80% Geek
Hope this image turns out alright on the blog. Apparently, I am 80% Geek. I lost out on Star Trek and Sci-fi questions, I think.
July 23, 2007
July 20, 2007
This looks like a useful purchase
SQL Design Patterns: Expert Guide To SQL Programming.
But only based on the title. Has anybody read it? Reviewed it?
July 19, 2007
Gregory's Girl
Enough said.
July 14, 2007
Windows Vista
Is ok.
But some of it is pretty rubbish.
Good: Robocopy is built-in
Bad: Files very rarely copy across to another drive….. I am not sure if the problems detailed here are the issue but there is something seriously unwell with File IO!
Annoying: I didn’t find out about Robocopy before I trashed the files I thought I couldn’t transfer.
Also, the Disk Defragmenter seems to have taken a step back in UI terms, though Wikipedia claims that it has been improved thus:
‘In Windows Vista, Windows Disk Defragmenter includes an option to automatically run at scheduled times and uses low CPU priority and the newly introduced low priority I/O algorithm so that disk defragmenter can continue to defrag using reduced resources (less CPU and disk read/write activity) when the computer is in use. The user interface has been simplified, with the color graph and progress indicator being removed entirely. It is also not possible to select which drives to defragment. Chunks of data over 64MB in size are not defragmented; Microsoft has stated that this is because there is no discernible performance benefit in doing so. [1] The result, however, is that Disk Defragmenter does not require a certain amount of free space in order to successfully defrag a volume, unlike previous versions which required at least 15% free space on the volume. The command line utlity, defrag.exe in Windows Vista, offers more control over the defragmentation process.’
I have to say that – out of the box – Mac OSX is a far more satisfying experience. The killer for the Mac, however, is the lack of Office 2007 which is really quite exceptional.
June 27, 2007
This year I have mainly been avoiding Big Brother
I couldn’t name anybody in it! Huzzah!
And then I find myself reading that Chantelle and Preston are separating and I feel even more vindicated that I have removed myself from the BB merry-go-round.
Worryingly, I realise that a holiday in a location without Channel 4 is the prime reason I missed it.
Now I have to learn how to ignore Hollyoaks.
Internet Explorer and XML
Internet Explorer is hovering around 60–90% Processor Utilisation and using over 300MB of memory. Why? To open a 1.7MB XML file……
How can that be?
It has been chugging away for nearly 10 minutes on this thing. Sheesh!
It is now sitting at 90%+ utilisation, using 400MB+
Something is not right about this picture
June 26, 2007
Blog hiatus
Another blog hiatus.
These things happen. I’ll try and get back into the groove now and start posting a little more regularly.
Honest.
Windows Server Core
This sounds interesting – can I use a Windows Server 2008 core installation for my AD / DHCP needs in a development environment with XP and Windows Server 2003?
What if I want to have a lightweight ASP.NET IIS 7 though? I heard that ASP.NET is not included in server-core, though IIS is….. what’s the point of that?
Marked under ‘needs more investigation.’
May 24, 2007
Why Ruby?
Scott Hanselman has an interestingly titled post ‘Programmer Intent or What you're not getting about Ruby and why it's the tits.’
Ruby is getting a lot of blog-inches and I began to wonder if I should be paying it some attention….. it is near the Stack but the stack is pretty full:
- SQL Server Analysis Services
- Consitutional Change in Scotland, including the creation of a bicameral executive
- Holiday plans
- Reading more fiction
- Deciding whether I really care about Python or Ruby or anything like it
- Millions of other things in my personal and work life…… and I mean millions.
So, as you can see on point 5, Ruby is kinda on there already. I guess the tone is: am I bothered? And to me, an outsider, I am not sure when Ruby becomes interesting; is it only when you are using Ruby on Rails? Should I have an interest because Microsoft is developing IronRuby and and extending the possibilities of IronPython by introducing the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR)?
What’s wrong with C#? VB.Net?
But then, in the aforementioned blog post, Scott tells me I can subtract twenty minutes from a date using the following syntax:
20.minutes.ago.
Sad as it is to say, that line of code is pretty impressive.
We’ll see if it makes it onto the Stack. You never know.
