Archive for January, 2006

Blog Spam: I don’t get it.

Saturday, January 21st, 2006

Most of the spam I’ve been getting lately (about 20 or 30 spams a day) is of a sort that I just don’t get. It seems someone has written a spam engine that knows how to post WordPress comments, and these comments take this form: {0} {1} {2} Where {0} is aa random complimentary phrase, […]

Backup Woes Continued

Saturday, January 21st, 2006

After trying Nero BackItUp and Handy Backup, now I’m trying Genie Backup Manager Home Edition 6.0.  So far it looks like it has the features I need – it can resume a backup on media failure (which Nero can’t) and it can it can verify the media (which Handy Backup doesn’t do), but I’m having […]

Parameterized Queries in HQL

Monday, January 16th, 2006

NHibernate supports parameterized queries but unless you go looking in the Java documentation it’s not obvious how to do it.  Turns out it’s really simple: IList results = _session.Find(“from MyAssembly.MyClass as MyClass where MyClass.Foo = ?”,     tagText, TypeFactory.GetStringType(64)); You can pass in arrays of objects and types for the last two parameters if you have […]

Did you mean Report a Bag?

Sunday, January 15th, 2006

This is funny.. I’ve found a bug in Visual Studio 2005 that I want to report.  There are lots of links to where I can pay for support, but I don’t want to pay to report a bug, I just want to submit it somewhere.  Apparently reporting a bug isn’t a concept that Microsoft Support […]

NHibernate

Saturday, January 14th, 2006

“Learn NHibernate” has been on my todo list for a while now, and I finally spent some time doing it today. I must say I’m impressed.  The folks who ported Hibernate from Java to .NET did a good job of making it feel like a first class .NET library, and not just a port.  This […]

Why is SQL Server so slow?

Saturday, January 14th, 2006

I’ve done this basic optimization of SQL Server performance problems a few times now, so I jotted down the basic steps and posted it as an article:  Why is SQL Server So Slow?

Google Video Store Live

Tuesday, January 10th, 2006

Google’s Video Store (beta, of course) is now live.  A day-pass to an epsidode of CSI is $1.99.  A day-pass gets you the ability to watch the show for 24 hours, but once the 24 hours is up, that’s it. You don’t get to download it. The pricing for shows is all over the map […]

Google Videos Now Available for Purchase

Monday, January 9th, 2006

Looks like Google has refreshed the video.google.com page. Two visible changes: They show a sampling of both random and popular videos on the front page, and now there’s a Purchased Videos link at the top right that shows you videos that you’ve purchased. You can filter searches for videos that are free, or videos that […]

Google Pack

Friday, January 6th, 2006

Well it wasn’t called GooglePlex and it doesn’t include RealPlayer, but Google did introduce a software bundle today. It’s called Google Pack. It was the inclusion of RealPlayer that made it sound like a bogus rumour; but I still don’t really see the point.

A Point in Microsoft’s Favour

Friday, January 6th, 2006

I’m using Windows XP Media Center Edition (I should set up a macro to expand $MCE into the full name for that product) and have it recording shows for me. I just naturally assumed that these shows were DRM protected. Last night I tried playing one from my PC just to see what would happen, […]