Premium passport service

Due to laxness on a grand scale I had the need to avail myself of the Home Office Identity & Passport Service‘s premium same-day passport service.  Whilst the cost was exorbitant (£108 for the passport, £40 for the train fare, a day’s holiday etc) it was a surprisingly slick operation. 

You *do* have to very carefully fill in the application, make sure you have your photo’s taken by a photographer with a home office certified Polaroid camera, have inordinate amounts of verifying identification and something to do during the four hours it takes to process the application, but having organised all of that I don’t think I spent more than 15 minutes in total in the passport office.

So I now have a chipped and machine-readable biometric passport and am part of ‘the system’ once more.

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FON community wireless network

I posted earlier about the FON community wireless network project. The idea is that members of the network share a proportion of their bandwidth for the benefit of other members. Well yesterday my free FON router arrived; setup was a breeze & their is now a wireless hotspot at my address! So it you are ever in the Greenham area of Newbury & you need wi-fi access, you know where to come!

Congratulations!

Catherine and Karl Hulme are celebrating the birth of their first child, Reece William Hulme, who was born at 4.15pm yesterday!!

MSDN Library Sidebar Search Gadget

Ditto!

How did I do without this??

Using WPF/E to simulate Vista

I’ve been meaning to blog about this for a while now, and am actually quite late to the game as loads of people have already commented on it.

‘This’ is a WPF/E application using the new(ish) FebCTP which emulates Windows Vista, it is an astounding example of what WPF/E can do.  There’s the glass effects, the sidebar clock tells the correct time, the window snapshots work when you hover over an item on the taskbar and you get balloons popping up intermittently.  The best bit by far though is the picture gallery and media player.

Have a look, there are two versions, one based in the home SKUs and one based on the business SKUs.

ReorderableListBox re-revisited

Update:
This now actually reorders the list.  I’d originally intended the consumer to handle the reordering of the items but I’ve tried to get the control to reorder internally; to be honest it’s a bit of a hack as you never know what type of list is going to be bound to the listbox.  I’ve create an ArrayList called internalList and do the reordering in that, reassigning it to the ListBox’s ItemsSource at the end.

Known Issues:
If you click on an item and then click/drag the same item what you are dragging around is actually the item after the one you’d expect.  It’s fine if you click/drag a new selection though; I’ll try and work that one out tonight.

Jim posted a comment asking if I had the source code for my ReorderableListBox sample.  The answer was no, now it is yes.  I’ve rewritten it against the RTM release of WPF, it still uses bits from Marcelo’s DragDropAdorner so thanks again to him.

You can get it from here.

The usual caveats apply, if you use it or modify it please keep the copyright notice with it and stick my blog address somewhere in your app.  If it doesn’t work don’t come running to me because it only took a couple of 4 hours 🙂

Have fun!

Technorati tags: ReorderableListBox, Marcelo, WPF Samples, WPF

Atomic Blography 2.0

Missing a ‘g’ but, I suspect, none of the genius, Karl has moved his blog to WordPress.  The question is though, will he keep it up? I hope so as I enjoy reading it.

Check it out, http://karlhulme.wordpress.com!