This morning I made my first purchase of a map from Route 66 for my Nokia Navigator. After an unsuccessful attempt using VMWare on the Mac, I took the DVD to work and tried it there.

First step - installation. No problems, just followed the instructions on the screen - although the phone does have to be attached to the PC.

Second step - choosing a map. One discovery I made, the hard way (by buying the wrong map), is that for France I can buy either the whole of France for EUR49.95, or sub-areas for EUR9.95. These sub-areas are nothing more than cities, they aren't provinces or regions, so for my trip I ended up needing the whole of France.

Third step - buying a map. At the top left hand corner is a button marked Switch to Route 66 Store. I recommend doing this rather than using the DVD.

Select the appropriate map from the left hand side (don't forget to check out the Free travel guides at the top of the menu as well)

When you select a map, the view will alter to something similar to below

Pressing the Add to cart button moves the map into the Shopping cart in the right hand side of the screen.
Pressing the checkout button allows you to enter your personal details and a credit card and when payment is successful the Download screen should be displayed. This will firstly download the map to the PC, and then to the phone.
Closing the screen will not activate the map on your phone at this point but will display a message similar to the following:


Fourth Step - Activating the map. Close down Route 66 Sync and disconnect the phone. Reconnect the phone and start up Route 66 sync again. On my PC a bubble was displayed informing me of new content. I clicked on the bubble and allowed the content to be updated. This seemed to activate the maps for me.

I didn't find the process particularly easy. These notes are as much for me as for anyone else, with the hope that next time I need to buy a map I can do it far easier than the 4 hours it took today trying out different things.

Labels: 6110, gps, route66

// posted by Jane @ 1:06 PM   

A colleague is doing some data migration work, and had a string he needed to manipulate to get at the id. The string had been put together as a title, with spaces replaced with -, and an ID with the title and ID separated by a -, i.e. Software-Developer-123 where title is Software Developer and the ID is 123.

He'd written some code to manipulate this, but it was taking quite a while and wanted to know if there was a one line TSQL statement to do it.

After a bit of head scratching we came up with the following:

DECLARE @strTemp VARCHAR(100)
SET @strTemp = 'Software-Developer-123'
SELECT SUBSTRING(@strTemp, LEN(@strTemp)-(CHARINDEX('-',REVERSE(@strTemp)))+2, CHARINDEX('-',REVERSE(@strTemp))-1)

This returns 123, and so is a (long) one line fix to his problem. As there is no LastIndexOf or similar function, I've used the REVERSE function to enable us to find the last instance of - and then its just some manipulation using CHARINDEX and SUBSTRING to get at the ID. The use of the variable @strTemp was just so we could easily swap in different test data and so isn't of any real importance to the solution.

I really enjoy challenges like this and have emailed this on as a brainteaser to the rest of the development team.

Update:
@DECLARE @strTemp VARCHAR(100)
SET @strTemp = 'Software-Developer-123'

SELECT RIGHT(@strTemp, CHARINDEX('-',REVERSE(@strTemp))-1)
A lot cleaner :-) Thanks Alex.

Labels: SQL, SQLServer, SQLServer2005

// posted by Jane @ 5:33 PM   

I make a lot of use of google reader, from my laptop at home, at work and on the move using the mobile version. One thing I've noticed which I find quite frustrating is the amount of people who choose not to feed the full content of their blog, but instead only offer the first 255 characters or so. I rarely follow the link to find out more and so their blog isn't fully digested and so the argument that RSS is used as a hook into the content on the site just doesn't work for me.

To set a blogger site to have a feed of full blogs the key field is "Allow Blog Feeds" which should be set to "Full"

Labels: RSS

// posted by Jane @ 8:16 PM   

On Monday evening I headed down to the Eagle to attend Josh's Silverlight Night. It wasn't really a presentation so much as a set of demos, around which a lot of questions and answers went on - especially from the Flash Brighton crowd. This was the first time I'd really spent any time learning about Silverlight, and I found the session really informative. I appreciate it isn't as mature a product as flash but I also don't really think it is targeting the same audience at this time - probably being best suited to video players and kiosk style applications. I really believe that the integration with other Microsoft toolsets, like the .NET languages, Visual Studio, Expression Blend, can only be a good thing allowing developers and designers to work together with a greater amount of ease. This is long overdue in my opinion.

It's great to get more Microsoft speakers down to Brighton - following on from Daniel Moth's attendance at VBUG a few weeks previously - and having spoken with Pete during the event I'm hopeful that he can help get more evenings like this arranged.

A few days after the presentation, I received an email from Microsoft informing me that the Mix:UK 07 videos were available. I'd heard great things about the conference and so followed the link and discovered that they'd all been encoded using Silverlight - so I guess I'll be installing it pretty soon. Amongst the sessions are a couple of interest re Silverlight - "Designing immersive experiences with Expression Blend, WPF and Silverlight" and "Building Silverlight Applications using .NET (Parts 1 and 2)" which I'm hoping to find time to follow up on in the next month or so.

Labels: .NET, Brighton, event, silverlight, sussexdigital

// posted by Jane @ 7:21 PM