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Friday-Flash-Game: Unterschiede finden | chilloutzone.de – free games and free fun

Guess I’ll go to lunch

Burning ISO files in Windows Vista

I went looking for an ISO burner for Windows Vista and found ISO Recorder from Alex Feinman. An initial test on my new Vista Ultimate installation went flawlessly, and fast too — love the 72x burner on this new laptop.

(h/t Neil Monday)

Building Silverlight Applications using .NET

I’m interested in Silverlight in theory — if I can easily create client-side apps in Visual Studio that are compiled, and have .NET library support, web services, etc., then I’m interested — and found this nice blog entry from Scott Guthrie:

Building Silverlight Applications using .NET – ScottGus Blog

(h/t Ken Rawlings)

Dell XPS M1330 First Thoughts

My Dell XPS M1330 arrived yesterday. The original ship date was specified as October 30th, so getting it a week+ early was a nice surprise. Here are my initial thoughts after having it for just one day:

1. Boy is this thing light! I bought it mainly because I was tired of lugging around my huge Inspiron 9300, which required a special bag to fit. I haven’t weighed it but the XPS M1330 is probably half the weight, when you include the power adapter weight. The form factor is really pleasing as well. I ordered mine with the red lid (I think it’s called “Sapphire Red” and it looks very sharp.
2. Fit and finish issues: There were a couple issues with the production quality, but nothing major. First of all, the laptop had a little “wobble” when placed on a flat surface. I very gingerly rocked it a bit, and the wobble seems to have gone down. Second, there were some minor assymmetries in the gaps between components, such as the hinge and the top of the LED screen. The problem people have reported with components (such as the drive bay, or the Express Card slot) pushing out from the bottom are not present in my machine.
3. Screen resolution: better than I had thought. I’m used to the 1920×1200 WUXGA on the Inspiron 9300, and this isn’t bad. I was expecting something way worse in the way of usability and screen real estate. Added bonus: the LED is less “shiny” than the TrueLife display on the Inspiron.
4. Keyboard: a little less firm than what I had been used to, but still very usable. The Inspiron had the best keyboard I’ve ever seen on a laptop.
5. Touchpad: I saw some people were complaining about the size of the touchpad. The XPS M1330 touchpad is just fine.
6. Windows Experience Score: Base score of 4.0, but this is entirely due to graphics results. Everything else is in the 4.6 – 5.7 range. I think with updated NVIDIA drivers I can increase the output of the little 8400 GS by some noticeable percentage.

New Balance SC 602, redux

I finally decided that my new NB SC 602 soccer cleats were just a bit too narrow, even in 2E width. So I called Dominic with Shoreline Wide Shoes and he is arranging to get a pair of SC 602s in 4E ordered. It will take about a month to get them in, so I will post again and let you know the differences between the 2E and 4E once I’ve had a chance to get them out on the pitch.

A nice thought

It just occurred to me that it’s been almost 7 years since the Yankees last won the World Series. Awesome. I remember watching Game 7 of the 2001 World Series (on my birthday!) and my birthday wish was “I hope Arizona comes back and wins this thing.” WHAM — Rivera gets rocked, Arizona wins Game 7 and the series, the Yankees have slid into mediocrity since. And Joe Torre (whom I actually like) gets the boot. Could it really be that the Yankees’ chances improve without Torre? Hard to imagine, but I haven’t been following baseball that closely the past year or two, being occupied with EPL and Champions League fandom.

2GB DDR2 PC2-6400: $69.95 USD!

What a deal from Geeks.com:

http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=2GBDDR2NB6400-MICSYS&cat=RAM. I purchased 4 GB for my new Dell XPS M1330, which is shipping today. Total cost including shipping: $156.46, or $39.12 per GB. Cost on the Dell.com website to upgrade from 2 GB to 4 GB: $375.00, or $187.50 per GB. Percent savings: 79.2%.

AND, the new memory is 800Mhz, whereas the Dell memory option is the slower 667Mhz.

Yay.

UPDATE: I just discovered that the Santa Rosa chipset, while showing a “800Mhz FSB” option, will underclock the 800Mhz memory down to 667Mhz. The FSB apparently is the bus to the CPU, and doesn’t refer to memory speeds. Who knew? 🙂 Crucial.com shows me the 800Mhz option as the “Best” option for my M1330 using their online configurator.

Stored Procedure returning different results based on how I compile it

This is driving me crazy. I have a stored procedure script that I can compile either from within SQL Server Management Studio or within Visual Studio 2005. When I compile from within SQL Management Studio, and then run the SP, i.e.

exec student_progress_report_get_by_student 500791

I get the right results (256 rows in this case). When I go into Visual Studio 2005 and select “Run On” to compile the stored procedure, the subsequent execution of that stored procedure (from either within SQLMS or via the web app interface) returns zero results!

I have spent the last hour building the proc side-by-side, both editors open, confirming it’s the right file, isolating anything out, such as a view, that might skew the results, but I can still reliably demonstrate the problem. I am guessing that since I’ve been awake since 4:30 my reptile brain is too tired to figure out the obvious, but this is one of those situations for which the phrase “going postal” seems apt.

UPDATE: this turned out to do with how the VS 2005 “compiler” deals with ANSI_NULLS. I’m not sure if there’s a default setting somewhere, and I’m too lazy to look, but when I explicitly set the ANSI_NULLS option in the script file using the statement:

set ansi_nulls on

… my problem became fixed. VS 2005 had ansi_nulls OFF by default.

Moral: always check your assumptions, and track everything down. Software doesn’t just stop working — there’s always a reason for everything.

Dell XPS M1330

This is what I just purchased today:

Set me back just over $3,000, but it’s swanked out with the top-of-the-line everything (except the solid state drive, which wasn’t large enough for what I needed).

Ships on October 30th. Can’t wait!