Courtesy of very_true_thing, another meme that required a bit of work - a little research in Wikipedia this time, as I couldn't name all the MPs who've represented me without help. For the periods when I was a student, I’ve given the MP whose constituency I lived in for most of the year, not the one at my parents’ home for whom I could vote. Otherwise John Mackay and Ray Michie would have been my MP for longer, Menzies Campbell for shorter, and Barry Henderson and Ernie Ross not at all.

• 1967 – 1972: David Steel (Liberal) Roxburgh, Selkirk and Peebles
• 1972 – 1974: Wilfred Baker (Conservative) Banffshire
• 1974 – 1975: Hamish Watt (SNP) Banffshire
• 1975 – 1979: Iain MacCormick (SNP) Argyllshire
• 1979 – 1985: John MacKay (Conservative) Argyllshire/Argyll and Bute (1983 boundary change)
• 1985 – 1987: Barry Henderson (Conservative) North East Fife
• 1987 – 1990: Menzies Campbell (Liberal/Liberal Democrat) North East Fife (1988 party merger)
• 1990 – 1991: Ernie Ross (Labour) Dundee West
• 1991 – 1992: Ray Michie (Liberal Democrat) Argyll and Bute
• 1992 – 1993: William Waldegrave (Conservative) Bristol West
• 1993 – present: Menzies Campbell (Liberal Democrat) North East Fife

Good coverage of parties there, all four of the main ones at one point or another, and five parties in all if you count the Liberals and the Liberal Democrats as being separate parties. Personally I don’t. Also two Knights, three Barons and a Baroness, two Liberal/Lib. Dem. party leaders (although one of them only became party leader a few years after he was no longer my MP), and the first Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament (equivalent to the Speaker in the House of Commons).

huskyteer has given me five words to write about, each of which she associates with me. If you would like me to give you five words to write about, leave a comment. Not usually a big fan of memes, but I like ones that encourage people to write.

There are a couple of articles I have to point you at on the BBC site today. They don’t bear any relation to each other but they both struck a chord with me.

Firstly you may already have spotted the nostalgic piece about the Target Doctor Who novelisations by Mark Gatiss: The Tome Lord. It ties in with a Radio 4 programme tonight, which I probably won’t catch but I enjoyed reading the article. I read all those Target books, every one, and bought one of the rare ones from someone in America for £25, in the days before eBay (we both read the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.drwho). I was a student at the time, and £25 was quite a lot of money for me to send to a stranger for a book, sight unseen.

In those days, too, the Temporal Nexus was a directory of links to Doctor Who sites that I maintained, rather than the name of my blog. It never challenged the really major resources of the time, like The Doctor Who Home Page (which hasn't changed much), but it got quite a respectable number of hits. My unique selling point was that part of the site was a directory of Doctor Who fan-fic, something that no-one else was doing at the time. I argued (civilly) with Doctor Who authors online, and even invited one to Dundee University to give a talk to the Computer Science department about working for IBM.

I enjoyed reading the comments on the BBC article. There’s one particularly bitter-sweet one that isn’t about the books per se, but shows how a slightly silly science fantasy show about a man in a box touches peoples’ lives.

The second article is more likely to have escaped your attention. It’s about Pollphail, a strange relic of the 1970s near where I grew up. I walked around it in the mid 80s, with my friends in the Venture Scouts when we were camping near Portavadie, and it is a very weird place – a “ghost” village where no-one has ever lived. Some images stick in my mind even though it was 25 years or so ago that I was there: the fire alarms hanging off the external walls with innards still in their plastic bags; and the canteen, with shutters down at the counter and carpeted floor covered in sheep droppings.

The Portavadie project failed because the concrete oil rigs that were supposed to be built in the dry dock went out of favour before any orders could be placed; but no-one ever seems to explain why it made sense to build rigs for the North Sea on a remote bit of the West coast, when the other yards were all in the North or East. Always mystified me.

Last time I was there, there wasn’t a chance to see the village, but I was able to watch horizontal rain so dense that you couldn’t see more than about a hundred yards, and seagulls flying backwards.

I’ve just discovered that the entire 1970s TV series of Dick Barton – Special Agent (episode intro) became available on DVD earlier this year.

Ordered.

Visual Studio Team System includes Code Analysis, an integrated tool that will analyse your .NET assembly once you’ve built it, and identify a range of common problems (specifically, ways in which your code doesn't meet the Framework Design Guidelines). These can raise warnings or even errors as part of the build process.

If you have a less capable (cheaper) edition of Visual Studio, then all you have is Code Analysis’ little brother, FxCop. FxCop is not integrated into Visual Studio, and has to be run as a separate tool.

It would be nice to be able to use FxCop to generate warnings as part of the build, and even make the build break if any warnings occur. After a bit of a look around this weekend, I found that although bits of the solution were out there, some of them were a bit complex and there wasn’t one simple recommendation that would do just that.