The Ninja's Blog

Updated CV

Dave "The Ninja" Lawton — Thu, 08 May 2008 17:23:13 GMT

download: Download

WTF - 39098 days to burn a 200mb DVD - VISTA ROCKS!

Dave "The Ninja" Lawton — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 23:58:31 GMT

Well, you be the judge - 39098 days to burn a dvd

The Ninja

Calculate Distance Between Geocodes in C# and JavaScript

Dave "The Ninja" Lawton — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 16:43:02 GMT

Chris Peitschmann has posted an exelent blog on calculating the distance between two geocodes using javascript.

http://pietschsoft.com/Blog/Post.aspx?PostID=1452

The Ninija

Programming nightmares

Dave "The Ninja" Lawton — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 18:35:57 GMT

Well, the un-imaginable has happened to me (or my workstation for that matter) very late on Saturday morning (about 3am).

While testing a new web application, I noticed IE was playing up, so I fired up FireFox and tried again - to the same result.

My computer kept lagging and crashing all browsers, then the apps started to crash until....................

complete C: drive failure!

I have spend the best part of 2 days now installing a new SATA drive, reconfiguring software and recovering data from the dead disk.

Sometimes a I really hate computers which reminds me of a classic geek saying:

"To err is human, but to really f*%k things up you need a computer"

I have finally got most of my software back and running, but I now need to recover my brain as i have had nearly no sleep for 2 days and now my head feels like it is going to explode!

The Ninja - near defeated in battle.

What music do you listen to while coding?

Dave "The Ninja" Lawton — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 07:21:40 GMT

I was just thinking about what drives me while coding, coffee? - no.

The way/pace of my coding is determined by what music I am listening to. Today I realised that the best music IMHO is techno, and banging techno at that!

Repetitive, yes, but so is coding

With every key stroke theres a kick drum, and it sends me into a coding trance making me oblivious to any distractions and my good ladies ranting about "are you nearly finished?", "what time do you think you will finish?".

Techno FM, www.techno.fm, is my all time favourite radio station for my programming requirements. kind of an unwritten rule of my coding practices.

To enhance the experience i recommend Sennheiser HD25 headphones, excellent for bass, djing and ignoring your Mrs

What is your favourite music for coding?

Answers on a post card!

The Ninja

How to calculate the distance in calculate the distance in miles between 2 latitude/longitude points.

Dave "The Ninja" Lawton — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 04:24:57 GMT

I have just had the requirement to calculate the distance between 2 locations for a client project.

At first I was going down the route of rolling my own within the C# domain model and then I found this amazing piece of code in the form of an SQL function (sql server 2000/20005) courtesy of Troy DeMonbreun (http://blog.troyd.net/PermaLink,guid,847b0f1f-498c-43d4-80de-d29902fbd2eb.aspx).

Thanks Troy, you just saved me!

The Ninja

CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[LatLonRadiusDistance]
(
@lat1Degrees decimal(15,12),
@lon1Degrees decimal(15,12),
@lat2Degrees decimal(15,12),
@lon2Degrees decimal(15,12)
)
RETURNS decimal(9,4)
AS
BEGIN

DECLARE @earthSphereRadiusNauticalMiles as decimal(10,6)
DECLARE @nauticalMileConversionToMilesFactor as decimal(7,6)
SELECT @earthSphereRadiusNauticalMiles = 6366.707019
SELECT @nauticalMileConversionToMilesFactor = .621371

-- convert degrees to radians
DECLARE @lat1Radians decimal(15,12)
DECLARE @lon1Radians decimal(15,12)
DECLARE @lat2Radians decimal(15,12)
DECLARE @lon2Radians decimal(15,12)
SELECT @lat1Radians = (@lat1Degrees / 180) * PI()
SELECT @lon1Radians = (@lon1Degrees / 180) * PI()
SELECT @lat2Radians = (@lat2Degrees / 180) * PI()
SELECT @lon2Radians = (@lon2Degrees / 180) * PI()

-- formula for distance from [lat1,lon1] to [lat2,lon2]
RETURN ROUND(2 * ASIN(SQRT(POWER(SIN((@lat1Radians - @lat2Radians) / 2) ,2)
+ COS(@lat1Radians) * COS(@lat2Radians) * POWER(SIN((@lon1Radians - @lon2Radians) / 2), 2)))
* (@earthSphereRadiusNauticalMiles * @nauticalMileConversionToMilesFactor), 4)

END