SteveX Compiled

Now I just need to convince the folks at work to upgrade…

After doing a few tests to determine what was normal, the first power saving technique I wanted to measure was dimming the screen. My baseline test is unplugging a fully charged 12″ Powerbook G4 1.5ghz and seeing how long it stays awake before being forced into sleep mode. In this test, the screen saver is [...]

I see there are some new options for JASJAR cases now: Piel Frama has some classy leather cases, while PDAir has a number of different cases including a rugged looking Aluminum case. I’ve added these to the ReviewWiki review page for the JASJAR. I find that the JASJAR’s convertible clamshell design means you don’t necessarily [...]

Check out this blog. At a glance, is this spam or not? It’s not until you look down a couple of entries and see the huge list of links that it becomes obvious that it’s spam. Most blog posts today are by spammers.. The only way to tell the real blogs from the spam is [...]

I did run into a problem migrating the Ottawa Events site. I didn’t notice it until I tried to log in: 12Procedure or function aspnet_Membership_GetPasswordWithFormat has too many arguments specified The database that holds the membership information, which is managed by ASP.NET, needed upgrading. The aspnet_regsql tool will do this, without disturbing your existing data.

I migrated the Ottawa Events site from the beta over to the release version of the framework, with almost no problems. Almost: There was an attribute in the web.config file, that the new version didn’t recognize, and it gave an error loading the site. The offending node was: 1234    <add extension=".rdlc" type="Microsoft.Reporting.WebForms.RdlBuildProvider,     [...]

The .NET framework uses GDI+ for the System.Drawing namespace, and this namespace has a whole new way of drawing text. Rather than using the venerable TextOut and ExtTextOut functions, there’s Graphics.DrawString() and Graphics.MeasureString(). The problem with these is that text kerning is measured differently – more accurately – but in a way that is often [...]

The Macromedia MAX 2005 General Session Videos are available online as well. The player is slicker, but I actually prefer to download and watch the videos offline, so Microsoft got this bit right anyway. The Ze Frank bit during the day one keynote is pretty funny. (Check out Ze’s site – lots of great stuff [...]

I’ve started working on my project to measure PowerBook battery life given various workloads. The battery lasts so long that it’s going to take a while to get a lot of different measurements, but so far I have two: 2 hours 51 Minutes with the usage set to Normal, screen at full brightness, disk drive [...]

Microsoft has posted the PDC 05 session videos online. I was at PDC 05, but there were so many good concurrent sessions that there’s a lot of content I’ve been waiting to see on the DVDs. The first thing they did wrong is releasing the content on the web before sending the DVDs to the [...]