• Run like a big girls blouse to your command line rubbish Git, or
• Use a real source control system like Visual Source Safe, or
• Curse someone at Microsoft whilst you attempt to install Team Foundation  Server for the 17th time in the last 3 days and dream of all the fun you could be having branching, merging and blaming with Mercurial instead.

At every possible opportunity (usually a “Next” button) you will have to navigate an error message. Sooner rather than later when installing Sharepoint Services for Windows or whatever is called you will come across this lovely error:

“create database permission denied in database ‘master’ “

What this means in even more plain English is this. The username you entered in the previous screen AS WELL AS THE CURRENT LOGGED IN USER (if you followed proper TFS install instructions then this should be TFSSetup) must have the “dbcreator” role assigned in MS SQL . LOoK:

You have to make sure the user you set to use the database in those Sharepoint Configuration screens also has access to the master database:

This is all probably incredibly insecure, but it will get the damned thing installed. Consult your local security advisor as for what to do with all those permissions (i.e. not me).

Good luck with the rest of your install. Post your nightmare installation stories below, feel free to pepper them with half truths to make the subject matter slightly more interesting.

http://border-radius.com/

Css border radiuses for firefox, webkit and css3 all at once. It’s so simple I’m starting to fear for my job, especially with browsers becoming more and more standards compliant.

As the years pass and experiences accumulate into a collection of blurry images all strangely framed by Polaroid paper,  I can’t help but come to the conclusion that it’s all a bit pointless. Religion that is.

Now I could blame Richard Dawkins and his zealously anti-religious campaign or maybe it’s the hilarious muppet show put on my al-Mouhajiroun/Islam4Uk.

But however much vocal media personalities may sway your opinion, ultimately the question of “who am I” can only be answered by ourselves. As a dashingly handsome young Muslim man living in one of the greatest cities on Earth it is not hard to have your resolutely held beliefs smashed to pieces one by one.

Look around your office – can you honestly say they are all going to hell? And if so just what did they do to warrant such condemnation? Do you as a Muslim have the confidence in your belief to walk up to any one of your non-Muslim co-workers and tell them they are destined for eternal condemnation because they showed too much skin? Or rather do you, like the majority of the billion plus Muslims on Earth put your head down, splutter under your breath and proceed to collect your pay packet on Friday.

The question is – have you made a mockery of your faith or has your faith made a mockery of you?

I can’t help but think it’s the latter.

A week later and you’ve already slipped behind schedule by half a day. “No worries” you say because you know you and/or your team will make up that half day with coffee and enthusiasm alone.

Several months later your 30 day schedule is now a piece of paper nobody wants to take owenership of. The poor orphan in all your majestically titled Project Documents folder.

So where did it all go so awfully wrong?

I don’t think one brief blog post will enlighten anyone but from my own anecdotal evidence, the sins go something like this:

Thou shall not covet thy neighbours wife.

People like building things. But they like coming up with ideas more. Once the project starts its become “old hat” and new, sexier projects start catching your eye. Your imagination drifts and you wonder how great it would be to be the architect coming up with that cool new spec. It’s 5 o’clock and you realise you’ve just spent 4 hours imagining how you would architect wordpress if you were given the opportunity.

Thou shall not commit adultery

Once you start a project your project manager comes along and says “Hey, the man, we’re trying to get these funky new clients into bed with us, we need you to come up with a quick demo in your spare time”. Being the good boy or girl you are you say “Yes”. You’ve still only ever got past the first few pages of “How to say no without feeling guilty“. You know your schedule is tight and you know you don’t have any of this mythical spare time. But there seems to be a chasm and a disconnect between your brain and your mouth. The numskulls aren’t doing their jobs properly. Faster than you can say “productivity suffers when context switching” you’re now heavily involved in more projects than P Diddy. Next time you won’t make the same mistake you promise yourself.

Thou shall not make wrongful use of the name of thy God

You’re already behind schedule and your team cry salty tears over their latest sprint. The false prophet that was agile has revealed his true colours. Rapid Development was but a cruel prank by the devil. The fabled waterfall was just an illusion. Your architecture in hindsight turns out to be a contradicting piece of convoluted pipework that ends up dumping raw sewage straight into the sea. It all seemed stunningly obvious when you were drawing out the squares in MS Word. It looked even more solid when you applied that shadow effect underneath the yellow barrel that was supposed to represent what turned out to be several master-slave databases. It’s been written about for decades but it still doesn’t seep into our collectively thick skulls. Without gathering requirements and taking time to develop a prototype or carry out proper in depth research your project is doomed.

