Archive for September, 2007

String Formatting FAQ

Friday, September 28th, 2007

My String Formatting in C# article has been one of the most popular on this site for the last two years, and it’s received dozens of comments, many of which were formatting questions or answers to formatting questions. This article is a round-up of those comments – all credit to the original commenters, whose comments […]

Price Disparity

Friday, September 28th, 2007

There’s always been a price disparity on goods in Canada compared to the prices for the same goods in the US. Now that the dollar has hit parity, Canadians are finally waking up to it. It’s all over the news and people are talking about it, and more importantly, doing things about it. I’ve been […]

Is Sony even trying?

Thursday, September 27th, 2007

After claiming that rumble was “last gen” when Microsoft had it and they didn’t, they announced that they were going to include it.  Good news right? The problem is that they also announced that they aren’t shipping it until Spring 2008. It’s pretty basic stuff that you don’t pre-announce hardware upgrades until you’re almost ready to ship […]

Sony Again

Wednesday, September 26th, 2007

So Sony’s chief Kaz Hirai has said the PS3 will have outsold the XBox 360 by March of next year. According to nexgen wars, which isn’t absolutely accurate but is usually in the right ballpark, this means they’ve got XBox’s lead of 7 million consoles plus whatever the Halo bump amounts to plus XBox 360’s […]

Halo 3 Silverlight Site Sucks

Tuesday, September 25th, 2007

Microsoft’s Halo 3 site uses Silverlight. Using my PowerBook G4, the site is unusably slow, and doesn’t scale to the browser window size, making me scroll around to see the content. This is probably not Silverlight’s fault but if anyone should be able to build a showcase site for it, it would be Microsoft.

Net Neutrality Illustration

Friday, September 21st, 2007

Finally, a way to visualize why we need Net Neutrality, in a way anyone can understand.

Mighty Machines

Thursday, September 20th, 2007

When you have a construction site in your back yard, any meal can be Mighty Machines Dinner Theater.

Problem Reports and Solutions

Tuesday, September 18th, 2007

It’s nice that Microsoft is checking for solutions to my 584 problems: I But the “solutions” leave a lot to be desired: A newer version of Flash Player is available for download that might address this problem. A newer version of iTunes is available for download that might address this problem. A newer version of […]

Removable USB Devices

Tuesday, September 18th, 2007

Yet another fun little Vista issue. I haven’t posted one of these in a while. I’ve got a 128mb SD memory card and I wanted to transfer some stuff to it, so I plug it into the computer.  The computer doesn’t recognize it for some reason – the drive letter is there, but it doesn’t show […]

iPhoto Metadata – Bug?

Sunday, September 16th, 2007

Maybe it’s not a problem with differing standards support at all – maybe it’s just a bug. I have two photos, I’ve called them “goodmeta.jpg” and “badmeta.jpg”. They both have keywords, but the keywords only survive the trip into iPhoto for one of them (“goodmeta.jpg”). Here’s the metadata for goodmeta, and the metadata for badmeta. […]