Trends in Technology

Mac osx

Eric — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 04:28:06 GMT

I found myself agreeing with this article. I am a windows developer pure and simple but at times windows suck http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/what-microsoft-could-learn-from-apple.ars...(read more)

Using ASP.Net to open a new browser window - Part II, the web control

Eric — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 00:48:04 GMT

http://www2.john.rummellcc.com/2007/02/using-aspnet-to-open-new-browser-window_19.html...(read more)

Windows Vista Source Code

Eric — Mon, 05 May 2008 03:43:38 GMT

Ever wondered how Windows Vista source code looks? Here it is! http://www.drunkenfairies.com/windows-vista-source-code/...(read more)

Free Sydney WiFi plan bites the dust

Eric — Thu, 01 May 2008 23:04:24 GMT

I have reached the point where I am totally disenchanted with the NSW government. Can they do nothing right? First is the disaster that the transport system in Sydney, then the hospital system in shambles, corruption in the councils and now this . We...(read more)

Graffiti CMS revisited

Eric — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 09:18:00 GMT

Over the last week or so, I been spending some quality time with Graffiti. I found that there were absolutely things that I love, even to the point of trying to convert this blog over to it. (more about this later). The layout and site design, is relatively...(read more)

My favourite picture

Eric — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 00:34:55 GMT

Taken in Queenstown...(read more)

Graffiti CMS

Eric — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 00:14:22 GMT

I been hearing good things about Graffiti so I took advantage of the $99 offer from Telligent. Will be implementing it on this site this weekend. This site was built on CS2.1 and to be honest CS2.1 is too clunky for a blog. Now with the licensing costs...(read more)

Newsbreak v2.0

Eric — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 04:51:00 GMT

I was using Beetztreams rss reader for a while but it doesn't quite seem to work properly so i decided to look around for something that will work on my mobile device. After some searching, I found News Break by IIium software. I don't know why...(read more)

Internet connection via Activesync

Eric — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 00:51:00 GMT

I havd issues my Atom and Active sync It is not possible to use the Internet connection via ActiveSync to certain desktop computers - connection to desktop seems working correctly but Pocket Internet Explorer is showing error message 0x80072f78 each time...(read more)

SQL Server restoring a database with mdf file only

Eric — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 23:23:00 GMT

At work, one of the logs was taking up too much space as the transaction mode was set to full and we deleted the log and had difficulty reattaching the database. There is a gem of a command that allows you to do that. exec sp_attach_single_file_db @dbname...(read more)

Koders.com

Eric — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 10:41:00 GMT

Jag showed me this..wayyy kool http://www.koders.com/info.aspx?c=tools#IDEs...(read more)

To Iphone or not to Iphone

Eric — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 12:31:00 GMT

My trusty O2 Atom is a bit long in the tooth, and since I moved to Vodafone from Optus is being acting strangely. Vodafone swears back and blue that it isn't them but i am a bit sus about it. The phone can be on, and shows full network coverage but...(read more)

Eric — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 02:16:00 GMT

If you worked at multiple places like I have, you would know what a chore it is to keep in touch with people and where they are working now. Invariably you will lose touch and if you are a bad communicator like me, relationships that you build up, tends to get diluted. A colleague at work showed me this really cool concept called LinkedIn and I wished I thought of it earlier.

Basically it is the same as any other social networking site. (think facebook, myspace etc) but for professionals and mainly geared towards IT professionals. Basically it allows you to

Create an online resume of where you worked in the past and the roles you have undertaken
Get your colleagues to recommend your work. How often do recruiters ask for referrals? See my point?
Keep in touch with other colleagues who have moved on, so you can have a sticky beak at what they are doing now
See if there is any common friends and colleagues between you guys.
Get new jobs (Not sold on this yet but have to wait and see)

Do check it out..this is my linked in details

AVCHD & Sony HDR-SR1

Eric — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 01:57:00 GMT

Another one of my interests is Digital Photography. Besides a Nikon D70, which I absolutely love, the fam and I were planning a trip to the land of the long white cloud..aka New Zealand. So I thought I would go look on Ebay to see if there was a video camera that could complement my camera. I been to the shops and had my mind set on a Sony HDR-SR1 but they were a bit beyond my budget.

What is an Sony HDR-SR1? it is a true 1080i HDV camcorder..for those not in the know, it is the same resolution as some of the lcds and plasmas around. It also has a built in hard disc of 30GB which means it doesnt need any tapes at all. It also touts a new digital format called AVCHD which is a highly compressed form of mpeg 4. More about this later.

Went to Ebay to see if i could pick up one.

Yes...HDR-SR1 were available and one caught my eye..HDR-SR1 model with extras..mmm ok. it was an NTSC model, ok I could live with that..I mean most tvs now can support both NTSC and PAL so i thought not an issue. Let the buyer beware, there is actually two types of electronic devices sold in Japan. One for the local market and the other for the export market. And guess which sucker bought which model? Yep...I got the the local version. Got conned by the buyer who said you could change the menus. Actually there was a recourse to this, you should be able to put at least a negative feedback against the sellers name for false advertising. But alas i gave feedback before i found out that there was no english menus!!!!! what a dingbat! So I am stuck with a high performance camera in Japanese! lol

That aside we recently had a conference and i had to get a new external hard disk to store the raw footage for the meetings. Works about about 3 hours of taping is about 20GB in size!

I evaluated a few editiing packages..Sony Vegas, Ulead DVD Studio and i found that the best and easiest one to use was the Pinnacle Studio Plus 11. It will do AVCHD format and comes with a number of templates. You can upgrade to the Ultimate version but you have to pay Pinancle for every extra feature you want to use or unlock..can turn out to be an expensive option.

Resharper

Eric — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 02:29:00 GMT

I blogged before about Coderush...however I think I am about to change camps to Jetbrains Resharper. Resharper code analysis and coverage tools are so much better than coderush. Only gripe about it is that it takes over the intellisense functionality of vsstudio. grrrr