November 2006 Entries
Since moving from university to the 'real' world of development I've been creating
alot of helper classes to try and cut down on the number of LOC I have to write. One
thing which bugged me for a while was Query Strings in ASP.NET - checking whether
a string existed and then getting that strings value. Sounds simple but then what
if you're expecting it to be an integer or a double, or a DateTime or something else?
You have to go through the checking then the converting to the type you want.
So instead of
string querystring = Request.QueryString["myinteger"]; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(querystring))
{ int output; if (int.TryParse(querystring, out output)
{...
Well my tablet is. I just found a cool little temperature
monitor and decided to give it a whirl on my tablet running Vista....65 degrees
C, 114 F. Looking back at the look of temperatures the highest its been was 78 C.
I'm not looking forward to the summer :s
Some nice people have made a comparison list
of all the Vista Editions, listing only which features an edition doesn't have.
Hardware Configuration(s)-Acceptability:
1: Max. ram support: 4GB for 32-bit systems. [Across all versions]
For 64-bit: 8GB max. for basic, 16GB max. for premium and more than 128GB for business
and ultimate. (Maximum tested at the Microsoft Labs was 128GB, and more could be accepted.)
2: Duo-processors support: Unavailable in Basic and Premium.
3: Integrated Smart card management: Not supported in both Prenium and Basic.
4: Control over installation of devices: Not supported in both Premium and Basic.
5: Virtual PC Express: Unsupported in all versions, except Ultimate.
...
I blogged yesterday
about a WLM Gadget for the Vista Sidebar. Well today a new beta was
released.
Microsoft brought Flip3d to
Vista as an alternative to Alt+Tab, which is nice and all but I still believe OSX's
Expose feature is better.
I've used TopDesk on XP to get
Expose functionality, but now theres 'My
Expose' for Vista, which makes use of the Desktop
Window Manager of Vista.
It takes a little while the first time you press F9 to change to the expose view
but I put this down to my lack of RAM, Flip3d on the other hand runs perfectly.
Now that I'm running Vista RTM on my tablet I thought I'd look at what gadgets are
available for the sidebar.
I found 2 cool gadgets; one is a BBC
Radio gadget which allows you to select which BBC radio station to listen to,
the second connects
to Windows Live Messenger and
lists all your online (or offline) contacts and allows you to open a new chat.
Vista RTM is a huge improvement over previous release candidates. I'm currently running
with 512mb RAM and its ok, I would recommend 1gb tho.
I've been spending the day trying to track down an annoying bug in IE to do with javascript,
"Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site http://....", "operation aborted".
It's all to do with the google maps api I'm working with. It works fine under firefox
yet I couldn't get the dam thing to work in IE7 (not tried IE6 yet).
The problem was the javascript I wrote was modifying parts of the page before they
were rendered and IE threw a benny, a simple defer="defer" attribute in the <script
type="text/javascript"> tag fixes the problem.
I've been getting 'Unexpected error 0x8ffe2740 occurred' under IIS 5.1 when trying
to start the website today and just went about fixing it. A quick google discovered that
it's due to another application using port 80. I remember having this problem once
before and the culprit was Skype. Closing down
Skype sorts out the problem.
This post explains
how to stop Skype from using port 80 if its free.
Although not out in the UK officially, i got myself a Toshiba
Gigabeat S from expansys uk. They seem
to be the only place this side of the pond to sell them.
It's an awesome device, the screen is beautiful, the interface is easy to use and
find what you want...and when you get bored of 60gb worth of music or video it's got
an FM Tuner so you can jam out to the crap which they play.
Music quality is brilliant, and sound quality on video is top notch for such a small
device. The only downside is it can't play avi (divx, xvid) videos, WMP11...
This is one of the most amazing pieces
of technology I've seen in a while. On a recent trip to Brugge I
had photosynth in the back of my mind and so I was taking photos in a way that they
would look cool when I'd finally get my hands on it. Unfortunately the tech preview
still doesn't allow you to use your own photo sets.
This is my token post, I'll feel left out if I don't make it, to say that Windows
Vista has been RTM (Released To Manufacturing).
I had a rant last night to Philip about
how I was annoyed at having my rss reader flooded with the same story...Vista RTM
(i think i must have seen it mentioned some 100 times, adding to that .NET
3.0 RTM and Office
2007 RTM my head is all RTM'd out).
I may have to suggest to newsgator/feeddemon to
add some form of grouping ability of similar posts tho they have likely thought of
it already.
Well i'm changing jobs and todays my last day. Come monday I will be a doer.
I had a little bit of spare time today so was making pointless programs. One which
counts down the seconds...and as my director put it "you geek".
I went to both D2 and D3 before and both were great. Registration for
Developer Day 4 has now opened (December 2nd).
I hope there will be jelly with jelly babies in again.
Just a quick congratulations to Alex whose
got himself a new job (Alex lives in a small city call NYC). It's a good reason to
keep up with the development community, he found the job via the dotnetrocks podcast.
I just found this awesomely pointless
product, so awesomely pointless infact I want one. It's a little rabbit which
connects via WiFi to the intraweb which can then have messages sent to it from friends,
notify you of the weather (because you can't always look outside), read websites to
you. Theres even a development
environment for windows, and a Cruise Control plugin (the ears notify you whether
a build has been built successfully).
I want one for no apparent reason other than its pointless and totally cool. And at
only £65 it's
not a bad price.
Found via Mike
Ormond