I'm back but the plugins have moved

Yup after more than 2 weeks without home broadband, I'm back.... what have I been doing and why are my plugins moving? (and more importantly where to ?)
Well it's all very simple...

I recently moved house to a much nicer location with a bigger garden and more space within for my wife and kids to occupy with more stuff.

In so moving, I needed to cancel every known service directed at my old place and inform said people of where my new address would be located.

This included of course... my home landline and thus my broadband.

Noooooo........

In the process of doing this, I discovered that I was not under contract with Pipex ( my previous provider) any longer and I could elect to move with no surcharge.

Interesting.

I enquired of pipex support what would happen if I decided to remain with them in my new abode.

They informed me (in a slightly cryptic manner) that things would be just as difficult as if I move to a different provider (new Landline, new account with pipex, difficulty in maintaining email aliases).

Additionally they would not be able to offer me the same rates as before because I would be having to start a new contract with them rather than transfer the existing one.

This would have the surprising effect of forcing me to choose from their new range of offerings, of which only one could possible suit me due to my bandwidth requirements. and oh shame this new package was somehow more expensive than the previous model.

Oh well that was it.

I have now changed providers to demon.net

They don't give me any web space but I don't need that as I have some spare elsewhere. However the rorybecker.co.uk domain name was more of an issue.

I bought rorybecker.co.uk from quidnames.com which to this point has been a very good purchase.

I needed now however to change the redirection on said domain so that it would point at my new web space.

This proved a little difficult.

Normally one logs in to their system through the use of the registered email and password.

Since I could remember neither of these, the system felt required to deny me the access which was rightfully mine.
I hurled massive abuse (verbal) at the site but this seemed to do no good. I decided that there would in all good sense be a method to retrieve said information since I am in fact the rightful owner of said domain.

It turns out that quidnames do, in fact, have such a method.

They simply require that you visit the appropriate page on their site and enter the domainname whose information you require and the registered email associated with said domain name.

And there-in lay the problem. I of course had no idea which email of mine was the correct one. I have "many".

I proceeded to mail "support" explaining (repeatedly) that if they would just email the details to whichever email address happened to be associated with the account, then I would be able to collect them as I forward most things to my gmail account these days.

My emails met with no response whatsoever for the next 8 days, where upon support got back to me to tell me which email address was in fact assigned to the account.

And that is where things get complicated :)

You see (if I understand this correctly)....

• The address in question was in a domain owned by the company I work for.


• This domain was bought through Company 1.


• Company 1 was instructed (not by me) to set the name servers of the domain to the IP address of a dedicated server we controlled.


• The dedicated server ran a nameserver of it's own. (NameServer1)


• NameServer2 (for some ungodly reason) pointed at dyndns.org which then pointed back at nameserver1, thus giving us a very neat single point of failure. (NameServer1)


• Nameserver1 pointed at a nameserver held by Company2 (NameServer3)


• The NameServer3(at company2) held instructions for distributing email.


• Company2 also held some pop3 boxes into which it was instructed to sort the email from the domain in question.

Can you see where all this is going?

• We ceased renting the dedicated server.


• The dedicated server was formatted/mangled/otherwise destroyed.


• NameServer1 vanishes like a fart in a tornado.


• The chain is broken and now the email from quidnames now forwards into the ether never to return.

ya gotta love the net :)

So now I have instructed Company1 to point set the domains nameservers to the 2 nameservers supplied by Company2.

This so it is said will take 24 to 48 hours

48 hours was sunday.

I am led to believe that the process was however only started yesterday evening so this time tommorow I should be able to retrieve email send from that point onward tro the domain in question.

After this I hope to request my password from quidnames and then retrieve said password and redirect rorybecker.co.uk to rorybecker.me.uk

and all, I think, will be well again :)

So the upshot is that my plugins have moved temporarily, to http://www.rorybecker.me.uk

My plugin site has been Refactored

Yeah my plugin site has been Refactored. Hopefully it now provides all that it once did whilst managing to do so with a 'little' more style and a little less noise :)

(For those that still think it looks crap (I'm still in that camp), my books on css should be arriving in a week or so (there seems to have been a little delay), so hopefully I'll start to be able to do something a 'little' better.)

So check it out at http://www.rorybecker.co.uk

Refactoring PaintIt -> DX_Contrib v0.1

I've realised that perhaps some of my PaintIt Code could be useful elsewhere.
I have spent the past couple of days refactoring PaintIt so as to extract the actual painting code (Including the ColorPicker and PaintPicker(yes they are crap names) from the Original PaintIt plugin and into a new Common Dll called DX_Contrib.

I am releasing this project like all my others, complete with source.

It is my intention to initially maintain control over this project but to accept code snippets in vb.net (feel free to submit in c# if examples are short enough for me to translate without too much difficulty) and to include them for everyone's benefit.

I would like to say up front that at this early stage, I have no plans to honour backward compatibility in any way. However like all my plugins, I will not be deleting past version from my site.

In addition, I will be including the version number in the dll itself (thus the first version is DX_Contrib0.1.dll) and in this way allow past versions to work side by side with newer ones.

For Example, PaintIt v1.3 (the current latest version) uses v0.1 of DX_Contrib. (naturally enough). I have release both. Some developer 'A' might choose also to develop against v0.1 of DX_Contrib. Later I might decide, or indeed have it subtley pointed out with a sledgehammer, that a give method is either in the wrong class or a class is in the wrong namespace. At this time corrections and enhancements will be made and a new version will be released with version 0.2. This new dll will be called DX_Contrib

As I said, it is my init plan to maintain control of this myself, but if it proves in some way successful then I think we will have to consider sourceforge or some similar facility instead. :)

Feel free to submit code to me either by email or newsgroup for potential inclusion in a future version of this dll.

Oh yeah, if you don't already know, DX_Contrib and my other real(ish) plugins can be found at http://www.rorybecker.co.uk

PaintIt v1.2

Ok version 1.2 of PaintIt is out. Well what are you waiting for? Download now from http://www.rorybecker.co.uk where full details of the changes can be found.