I actually have the last two episodes of my RavenDB series ready to go, but doesn’t seem much point publishing them this week, so here’s a few thoughts on stuff from build and Windows 8 instead. Firstly Windows 8: I thought the build keynotes did a nice job of selling Windows 8, although adjectives like super and amazing were used far too much for my tastes. I would like a Windows 8 tablet because it seems to do a nice job of bring it all together, yes it’s nothing you can’t get already from Apple (iPad, [...]

Initially, one of the biggest problems I found when trying to marry records was the god awful quality of much of data I often have to work with. It’s mostly old mainframe and database data with truncated fields, limited character sets and fields with nonsensical contents. Even worse, much of the data is the result [...]

We’ve decided to do it again. After the success of the Functional Programming eXchange 2011 and 2009, we have decided to put on another edition. Functional Programming eXchange 2012 will take place on Friday March 16th March 2012, at the Skills Matter eXchange, in London. The program is under construction, I’ve already started to invite speakers whose work in the functional programming community interests and excites me. I’m actively seeking other speakers so if you’d be interested in following in the foo[...]

Problem Each character on a computer is assigned a unique code and the preferred standard is ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). For example, uppercase A = 65, asterisk (*) = 42, and lowercase k = 107. A modern encryption method is to take a text file, convert the bytes to ASCII, then XOR [...]