Archive for May, 2009

Hotel Floris Avenue, Brussels

By | May 11, 2009 | Uncategorized | No comments

Outside the Eurostar Thalys Terminus station in Brussels you will find an organized queue for taxis, (complete with taxi marshal)
We were allocated our taxi, and I presented the driver with a sheet of paper with the hotels address printed on it.
After some consideration, he said it would be 10 Euros, but that it’s only a 10 minute walk from the station.
We opted for the taxi, since I didn’t have a clue where I was going.
Yes, I could of used my iPhone to get us there, with a little help from Google maps, but the charges for data, even in the EU. Put me off.

The day we arrived in Brussels (10th May) there was some special festival, so there were many people out in the streets.

We pulled up outside the hotel around 5 minutes after we left the station (it really would be a 10 Minute walk)
First Impressions were good – hotel is nicely presented, clean and well lit.

Checking in, I noticed that you could buy Internet connection for 10 Euros for 24 hours (which is what I’m using to write this post!)

We were given room 304.

Room

Room was very clean, large, and spacious, with modern decor.
The bathroom was brilliant, had a bath, with shower.
The shower was extremely powerful, lots of pressure, which I like.
One thing that we noted – no soap was left for us on arrival but we did get it on day 2)

The bed, although advertised as a double, was actually two singles pushed together, but this did not matter. Was very comfortable.

We had a TV, with a type of Freeview box that allowed us to get BBC1 and BBC2.

Gym

The hotel was equipped with a “fitness room”
This was a little disappointing – not because there was not much equipment (there isn’t really room) but because none of it worked.
There is:
A treadmill
A cross trainer
A bike
A multigym – Lat pull down, leg extension, pec-dec etc.

This would of been adequate for our 2 night stay, however most of the equipment did not work.
The multigym had come off its pulley system, the treadmill was missing its safety key, the bike, didn’t move. The only thing working was the cross trainer.

Breakfast

Breakfast was served on level -1
Consisted of cereal, ham, cheese, fruit, pastries (croissants etc..) cooked sausages, bacon, eggs.
All in all, was very nice.

Location

The hotel is brilliantly located. Just a few minutes walk from Great Market Square and many shops.
Directly opposite the hotel was a supermarket, where we bought some things for the room, since the mini-bar was hideously expensive – ?3 for a can of coke!!

 Useful links

Official Site: http://www.hotelflorisavenue.com
Hotel Chain: http://www.florishotels.com
Trip Advisor: http://www.tripadvisor.com/Hotel_Review-g188644-d344865-Reviews-Floris_Avenue_Hotel-Brussels.html

String.EndsWithAny and StartsWithAny Extension Method

By | May 8, 2009 | Development | No comments

It frustrated me that while String provides the StartsWith and EndWith method, it doesn’t provide an EndWithAny. So, if I wanted to see if a particular string started or ended with any specified string, I would have to create my own method to return a true or false.
Whilst this is fine, it’s a little clunky if I want to use it in various places in my application.

For this reason, I decided to create an extension method:

EndsWithAny

public static bool EndsWithAny(this string input, params char[] endings)
{
	foreach (var x in endings)
		if (input.EndsWith(x.ToString()))
			return true;

	return false;
}

The method is very similar for StartsWithAny:

public static bool StartsWithAny(this string input, params char[] beginnings)
{
	foreach (var x in beginnings)
		if (input.StartsWith(x.ToString()))
			return true;

	return false;
}

I’ll write up a post on Extension Methods as soon as I get a chance.

For now, the MSDN one may help….

Iphone Screen Cracked!!

By | May 3, 2009 | Gadgets / Hardware | No comments

I have had my for around 4 weeks now.

I was shopping in Guildford, and took the phone out of my pocket, and noticed the screen had cracked all the way from top – bottom!

I knew for a fact that I hadn’t dropped the device, and that it had not received any

Base checksum mismatch – A solution for TortoiseSVN users.

By | May 1, 2009 | Development | No comments

I recently had the misfortune to get a Base Checksum Mismatch error, when I tried to check in files to my repository.
The problem occurs when the files svn data has become corrupted.
There are many solutions to this problem, but here’s how I solved it simply (I only had 2 files that had this error)

  1. Check in everything except the files that are causing the issue.
  2. Take a fresh checkout to a separate directory
    (right click in a directory -> SVN Checkout)
    Screen should look like the image below:

    image

  3. After TortoiseSVN has checked out everything to the new directory, simply copy across your files that were giving you trouble
  4. Check back in.

That’s how I fixed it.
Hope this helps!

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