Shandy's Blog

Where Andrew Sutton, aka Shandy rants and rambles on as the fancy takes him

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My name is Andrew Sutton, aka Shandy.

I am currently living and working in the UK within the garment industry as an IT specialist. This blog contains mainly IT related issues.

I was a Microsoft VB MVP for a couple of years (Apr 2004-Mar 2006) and was a vbCityLeader between April 2003 and June 2007.

If you are looking for my Sri Lanka or Morocco experiences check out Shandy's Sri Lanka Blog or Shandy's Morocco Blog. My personal (Non IT) blog is now at Shandy's Place

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Saturday, February 26, 2005 #

Should be off to the German Restaurant, up near Galle Face Green in Colombo, tonight for something to eat. Its been a good few months since we last went and we have been 3 or 4 times since we have lived in Colombo. The food has always been pretty good and reasonably cheap. Sadly, they have had no German beer the last few times we have been but I can live in hope :-D We're meeting some friends Sheila & Gail. Sheila is a long term friend over here and Gail is one of her oldest friends, visiting from Cairns in Austraila. We went out with them to Cricket Club last night and my wife, Helen, went up to Nuwara Eliya with them last weekend. Gail flies back early Tuesday morning so this might be the last chance to see her. I think the plan is to go up to the Galle Face Hotel around 18:30 and watch the sun set (which we did quite often when we first came out here but haven't done for 12 months now) and then walk down to the German Restaurant around 19:30. I'll try and post a review of the place tomorrow.

posted @ 4:30 PM

For the first time since November I have managed to open up Visual Studio .NET and get stuck into some coding in real anger. Man it feels so good :-D Nothing earth shattering has been accomplished as most of the time was spent scratching my head, trying to figure out how to do really basic stuff. I set myself a little project up to create a command line email application. One that you could run at the DOS prompt and pass command line arguments to for stuff like email server, recipient, sender, subject, message text etc.

I've got the basics of the command line manager component sorted out, learning about how to create a collection class along the way. This is a DLL that you pass the command line to and it breaks it up into name/value pairs with a few members to make retrieving the command line arguments pretty simple. The Email component is also working so I can send emails. Another DLL that also has a graphic form that can be used to modify the settings, if required. I need to put them together and expand on the basic features a bit but all in all not a bad days programming :)

When I get it up and running I'll post it up as an open source project, not that I suspect many people will be too interested in it ;-)

posted @ 4:20 PM

I noticed that the UK government has created a web site that

is designed to provide both home users and small businesses with proven, plain English advice to help protect computers, mobile phones and other devices from malicious attack. It consists of both the Advice on this website, and a low-volume Alerting Service.

The web site can be found at IT Safe and I found a BBC News Article About IT Safe.

To be honest there is not much information on there as yet but it will be interesting to see if it takes off as I think the idea certainly has merit.

posted @ 10:06 AM