I’m still a long way from the lovely country I call home, New Zealand. While everyone there enjoys stunning summer days and long evenings, we have rain, sleet, snow, and darkness at 4pm.  The last 6 months have brought an entirely new way of life for me, and one major unexpected change.

You know that saying about plans going astray, well, yeah, I can verify that is true Still, my life is very nice right now, just a bit different from our plans of just a few months ago. We always had planned on coming to London for a few years to work. We planned on having a baby at some stage and coming back to NZ to settle. Little did we know that I was already pregnant when we left glorious New Zealand! So that was one small spanner in the works. I looked for work solidly for a few months once we arrived, but there was just no software development jobs going. In hindsight I should have given up looking a lot earlier and worked in a cafe, but I didn’t, and well, then it became too late because I sprouted a somewhat huge baby bump. Thankfully my husband landed a sweet job very soon after we arrived (and they love him, he has just had a promotion!), otherwise we would have been on the next plane home.

on the tube, blissfully unaware of the baby growing in there

So, here I am, jobless, and growing a baby in my belly. People ask me what I do and I have a hard time answering – what on earth do I do? Well, I spend a lot of time on eBay, that’s for sure. Having a baby has increased my addiction even further and opened my eyes to the designer baby second hand clothing market. Thankfully we also bought a car that turned out to be a piece of crap, because I spend lots of time fixing it or visiting our mechanic, who I am getting to be quite good friends with haha. I go for walks, I go shopping and have hot chocolates, I cook and sometimes I even clean.

Yeah. My life is pretty sweet. And on top of this I seem to have been blessed with the worlds easiest pregnancy. I haven’t had any morning sickness, or anything weird like that, and I’m only just getting to the uncomfortable stage where I walk the poor baby into door frames and stuff.

31 weeks pregnant!

What else is going on….

I’m so itchy. I don’t know what causes it, although I do have a general idea of what trigers it – water, or more specifically taking a shower. Generally I can minimize the itching if I just jump in and out very quickly and then slather some moisturizer on my legs. But – sometimes a quick shower just doesn’t cut it. Like right now. I really needed to wash my hair, and as you probably know, my hair is really, really long. This means it takes me a few minutes to shampoo and condition it, plus shave or whatever else I gotta do, and by the time I get out my skin is crawling.

I literally scratch to the point where I am covered in red marks and lines. It usually takes about half an hour for the urge to scratch to disappear and then about half an hour after that I feel like I can function normally. This has been going on for years and years, and I go through periods of months when I am fine and some where I am not.

I think maybe I have some kind of liver problem, or food allergy. Its getting to the point where I really need to do something about it, because its getting damn hard to scratch certain bits now I’m pregnant! Plus the thought of having a little baby and one hour of itchies freaks me out.

Yeah apart from that not much else. I feel my next few posts will be baby stuff related.. so please forgive me xx

Error: 0xC002F304 at Send Mail Task, Send Mail Task: An error occurred with the following error message: “Failure sending mail.”.
Task failed: Send Mail Task

Msdn provides a list of Integration services error and warning message definitions here, but check out the definition for this one:

DTS_E_ERROROCCURREDWITHFOLLOWINGMESSAGE An error occurred with the following error message: “%1″.

Wow.. an error occured with the following message, failure sending mail, so amazingly descriptive.

Anyway you know you are doing something severely wrong when you do a google search on SMTP Error: 0xC002F304 and only get back about 2 releveant results, and sure enough I was doing something majorly wrong.  Eventually I got so frustrated with the Send Mail task and its complete lack of error debugging information I decided to use the script task to see if that would give me any more.

So I added a new script task and ew put some VB code in and that gave me a different error that was no more descriptive than the last. Anyway that motivated me to open Visual Studio and try the same in goold old C# and sure enough…

My SMTP server was unable to relay to the recipient I had chosen (my personal email). Switched it to my work email and BOOYA all go.

• turn on delay validation so you don’t have to enter an email address in the *to* field -> you can use expressions to read it from a table or recordset etc
• configure your exchange server like so
• Launch your Exchange System Manager
• Navigate to your server -> Administrative Groups -> Admin Group -> Server Name -> Protocols -> SMTP
• Right click on the “Default SMTP Virtual Server”
• Click the access tab
• Press the Relay button and add the IP of the machine that wishes to use this as their SMTP server.
• Fun times.

My first thought was to go with Database Mail. Well, Database Mail is nice enough, I set it all up nicely following the msdn walkthrough here, the test email fired off fine.. I thought all was good and well until I thought my problem through a bit further. I will have a recordset where each row is associated with someone to email with information in that row. So to use the sp_send_dbmail procedure would involve some kind of cursor/crazy stored procedure that I just wasn’t all that keen on writing. Like I said. Im no SQL guru.

So then one of my collegaues said what about Notification Services. I thought, hey cool, I love the BI tools that come with SQL 2005 (especially reporting services <3) and Notification Services I would love to learn about. So I spent 20 mins googling it and then I find out Notification Services does not ship with SQL 2008. Well that kind of pissed me off a bit because I didnt want to implement some solution that would get scrapped in a few months when we upgrade to SQL 08. Not that my workplace is likely to do that anytime soon.. haha.
Anyway, so then I discovered this awesome, and I mean awesome tutorial that basically explains to do exactly what I wanted. One thing I have learnt though, is that delaying validation on the send mail task will allow you to set the ToLine property using an expression. This is the perfect solution for my problem, and means that for every row in the table/recordset I can send a new email to the required person with information from that row.

Another caveat was that to get exchange to act as a SMTP relay so you can fire off the Send Mail task you need to tweak the default settings a bit. The official word on how to do that is here, basically just add the IP address of your Exchange server to the Relay settings in your exchange system manager.

