about coding on a Friday afternoon.

Hope it made you chuckle.

System.IO.FileInfo - Delete a file

Just something I stumbled across today.
Why if you are creating an instance of the System.IO.FileInfo class do you then also have to supply the file path if you want to call the Delete method?


FileInfo TheFile = new FileInfo(logoPath);
if (TheFile.Exists)
{
    File.Delete(logoPath);
}


Now let me quote the class summary for you



Provides instance methods for the creation, copying, deletion, moving, and opening of files, and aids in the creation of System.IO.FileStream objects.

I beg to differ!

Whilst the methods are instance (in the sense they are not declared as static)  but surely having to supply the path when you call Delete is a contradiction.


Curiously though I notice that the Delete method

public override void Delete();


Does not actually specify a parameter.

So where does it come from?
Have I missed something?