Channel 9 - Discussions by Aptly Goodie

Coffeehouse - Will IE add a built-in spell checker?

Aptly Goodie — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 12:16:34 GMT

I think most people simply overlook (and taking for granted) things that big companies brought forth, and set low standards for creations by 16 year old basement dwelling kids. XMLHttpRequest came from MS and still people say the company never innovates.

Tech Off - Quick Asp.Net 2.0 question

Aptly Goodie — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 23:06:50 GMT

Dupe

Tech Off - Quick Asp.Net 2.0 question

Aptly Goodie — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 23:06:18 GMT

sgomez wrote:

Great tip, thanks...

But still not working...

this:

generates this:
<%= "Hello " + "World!"%>

Text property expects a string, and if the tag is not <%# %>, it will consider that a literal string; <%= Hello + World %> in this case. If you want evaluation on the front page, you'd need <%# %>, but that will require you to raise DataBind event.

One nice thing about <%# %> is you can put them anywhere... such as

So you can actually assign data to controls without doing it in code behind. I prefer this method because it lets me see where I'm getting the data from.

Coffeehouse - Settling the religous debates once and for all

Aptly Goodie — Tue, 04 Jul 2006 22:04:48 GMT

Sabot wrote:

People have argued for centuries about Jesus and religions, so we aren't going to crack the issues here on C9 are we?

But I have a belief about what will solve the issues once and for all.

Time.

Sorry, my friend, time will not change much. Religion will only evolve with changing human thinking. It's inescapable. First we have Terracentric thinking, then when we all know it's heliocentric, somehow we managed to adapt religions to work with that new discovery. And then when we proved that Earth was more than 5,000 years old, religion still works. Then evolution etc etc... It's really a waste of time when it's clearly an outflowing channel of human's dissatisfaction of its own fragility and insignificance in the universe. Healthier to admit that kind of fragility and insignificance than to force to think otherwise. Didn't you guys get taught that you should be who you are and be proud of who you are in pre-school? It's the biggest athiest organized conspiracy, ya'know.

Coffeehouse - like animation? rent Mirror Mask.. (minh?)

Aptly Goodie — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 12:49:35 GMT

Cairo wrote:

What's the music that's used in the flash movie on that website?

I believe it's Iain Ballamy. His rendition of "Close to You" is just awesome.

Coffeehouse - Office12 Document Format is Not an Open File Format

Aptly Goodie — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 15:43:07 GMT

PaoloM wrote:

leighsword wrote:
I remebered I used the legendary 'notepad' to modify and save the Xml file, so I don't think there such an encoding problem.

That's exactly why.

I think that's why too. Remember that XML headers define the encoding (usually UTF-8), so the parser will switch to different decoding schemes regardless of what the file originally is. Notepad can save in UTF-8 format, but on my English machine it saves as ASCII by default. See what your Notepad saved it as.

Office can say "XML file appears to be corrupted" but a standard user will not know what that is all about. ("I'm opening a Word file! What XML file!?!")

Tech Off - Data model performance question (splitting tables)

Aptly Goodie — Sun, 19 Feb 2006 17:17:13 GMT

Is it a good idea to split tables? Let's say I have a table of photos, a table of galleries, a table to relate photos to galleries (M-to-N), a table of articles, and a table to relate photos to articles (M-to-N). Should I combine these two relation tables into one and distinguish each relation with a type, or split it into two by type? If I split them, the growth of table size will only be moderate, say O(1.5N), knowing that a photo may only be featured in 1.5 galleries on average (maybe lower). If I combine them, it may make searches lengthier because it will record all relationships, including ones that I have no mentioned, making the growth likely be O(m x n) or maybe O(n^2). So one makes coding harder and overall performance better, the other makes coding easy but performance may be unscaleable. Further, it's very likely that finding photos in a gallery occurs more frequently than finding all relations in a gallery. What should I do?

Coffeehouse - Subtitles?

Aptly Goodie — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 14:51:11 GMT

Well, there are transcripts, but I guess not too many of them. I think WMV supports something like a text subtitle thing? On top of transcribing uttered words, syncing it with video must be a bigger job.

Coffeehouse - IE7 teaser/commercial.

Aptly Goodie — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 15:21:10 GMT

Stephen wrote:

I thought he was going to activate the trash compactor

Nice one though

What a waste! He didn't even recycle the cat food can!

Tech Off - Explorer thumbnails not reflecting image

Aptly Goodie — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 14:32:38 GMT

I had the same problem and never found a way to solve it. Although I think it may very well be the fact that JPEGs contain more than one image... perhaps because of EXIF?