Thou shalt remember the Sabbath and keep it holy

Everybody needs a break. DHH reckons we can only program effectively for 5 hours a day. Once projects start slipping panic mode sets in. You try and hack your day to contain 48 hours but it just doesn’t seem to work no matter how many redbull-coffee-sugar concoctions you invent. Your body gives up and your brain seems to have seeped out with that 8th trip to the loo. Sometimes you have to admit you’re just a human. Ain’t no red cape gonna change that.

So then?

I don’t have any answers – but maybe realising that software development and systems building is a human endeavour that is prone to all the weaknesses of being human – will help us leave our pride at the door and stop believing in our own super-human abilities.

Having decided to use the seemingly very useful and bordering on lovely Community Engine in place of a custom solution, the next step was testing it out in a live site. You can of course use your shell to install the plugins or you can cheat like me and ftp them on. It all depends how many cups of coffee you want to get through.

Right, so everything running like clockwork that is until you decide to break into the virgin home page and give the commnity aspect of the engine a good workout. Kabooom! Oh dear “image_science” caused the kind of mischief only a rails app can. Proudly crowning the top of my page was the following statement of error:

Define INLINEDIR or HOME in your environment and try again

Blimey, you were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!

After a bit of digging and coming across this post I made the following changes to my setup:

1. In my hosting user area created a new folder “islamikah.inlinedir” with permission 755
2. In config/production.rb added  the line ENV['INLINEDIR'] = ‘/path/to/islamikah.inlinedir/’
3. Restart your server, or with fcgi kill any dispatch.fcgi  processes (on hosting rails do $ killall -u user_name dispatch.fcgi). Your host may have different arrangements for restarting fcgi.

And all was well again in the land.

Now I am in love with JQuery, like everyone else. I’ve had my fair share of JavaScript woes over the years and using JQuery is like putting lipstick on a pig and actually looking nice.

Several coffees and expletives later it turns out Internet Explorer  in all its reincarnations doesn’t seem to know what “background-position” is and instead retrieves its own “background-position-x” and “background-position-y” css rule. That’s all very nice and good but it means my code now has to have this:

function determine_x_pos(obj){
//parameter obj is something like $('#my-div')
    var pos = $(obj).css("background-position");
    if (pos == 'undefined' || pos == null) {
        pos = $(obj).css("background-position-x"); //die in hell
    } else {
        pos = pos.split(" ")[0];
    }
    return pos  || 0; //yes returning a 0 on fail  is bad but its for demo!
}

In true NastyHabit fashion, the code is shit. Nevertheless, it works a treat!

The paranoid guy in me believes this cursed issue only afflicts me. Please check if you too have been burdened by the beast of redmond and help a fellow man feel less picked on by the curse of IE.

Enjoy at your own peril *I claim NO RESPONSIBILITY whatsoever if you cock up your database using this function*.

DROP FUNCTION IF EXISTS `slugify`;
DELIMITER ;;
CREATE DEFINER=`root`@`localhost`
FUNCTION `slugify`(dirty_string varchar(200))
RETURNS varchar(200) CHARSET latin1
DETERMINISTIC
BEGIN
	DECLARE x, y , z Int;
	Declare temp_string, allowed_chars, new_string VarChar(200);
	Declare is_allowed Bool;
	Declare c, check_char VarChar(1);

	set allowed_chars = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789-";
	set temp_string = dirty_string;

	Select temp_string Regexp('&') Into x;
	If x = 1 Then
		Set temp_string = replace(temp_string, '&', ' and ');
	End If;

	Select temp_string Regexp('[^a-z0-9]+') into x;
	If x = 1 then
		set z = 1;
		While z <= Char_length(temp_string) Do
			Set c = Substring(temp_string, z, 1);
			Set is_allowed = False;
			Set y = 1;
			Inner_Check: While y <= Char_length(allowed_chars) Do
				If (strCmp(ascii(Substring(allowed_chars,y,1)), Ascii(c)) = 0) Then
					Set is_allowed = True;
					Leave Inner_Check;
				End If;
				Set y = y + 1;
			End While;
			If is_allowed = False Then
				Set temp_string = Replace(temp_string, c, '-');
			End If;

			set z = z + 1;
		End While;
	End If;

