I had a weird Serialization problem with Linq to SQL the other day and since I didn’t Google the fix I figured I’d publish it here.
I had a table which refers to itself, something like this:

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[node](
[id] [int] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL,
[title] [nvarchar](50) NOT NULL,
[parentId] [int] NULL,
CONSTRAINT [PK_node] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED
(
[id] ASC
)
ALTER TABLE [dbo].[node]  WITH CHECK ADD  CONSTRAINT [FK_node_node] FOREIGN KEY([parentId])
REFERENCES [dbo].[node] ([id])

I have a stored function to retrieve all the nodes, including their descendants from the DB, mine’s based on the function included here [LINK]
Once I got the rows, …

Moore’s Law states that the level of technology/computing power available doubles every 18-24 months. This exponential growth has held true the last thirty years and shows no signs of slowing down. There is a physical limitation which will be reach but I have no doubt that by that time we will switch from silicon-based transistors to some other means. E.g. Just the other day scientists announced the world’s first molecular transistor consisting of a single molecule of benzene [LINK].
So what’s next? Well if computers get stronger/smaller/faster you might think we’ll …

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a theory in psychology which attempts to classify human “needs” in order of importance ranging from low to high. The lowest needs being the ones most fundamental to life, the highest being the most aspirational or transcendent.
The hierarchy of needs is arranged in a pyramid, once lower level needs are met you can move up to the next level. Lowest on the pyramid are things like Food, Sleep, Water. Here’s a visual:

Self-actualization is highest in the list and presumably by the time you’re operating at …

Steve Chamberlain [LINK] has achieved the ultimate in home-brew electronics: Creating his own CPU from basic logic chips. Absolutely amazing. The photos alone are a thing of beauty but to know this thing actually works is incredible.
From Steve’s site:
“Big Mess o’ Wires 1 is an original CPU design. It does not use any commercial CPU, but instead has a custom CPU constructed from dozens of simple logic chips. Around this foundation is built a full computer with support for a keyboard, sound, video, and external peripherals.
My original goals were:

Build the …

A number of folks have asked for detailed step-by-step instructions so here’s how I added a nice Carousel to the Arthemia theme running under Wordpress. I use the free version of the Arthemia theme which doesn’t have a carousel out of the box. It’s easy to add one though and of course these instructions apply regardless of the theme you’re using so here goes.
I’ll assume you have Wordpress installed, doesn’t matter which version.
Depending on the theme you use, the pages you’ll need to edit are located in a folder under …

Twitter oAuth is working again, in fact it never went away. All that was suspended was the ability to grant new access tokens. Existing ones worked fine. At least from my rudimentary testing.
It seems like it came back sometime around 10 o’clock eastern. I immediately noticed things weren’t working on TweetARun.com but Twitter was at least providing an authorization token.
A bit of debugging revealed that Twitter no longer respects the oauth_callback parameter passed in by the relying party. It seems to be just directing the token back …

Today I learned that Twitter and Yahoo have pulled their support for oAuth on the news of a security flaw. [LINK] Open Auth (oAuth) is an open source authentication scheme which I’d just implemented in a new project I’m working on (http://TweetARun.com) and wouldn’t you know it it’s dead in the water.
This just highlights the dependency we as Relying Parties have on Identity Providers.
http://TweetARun.com is a nice simple little site that purposefully avoids the need to register or store passwords by implementing Federated Single Sign On with Twitter …

Checkout this screen grab of an error message thrown up by my garbage collector’s online bill pay system. This is appalling. If you develop software for a living you’ll know what’s going on here. Essentially the developer didn’t unit test their code, and didn’t handle the exception. Actually they did handle the exception but in completely the wrong way, throwing a system exception straight back to the end user.
Not only has this developer ruined the user experience but he’s exposed vital information to a potential villain. E.g. from this …

I like to run and when I have the time I’ll run about 30-40 miles a month. There’s a couple of great free tools out there to help improve the analytics of your run. The first is appropriately named “MapMyRun.com”
Map My Run lets you draw your run on a Google Maps like map and measure the distance. It let’s you store your runs and share with others. This is nice as you can sometimes find a track in your area.
May My Run does a nice job but it …

You’ve got to be careful with alliances. When two companies work on the same thing then try to make those things work together, hilarity ensues. Last time I wrote about WSRP ["WSRP is Soo dead"]. WSRP in my opinion is a dead man walking. This time the topic is “Open Ajax”. [LINK].
The Open Ajax Alliance has been in existence since late 2005/early 2006. In that time I am not sure what they’ve done other than publish the OpenAjax Hub.
The charter is “The OpenAjax Alliance is an organization of vendors, …