Now I can spam emails to my co workers when I test this on Monday

Im not sure what brownies I like better, these ones or the normal cakey sort I normally bake. I would have to say I probably like these the best, they are soooooooo chocolatey and just mmmmm. But I have a tendency to like things that other people sometimes mis-interpret as undercooked.

Best Chocolate Fudge Cocoa Brownies

140g (1 1/4 sticks) unsalted butter
1 cup sugar
3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder (use some good stuff)
1/4 teaspoon salt (skip if using salted butter)
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 cold large eggs
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 jar of dulce de leche

Preheat the oven to 160°C (325°F). Line the bottom and sides of an 8-inch square baking pan.

Combine the butter, sugar, cocoa, and salt in a saucepan over very low heat. Stir until the butter is melted and the mixture is smooth and hot so that the sugar has started to dissolve a bit but the butter is not burning. Remove from the heat and set aside until the mixture is just slightly warm.

Stir in the vanilla, then add the eggs one at a time, stirring hard after each one. Add the flour and mix thoroughly for about 1 minute with a  wooden spoon or a rubber spatula. Spread evenly in the lined pan (the batter will be very thick).

Dot teaspoons of dulce de leche on the surface, then take a wooden skewer and mix through the batter to create a pretty swirly effect.

Bake until a toothpick emerges with some moist crumbs sticking to it (but not wet with batter), 20 to 25 minutes. Cool completely on a rack.

Or hack with a knife, burn fingers on dulce de leche and feel sick from consuming far too many. Try and get your husband to consume the remaining brownies to save your thighs.

On a positive note, I am now a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist: .NET Framework 2.0 Windows Applications!! Yay for me. 980/1000 for 70-526 and 1000/1000 for 70-536. Now for 70-548 to get my Microsoft Certified Professional Developer certification!! Go Laulau go.

The request failed with HTTP status 415: Unsupported Media Type.

I have seen all the advice saying to add <soapServerProtocolFactory type=”Microsoft.Web.Services3.WseProtocolFactory, Microsoft.Web.Services3, Version=3.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35”/> to web.config… But my configs are all looking good so what gives.

Well it appears it was something funky to do with MTOM – I had MTOM settings off on the client and on on the server. Switching it off appears to have worked

Now onto the next issue. Sigh. Do not install .NET 3.5 if you still need to publish .NET 2 Web Services….epic issues ftl.

Instructions and Pics after the jump

I photoshopped up a Porsche logo outline and printed it out multiple times and then attacked them with scissors. I then rolled out some brownish fondant and placed the logo on top and began to trim away…

then the smaller middle piece

I then dusted the fondant with gold luster (edible) and a drop of yellow food coloring to get it more yellow gold colored, and left it out overnight to dry.

then the fun part (not). Decorating. This gave me insane hand cramps lol…

And then I made a Nigella Lawson Chocolate Fudge cake (which happens to be the best chocolate cake ever btw – I will post it later) and placed the Posche Crest carefully on top and shaped it a bit with my fingers because it was still a bit soft and the top of my cake was by no means flat (stupid icing skills)

I probably could have taken more pictures but I was so so tired and grumpy when I had finished I just wanted to go to bed lol.

more after the jump….

so I did them three ways.

plain

with caramel filling

with toffee.

I used my banana cake recipe that I have always used and don’t often give out but heck who cares, its one of the few I know off by heart… and it always comes out good. its better as a cake but good as cupcakes too

125g butter
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
3 medium bananas
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda

beat butter and sugar until light fluffy and pale. once again this is the most important step I feel. beat in eggs one at a time adding the next one after previous one is incorporated. mash banana and stir thru (or do both at once like me lol). mix in dry ingredients till just incorporated and BAKE at 180 deg C for 15 mins.

i split the mix and added some chopped up toffee to one lot:

the next lot i put half the normal amount of batter into a pan and topped with a teaspoon of caramel, then filled up the rest with more batter

then i stupidly forgot to take photos of them all lined up. I think I made 4 dozen!! So that was stupid, must never forget to take piccies again. I frosted with cream cheese frosting and topped with a quarter of a toffee on the toffee ones, and caramalized banana on the plain ones, and caramel and chocolate drizzle on the rest . Here’s some I took at work on my phone

I also found a use for my 20-50 year old cupcake liners (who knows how old, they either came from my parents or grandparents)

and sorry Jeremy if you are reading this but I found many dead cardboard moths in between sections that I removed :S and a dead weevil I think too. So gross. LOL. They were seriously like 50 years old…. don’t worry I only used clean cases lol. <3

and it increased again the next night when we returned to get a piece each. so, so good. tastes like heaven. anyway, ever since then I have not been able to get it out of my head so I have been trawling the internet for recipes. why does everyone fail me?! I think I am actually going to have to suck it up and go and ask if they will give me the reciepe. cos this one is good but it does not win… and it needs a biscuit base not a pastry one.

ricotta cake[original recipe here - much adapted and includes base I baked]

• 2 x 250g containers ricotta cheese
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
• 1/4 teaspoon grated lemon peel
• 1/4 teaspoon grated orange peel
• Dash salt
• 4 eggs
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 1/3 cup semisweet chocolate chips
• 1/3 cup diced candied citron (optional)
• 1/8 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1 dash ground nutmeg

For filling, beat the ricotta, sugar and flour in a mixing bowl. Add peels and salt; beat until smooth. In another bowl, beat eggs until thick and lemon-colored, about 5 minutes; slowly fold into ricotta mixture. Gently mix in remaining ingredients. Pour into the crust. Bake at 180 degrees C for 55 minutes or until a knife inserted near the center comes out clean. Cool. Store in the refrigerator.

Trust me, do not eat this until it is cool! hehe.