	Select temp_string Regexp("^-|-$|'") into x;
	If x = 1 Then
		Set temp_string = Replace(temp_string, "'", '');
		Set z = Char_length(temp_string);
		Set y = Char_length(temp_string);
		Dash_check: While z > 1 Do
			If Strcmp(SubString(temp_string, -1, 1), '-') = 0 Then
				Set temp_string = Substring(temp_string,1, y-1);
				Set y = y - 1;
			Else
				Leave Dash_check;
			End If;
			Set z = z - 1;
		End While;
	End If;

	Repeat
		Select temp_string Regexp("--") into x;
		If x = 1 Then
			Set temp_string = Replace(temp_string, "--", "-");
		End If;
	Until x <> 1 End Repeat;

	Return temp_string;
END;;
DELIMITER ;

I’m more interested in the identity protection of “juvenile” criminals tried in “adult” courts for “adult” crimes. The disturbing murder of Sophie Lancaster came hot on the heels of another wolf-pack-murder this time of Ernest Norton, a pensioner playing cricket with his son. And if you think these are isolated cases causing mass panic for no apparent reason then shed a tear or two for Alan Fessey, Gary Newlove and others in Liverpool and plenty of other unfortunate victims of the drunken juvenile hordes.

Back to the Goth murder. The attacker was either 15 at the time of the attack or he is 15 now. Regardless, I want to know:

1. His name
2. Where he lives
3. His face

If at the age of 15 he decided (as did his mates) that killing somebody because they dress slightly differently from the norm is quite funny, then I believe it is my right to swear at him and curse his face to eternal damnation. Or at least a few years in the slammer.

I do not want to be presented with an anonymous “boy A” banner scrolling across the bottom of my screen. No. I want a full scale 32” face menacingly peering at m. His eyes telling me he believes doing it for “a bit of a larf because they are Goths” is OK. It’s YouTube material. It’s an act just long enough to fit in his 5 minutes of mobile video recording time which he could Bluetooth to his equally Neanderthal school mates. I don’t want to understand what led him to becoming such a thoughtless moron. Right now I want him to be hung, drawn and quartered. I want the worst possible punishment under British law tripled especially for him. I want revenge on behalf of the public.

Because as morbid as it sounds, I want to feel like a good, law abiding citizen. I need “boy A” to make me feel morally superior. “Boy A” is my moral ruler. I want to feel I am contributing to this country even as a small cog in a huge machine in a positive way. I want confirmation my morals are superior to his. I want to know that good prevails over evil. I want to know there is some sort of deterrent to drunken moron teenagers going on the rampage. I want to know this country is becoming safer not more dangerous. I want to be part of a moral public victory against this juvenile monster. I need justice.

Saying all that a life sentence will be just fine Mr Judge Sir.

Twats. Justice served.

EDIT: The judge has lifted the ban on concealing their identities. Thank you. I feel slightly better. Rot in hell Brendan Harris and Ryan Herbert. At least the Judge seems to feel similar sentiments to the public, which is a step in the right direction.The Goth murderers of Baccup are finally brought to justice. This should be the beginning of a wider crackdown on this dangerously virulent form of juvenile entertainment.

Currently: Shit.

I’ve got to the point where I find solace in watching Steve Wilkos Show and Maury so my self-esteem lives on another day. My hopes for the next Web 2.0 web-app died with my hard drive, leaving me in good preparation for Web 3.0 (or if Microsoft have anything to do with it Web 2.5). And as each day passes my pre-mid-life-crisis plan of jetting off to India and Morrocco for some spiritual awakening has slowly frittered away via my wallet into the hands of the Kebab Shop. I live with my mum (and the rest of the animal clan). To add insult to injury Leicester are about to plummet into the 3rd division for the first time ever.

Just incase you didn’t understand my sorry plight – I live at home, I have no money and no job, my team are shit and I’m with a woman belonging to someone else. Allah Jesus Krishna Budha lords of the sky which wrong corner did I take to arrive at this fate?

Some days I wish I lived in Bridgend.

And so the obvious solution to these problems is to stop wallowing in self pity start a blog. A problem shared is a problem halved. And just like the mind numbing popcorn fodder “Untraceable” the more people that visit me, the faster my problems will die. Or as the great man himself would say – “Just Like That”.

Genius.