Ptolemaios

Apparently my good old 6800GT died on me on Saturday =(.  I sensed that the day of its death was coming by the random reboots and fan not running on boot up.  It’s not totally dead, but it won’t go anything over 640×480, and it’s running very, very slow.

To make things a little worse, it’s an AGP card – meaning even if I could dig up an AGP card out there, it’s not a very good investment (plus all those trouble just to get one).  The machine had undergone a board/cpu change during its service of about 5 years ( p4 3.2, then to AMD 64 3000+).  I loved this machine so much I gave it names, different for each spec it was on. P4 3.2 was named Eternal (ok, it lasted much less than that); and was renamed Kabuto when 3.2 and the motherboard was burnt and replaced with AMD 64 3000+.

I need a machine as soon as possible, so I had to rush out today to PBTech and pick the parts for the next machine.  I wasn’t planning to replace Kabuto this soon, as DDR3 is not mature enough and I was  reluctant to jump onto the band wagon at its current prices.  For costs sake, I ended up with DDR2 – this will do for now, and is still better for gaming.  A Core 2 Duo E8500, Asus P5Q Pro, Gigabyte Radeon HD 4850, hard disks, dvd writer, etc. I was looking for the 4870 but there’s no stock, and I’m not so keen on spending big bucks today.  May upgrade it after a year or so, but right now it should be sufficient.

I named this new machine – Ptolemaios - after the carrier ship with same name in Gundam 00.  The drives on the machine are named after the 2nd and 3rd generation mobile suits in the show. 

 

Damn, spent a day building this machine and no time to study!

And hmm….what should do with 1TB of free space?

TextBox value not preserved when it’s disabled

TextBox value is not preserved during post backs when it’s disabled. Client side changes are pretty much lost.

The reason behind it seems to be that ASB.NET, by design, do not get clients changes made to read-only or disabled text boxes.

This is something pretty new to me. I thought it’s always returned to the server fine – I guess the problem is that I never make any client-side changes (i.e. using JavaScript to insert the value to the disabled textbox).

This is explained here. The site also suggests a workaround.

The Best Add-Ons for FireFox

The best add-ons for fire fox:

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/a-closer-look-at-the-extend-firefox-winners/

Found this post while I was looking for ways to submit blog entries using Ubiquity.

Pencil is pretty neat!

XAML designer not working ?

VS’s XAML designer stopped working after a series of installations on my machine: namely VS2008 Team Suite trial and Silverlight 2.0 beta 2 tools.

This seems to be some kind of settings issue with VS2008.  Just reset the settings and it will work again:

“C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\devenv /resetskippkgs”

This was mentioned in the msdn forums

SQL Server 2000 / 2005 Indexes and Unicode performance issues

I recently investigated (and in fact still working on) a performance issue with a J2EE application which used SQL Server 2000 as its data store (and for that matter, 2005 on my local machine).  The J2EE application is rather simple in terms of persistence, since it uses Hibernate 2.  The JDBC driver used is jTDS.

Smarter Enums – C# 3.0

Sometimes don’t you just want friendly names for enums in C#?  Recently when I was creating an enum as simple as “Yes, No, Not Approved, Not Applicable”, it came to me that typical enums are not friendly enough.  Since variable names can’t have spaces and I had to write “Not Approved” as “Not_Approved”, there are basically no direct means to assign a friendly name nor a description. (nor anything your enum should have).   Hmm, maybe I should just treat enums in C# as int/long/byte like they are intended to ? I beg to differ.  Remember how it was pretty easy to make smarter enums in Java ?  So out of curiosity, I looked for ways to do similar things with enums in C#.

Smarter Enums – Java

Having worked without Enums support back in the Java 1.3/1.4 dark ages, its addition in 1.5 was a god send.  The big surprise is though, Enum in Java was not *just* another glorified constant value type like in C# (more on this later).

New blog!

I’ve created this blog to document interesting discoveries from my work life as a Java Developer, and now a amateur .Net Developer.   I imagine most of the posts here will involve comparisons between the Java world and the Microsoft .Net world, and I hope that will not offend anyone and their favorite platforms.

Here’s a bit of info about me and my adventures (i.e. my pretty boring work life):

• Graduated from the not-so-good University of Auckland, New Zealand  (land of the sheep and the One Ring to Rule Them All.) as a Software Engineer (Bachelor of Engineering)
• Worked 3 years at a company which focused primarily on Java development.  Here’s where I worked using other open source stuff like Hibernate, Spring, and some others.  They use JINI here, a SOA architecture.
• By the end of the 3rd year, I find that I was pretty much out of sync with the latest technologies, and it’s pretty frightening to only be proficient in Java after all these years.  Work life was dull having to work and maintain on the same product. (note, there’s a difference between projects and products – there have been quite a lot of features projects with this product I worked on).  So I decided to move on.
• A long time friend of mine introduced me to her company and there I went.  The new company seems to have a lot of things that I looked for: technologies, innovations, and short-term projects ! (which means more variety!)

And here I’m blogging about my discoveries while working at this company.