Archive for December, 2006

Real-Time Search

Sunday, December 31st, 2006

One of the most significant consumers of bandwidth on the Ottawa Events site is GoogleBot.  GoogleBot crawls the site very frequently, fetching mostly the same content over and over.  I just saw an example of this working out very well.  There’s a free New Years party with fireworks that has almost no online presence.  I […]

Ottawa Events Progress

Sunday, December 31st, 2006

The site I’ve spent the most time working on this year is the Ottawa Events site.  Not so much in the coding of the site, but in the maintenance of the data that’s there – finding and entering data myself, and editing what other people post to keep it in line with the rest of […]

Mio C310s GPS

Saturday, December 30th, 2006

I picked up a Mio C310s GPS just before Christmas, and tried it out during our trip to the family’s place in Southern Ontario. It’s an impressive little device. I’d never heard of Mio, but Staples was selling the C310S and had it on sale for $229.  For a small colour GPS, $229 is an […]

New Printer for Me

Friday, December 29th, 2006

I picked up a refurbished Konica-Minolta Magicolor 2400W printer from Future Shop during their Boxing Day sale.  It’s hard to pass up a colour laser printer for $179 (with $5 shipping?  This thing weighs a ton, there’s no way that’s right.. but hey, it made it here). Installing it on XP was no problem.  Connecting […]

Merry Christmas!

Monday, December 25th, 2006

The title says it all.

The Switch to 64 Bit

Thursday, December 21st, 2006

A very good article posted by Scott Byer reminded me I wanted to say something about this. There’s this perception that 64 bit is better than 32 bit, the way 32 bit was better than 16 bit, and that it’s just a natural transition the software industry will have to make. But there are some […]

PS3s at Toys R Us

Wednesday, December 20th, 2006

The Toys R Us in Ottawa (Merivale Rd) has 3 PS3 60gb versions in stock. They have a little paper sign tacked up that they have them available, but nobody’s buying them. Maybe the folks that want them have just given up for the year. I’d have bought one to resell but I think the […]

The One Way Web

Monday, December 18th, 2006

My host has disabled comment posting again, because of the thousands of spam attempts that were hitting the comment post URL. WP-HashCash blocked the requests from being submitted, but the volume of requests was such that it was interfering with other sites on the same shared server I’m on. Wow. They’re working on a solution.

Motorstorm

Sunday, December 17th, 2006

I was just in Best Buy looking at the PS3 demo kiosk, and the PS3 there had a lot of video trailers of games loaded, but only a few actual game demos. I fired up Motorstorm for a look. It’s a very nice looking game and the physics seemed excellent during the short time I […]

Why does DWM.EXE use so much memory?

Friday, December 15th, 2006

DWM.EXE is the Desktop Window Manager in Windows Vista.  When you’re using Aero Glass in Vista, DWM owns an offscreen bitmap for every open window, the size of the window, with a rendering of that window’s contents. DWM needs this so it can quickly show you thumbnails of all the open windows, and so it can […]