Tech Off - Separate instances of Acrobat

Aptly Goodie — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 14:28:36 GMT

Why do that anyway. Just use Ctrl+W to close the document. In fact, it's better to use MDI since you can automatically tile the child windows horizontally or vertically in Windows > Tile, as per request. Only problem is you cannot easily know which documents are loaded. No tabs. Though the Windows menu helps some.

Coffeehouse - Sparkle? Flash? Flex? Try NeoSwiff!

Aptly Goodie — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 00:02:26 GMT

Anyone who's ever tried to do anything complex on Flash with Actionscript will greatly appreciate this product. Thanks for the tip, will go exploring! Besides, Flash is still ubiquitous and will probably remain so for sometime, even after WPF/E is released.

Coffeehouse - Channel9 Video Quality Poor

Aptly Goodie — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 16:39:56 GMT

I compared the videos posted here and looks like you're quite right, but it's really hard for me to discern. Also while the WMV version, at the same bitrate, uses about 30% of my humble Athlon XP 2100+, the MOV takes up 100% and stutters. Maybe later.

Coffeehouse - They laughed at Bill Gates

Aptly Goodie — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 19:05:04 GMT

Then again you can't help others if you can't help yourself. Every effort should be appreciated.

Coffeehouse - "Why do I need Vista?" - Scoble and Clement explain!

Aptly Goodie — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 15:52:02 GMT

jonathanh wrote:

Nope, under 5% is right. I just had a quick MSN Messenger chat with encarta@conversagent.com

I was talking about energy consumption.

Coffeehouse - "Why do I need Vista?" - Scoble and Clement explain!

Aptly Goodie — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 05:08:47 GMT

sysrpl wrote:

Always leaving my computer on in my small one bedroom apartment I could in all seriousness see my power bill jump from $90 a month to $175 a month.

Hmm. According to this article, with that price difference, you can run two more computers for a whole year.

sysrpl wrote:

Just image how Windows Vista will affect the United States already horrendous record on power consumption. We are less than 5% of the world's population, but we use 40% of it's power.

Isn't it 25%?

Coffeehouse - WinXP HOME, another failed product after WinME

Aptly Goodie — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 04:50:30 GMT

Is the title completely unrelated to the content?

Anyway, I once bought a Dell and it came with Encarta Atlas. Pretty cool. But most will find it useless (we have Wikipedia afterall) and consider it bloat, or maybe DoJ and EU will fine MS.

Coffeehouse - Not starting a fight I swear!

Aptly Goodie — Sat, 21 Jan 2006 14:41:24 GMT

As far as I know, PHP is like legacy ASP. If that's the case, PHP -> ASP.NET is a radical jump. Although Visual Studio will help a lot in learning the platform, do learn the concepts first. It will help tremendously.

Coffeehouse - Office Access revolution

Aptly Goodie — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 02:34:40 GMT

SQL Server requires a system service to function, and register all data and logging files to the instance. mdb's portability has its place.

Tech Off - Vista new features?

Aptly Goodie — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 05:02:24 GMT

Sven Groot wrote:

Actually, the installer says it's "the fastest and most reliable Windows ever," implying that no more improvements will be made ever again. I don't understand why they left that in because it was bugged during the beta and it's also not the first Windows installation to make that mistake.

My understanding of the usage here is "The fastest and most reliable Windows ever to date", which is a valid sentence and still true.

Tech Off - XML Element Node Attribute Parsing

Aptly Goodie — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 23:03:36 GMT

Or you can use stuff in System.Xml.Serialization...

Coffeehouse - Will 2GB of Ram Improve my preformance

Aptly Goodie — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 05:30:23 GMT

Your system is overpowered! Mine is underpowered

Coffeehouse - Why Vista only ships on DVD?

Aptly Goodie — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 15:18:16 GMT

Well you know they love each other. Like Susie and Calvin. They can't live without another.

Happy New Year!

Coffeehouse - Keyboard - natural ?

Aptly Goodie — Sat, 24 Dec 2005 02:51:09 GMT

I used to use those keyboard and if you're not a touch typist, it's a good way to learn the right way. Not only will you type faster with greater accuracy, typing with the correct fingers prevent your arms from swaying all over the place, reducing chances of sores. I'd say get it, but be prepared to forced into the right way of typing and expect some initial typing speed slow downs.

Coffeehouse - External Hard Drive

Aptly Goodie — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 21:18:36 GMT

I used to have a problem of that sort with my laptop format external USB HDD. Turns out there wasn't enough power so while the controller was recognized by Windows, it failed to used it because the HDD failed to spin to operational speed. I bought another one with dual USB cable (one for data and one for power) and never had that problem anymore.

Yeah, though they said external power may be needed, it's safe to say it is required.