25 Mar 2007
My Vista installation has to wait a while longer. Toshiba does not support Vista on the Satellite M30 and considers it an out of date model ( ??? ). Though the hardware is perfectly capable of running Vista with Aero glass. NVidia doesn’t have Vista drivers for the GeForce Go 5X series GPUs. There are hacky ways of getting this to work, but these are not stable so far from what I’ve read.
However, I’m in the mood to buy a new laptop. I’m looking at the Toshiba P100 series of laptops, as they have a decent mix of features i.e good graphics Nvidia geforce 7600 with at least 128 MB of video ram, IGB of memory and a 100gb hard drive. My budget for all this is about £1000. I play games on my laptop and it serves as my main entertainment center therefore it should have a decent graphics card. Should be able to run secondlife and need for speed :). I’ve narrowed down my requirements and now just need to hunt around the shops more till I get it for as cheap as possible. It’s cheaper to buy a laptop with 1 GB of RAM and upgrade it later. Crucial is selling 2 GB kits for less than £100. The price difference between a 1GB laptop and a 2GB model is close to £250.
24 Mar 2007
I bought a Picooz on impulse a few weeks ago. I saw it on display and it was only £30 and it gave me a “What the heck, its only 30 quid” moment. Turns out that I’ve bought the world’s smallest RC helicopter, weight about 10 grams. Though it is small, it does have a lot pf power in it. The copter charges from the RC controller and takes about 20 minutes to charge for a 5 minute flight.
It’s hard to control it at first, though I’m getting the hang of it. It’s a very forgiving toy and handles all the bumps and crashes very well. Indestructible so far :). Getting the Picooz to fly forward took a bit of hacking it. It has a tendency to fly in circles and get into an un-controllable spin. This happens even after trimming. I added a nose extension, which looks like an antenna to add a bit more weight to the front so it can fly forward slowly.
19 Mar 2007
I should be receiving my copy sometime this month. This was for answering a question after the UK Vista and Office developer launch event. I thought I didn’t win since I didn?t get the email from MS. Yesterday I requested a list of the winners and my name is on the list. Yippee !! 🙂
Ok, now I have to find a laptop to run it, my current laptop is showing its age. In retrospect, I should have entered the Office competition because I would be able to use that on this laptop.
28 Jan 2007
A nice step by step tutorial, on how to submit a patch/bug fix to a OSS .net project on Sourceforge.
How to contribute a patch
16 Jan 2007
I have situations where I need the domain name and the application path of the current page (request ).
if the current request was http://www.myserver.com/website1/page.aspx
I need http://www.myserver.com/website1. Though the web.config can store this setting, I don’t want to change the config each time I move the site between servers.
So here is a little function I wrote.
Request.Url.AbsoluteUri gives http://www.myserver.com/website1/page.aspx
Request.ApplicationPath gives /website1/. Subtract page.aspx from http://www.myserver.com/website1/page.aspx
public static string GetSiteUrl() {
if (HttpContext.Current.Request.ApplicationPath == “/”) {
return “/”
}
string url = HttpContext.Current.Request.Url.AbsoluteUri;
int end = url.IndexOf(HttpContext.Current.Request.ApplicationPath) +
HttpContext.Current.Request.ApplicationPath.Length;
url = url.Substring(, end);
return url;
}