First day @ Accenture Technology Solutions

Orienation day 1 provided a mix of presentation, gifts, food and good company! We have a fantastic bunch of new joiners (about 24 in total from memory).

Luckily I have been placed on some London based .NET and .NET Compact Framework projects. Can't wait to get my hands dirty on the Compact Framework work, it is a very interesting little project even if I am being pulled in only for a short amount of time to finish off some UI elements. My base of work will be in PC based .NET however, and after my short stint of compact framework work I will start that full time.

Its going to be an exciting entrace into the world of Accenture!

Orange and Mobile MSN Messenger

I just got myself a new Orange SPV E200 Windows Mobile 2003 Smartphone. Consequently I had to update my MSN Messenger Mobile profile so messages sent to me while offline would go to my new phone.

Upon selecting the new Country (UK) and new Providor (orange), I had to agree to the terms of service which state that Orange can charge ME 10 pence for each message I _RECEIVE_. Yes, thats right, they want to charge me for receiving messages.

Fat chance! Service disabled, sorry!

PS. This smartphone rocks!

Password Storage Applications

I have passwords coming out of my ears, so many in fact that I went to download a trial version of Macromedia Fireworks MX this morning and i couldn't for the life of me remember my password for the Macromedia site.

Time to find a password storage app for Windows. I found Password Keychain, but seeings as i'm a sucker for sexy apps and I have a week or so before I start work it's time to roll my own .NET password storage application, and make it integrate with Mozilla Firefox, and maybe Internet Exploder too.

Keep an eye out.

RSS 2.0 and ATOM Feeds now Available

Tonight I have finally updated my ageing feed standards and you can now subscribe to my blog using RSS 2.0 or ATOM (See subscription links above). I also made use the new "feed:" URI scheme so if you use a compliant News Aggregator a simple single click should subscribe.

I will maintain the RDF, RSS 0.91 and RSS 1.0 feeds in their old locations so nothing will break.

Mozilla FireFox 0.8 Released

8th Feb MC Motorchallenge Photo's

Thanks to Craig (Not Blogging) here is a gallery of pictures from 8th Feb's MC Motorsport Motorchallenge event.

Its a shame. If I hadn't moved to the UK I would be participaing this season in my pride and joy.

Some sweet cars there!!

Found another Accenture blogger...

Keep an eye out on this post I will add them as I find them. When I have a few more I will create an OPML.

Mike Klein : http://www.happycynic.com/
Chris Mann : http://www.bigmansun.com/

DayPop.com

I wonder why I haven't run into DayPop before? Interesting analysis of word and topic trends amongst webloggers and news makers, as well as search.

Accenture Interview Hits

Very much like Mun i've recently starting getting a lot of search engine hits for "Accenture+Interview" in my referrer logs recently. Accenture Technology Solutions (ATS) must be on a massive hiring drive, or at least they must be in the UK!

I'm not sure that there is much help either of us can give to anyone that is interviewing with ATS at the moment. If you know your stuff and are a good communicator then you should have no troubles acquiring a position with ATS. The HR interviews are the same you will experience at any medium-large enterprise. The skills interview will catch you out if you don't know your stuff, so shy away from applying for positions that you are not qualified for, and be wary of padding your CV with falsehoods. (I know this is a "durr" type moment but im sure there are people out there that do it :) )

On another note, Mun, maybe we should set up "Accenture Bloggers" OPML file and create a synthetic feed using Feedster along the lines of what Alex Hoffman has done for Australian .NET bloggers? If anyone is interested drop a comment onto this post (if any accenture bloggers actually find my blog).

My NewsGator Render Template

This template (sort of) makes the Post view within Outlook look like the "News Page" displayed when you select the root NewsGator folder.

To Install:

1. Download the template [Marks_NewsGator.zip] (3kb).
2. Unzip the files into your Newsgator\Render folder.
3. Inside Outlook, Press the NewsGator button on the NewsGator toolbar, then select Options... from the drop down menu.
4. Switch to the Rendering tab, and select "Marks_NewsGator" from the drop down list. (Note you can also set the rendering template up on a feed-by-feed basis, look at the NewsGator documentation for info on how to do this)
5. Restart Outlook.

To get the text centered next to the NewsGator logo at the top I have had to use a 12px top margin. For some reason I couldn' get the vertical-alignment: middle; CSS style working. If someone wants to have a look at the CSS and XSLT files for the template and tell me what i'm doing wrong I would greatly appreciate it, i'm still an infant when it comes to CSS.

Testing my Newsgator XSLT and CSS

Well it seems that NewsGator allows you to create custom transforms for feeds (and even on an individual feed basis!). Unfortuantely the XSLT transform happens very early on right when data is stored into the PST file, which sorta negates the whole concept behind XSLT, doesn't it?

Anyway, this is a post to test my transform. I will post up the files when i'm done.