The Microsoft .NET magazine for Developers #5 (what a great title for a Dutch magazine!) has an article about Delphi 8 for .NET, written by Bob Swart. As one can expect from Bob, the article is clean, without prejudice and after reading it you can only think: why don’t I have a copy yet?! 😉
No link to the article, since the magazine is not an e-zine, but an old-fashioned paperstyle magazine.
Pfffff….back to “normal” operation again. In trying to get back to the right combination of settings, I only made things worse: Windows did not start at all anymore. Jikes! I started from the Windows XP disk, went for “Logon to exisiting installation” and saw that Windows reversed the drive letters of the IDE partitions: I was F and F was I. So….back to the BIOS, enable one of the two drives, and yes, there she blows was again. Reboot and enabled the other drive again, and now things are back to normal. WITH the annoying S.M.A.R.T. error message.
I must tell you: seeing messages like “NTLDR not found”, “Invalid system disk”, “Press any key to reboot” or just a blank screen when you expect the Windows XP login screen is as scary as it gets.
Because one of my drive reports via S.M.A.R.T. that a failure is imminent, I decided to turn of SMART. But, this Asus bios is not tricked easy: even with SMART off, it reports the error. So, I decided to switch of the IDE channel in the BIOS because my boot-device is a SCSI disk (IDE only used for storage). Windows booted fine, without the error.
But…you guessed it, Windows talked to the drive in PIO mode, no DMA at all. WTF? Back to the bios, let’s get the error and the speed back. Hey, there’s the error, but where’s Windows?
After several tries, reboots, settings, I can now only use my system with the IDE controller switched of in the BIOS, therefore the speed of this machine dramatically drops when I use the IDE disk.
Can someone explain this to me?
This weekend was a weekend of gardening. Or should I say “creating the garden”? The garden behind our house was nothing more than a lot of sand and some tiles in front of the door to clean your shoes before entering the house…
Friday we basically paved the garden and we layed the electricity cables for the garden lighting. Saturday we bought some plants and some enhanced ground and some wooden poles for a pergola(?). Yesterday we planted the herbs and the other stuff and I finished the electricity. Just to test it, I hooked up one of the lights we bought, and it looks great.
I gotta tell you, this is hard work. Typing on a computer, or using a mouse is a little different from lifting 30kg tiles, walking around with wheelbarrow filled to the brim and being on your knees for the greater part of the day. My respect for people that do this kind of work for a living!
Wow. Mono beta 2 has been released yesterday. The release notes describe what has changed since beta 1 and on the download page you can get the software.
Yesterday I bought a Linksys 54-g card for the laptop. The installation is very simple: just do a setup with the supplied CD, reboot and insert the card. Windows then recognizes the card and uses it. But when I switch to using WEP (since the AP is), it would not connect to the AP. After much trying and changing settings, I found that you just have to wait a little longer than I expected. A proper reboot after changing the settings and then waiting until the connection is made did the trick. After that first wait-till-I-get-my-settings-confirmed-with-the-AP, things are smooth. Reboot until network-up-and-running is faster than with the 3Com card. And the link quality is a lot better: signal strength and link-quality in the 90%-range.
Great, now we can surf the internet downstairs again, without bugging the connection to the computerroom upstairs.
How could I have missed this one: WSE 2.0 is out for download. WSE is a supported enhancement to VS.NET and the .NET Framework, so for secure applications you’d better install/use it.
Yesterday, I converted the application I’m building for a client from using TRichView to WPTools, after succesfully using both next to eachother in one window.
Although WPTools is only $45 (225 vs. 180) more expensive, it offers not only more components to make your programmers life easier, but it has better RTF-compatibility as well. TRichView (as confirmed by the author when I asked him about it) has problems with very thin table-lines (if you set the border to 1 or so). And it can’t handle headers and footers well, as I blogged about before.
In a couple of hours playing with the WPTools-components, I had more functionality in my application than ever before with TRichView. And when I asked the author a question in the middle of the night (actually, it was about 01:00), the answer was already in my mailbox this morning (at about 06:55). And I thought I had little sleep!
If one is interested, I can draft an article that shows the differences in more detail then described here. So drop me a line/comment if you would like to see such an article.
I changed the Linksys AP and the ethernet-bridge to use WEP (10-bits) and found that the performance was like I thought it should be: I have a 2-8mbit (downstream) ADSL connection, and I was seeing downloads in the range of 400-500kbyte/sec with peaks to around 800-900kbyte/sec.
This is the graph:
Problem now is that the laptop has a 3Com 11mbit network card, so I have to buy a 54g card, since it does not connect to the AP when WEP is enabled. It sees the AP, recognizes the signal-strength (excellent!), but it does not connect.
If you have a lot of images or pictures on your PC, you probably have some program to organize and modify them. Why not try FxFoto? It’s simple, and there is a FREE version. The pay-versions are only $29 or $39!