Author: Andrew Huey

ACM

A few months back, I blogged about ACM’s deal with Safari and Books 24×7, where ACM members can access a subset of these online libraries. At the time, the book selection on both sites seemed to be a bit out of date. Well, they’ve updated the selection on both sites today, and there’s definitely more useful stuff up there now. They’ve (finally) got some ASP.NET 2.0 stuff, including the “ASP.NET 2.0 Core Reference” book by Dino Esposito, which is pretty useful. They even have some stuff on WCF and WPF.

The printing capabilities on Safari have gotten a bit more useful, too. I don’t remember exactly how it used to work, but it’s definitely easier to print a big chunk of text than it used to be.

I’m not sure that much has changed on the Books 24×7 site, though. I think there’s more .Net 2.0 stuff than there used to be, but I did a search on “Vista” and found nothing at all, initially. That’s not good. (I later found two Vista books that inexplicably did not show up when I searched for “vista”.) The Safari site has about four Vista books, which is OK, but not great.

asp.net performance

We’ve been having some trouble with our main ASP.NET application in work recently. (It’s our intranet, basically.) It’s been growing a lot lately, with more and more functionality being added to it, and more and more users accessing it. It’s running on a Windows 2000 server under ASP.NET 1.1. I have a new server set up that I’m planning on moving it to — it’s running Windows Server 2003, and I was planning on upgrading the app to ASP.NET 2.0 before moving it over. Given the performance problems, though, and my general lack of spare time, I’m thinking about moving it over as is, just to see if that helps, then maybe upgrading it to 2.0 later, when I have some time.

I know that there’s probably a lot I could do to tweak the performance on this application. We’ve done very little in the way of performance-tuning on our ASP.NET stuff. I discovered a book from Microsoft yesterday, Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability, which I think should be some help in guiding us through some tuning and optimization. The book is available as a PDF download, and it’s about 1100 pages. I read through a couple of chapters tonight, and it’s definitely got some useful advice on ASP.NET, ADO.NET, and SQL Server tuning. There’s plenty more in there too, but that’s all I’ve had time to read so far. I’m finding it useful enough that I went over to Amazon and ordered a used copy of the dead tree version. Highly recommended, if you need to do some .Net tuning, and you’re not sure where to start.

KeePass

I finally finished entering all my passwords into KeePass. I previously blogged about this here and here. So it looks like it took me a little over a month to get this done.

I see that the author of KeePass is working on a 2.0 version, rewriting it in .NET/C#. That’s pretty interesting; I’m curious to see if anyone will create a usable Mac version (running under Mono). Some of the features he’s including in 2.0 sound good too.

Now, I just need to come up with a viable way of keeping the database in sync between my PC and Mac. I may try doing it with FolderShare. I’m using that on my work PC and home PC right now, to keep some files in sync between the two, but not on my Mac. There may also be a way to keep the file in sync with .Mac; the challenge on that would be automating it on the Windows side, I think.

Bond

Film Forum is running a series of old James Bond films, starting at the end of this month. I’ve never seen any of the old ones on a big screen, so this might be fun. (I’ve seen them all a dozen times or more, I’d guess, but usually on TBS, or whichever cable channel happens to have the rights at the time.)

spring cleaning

I mentioned in a blog post about a month ago that I had found a receipt for a copy of OS/2 that I had bought in 1994. Well, I was doing some spring cleaning today, and I found that copy of OS/2, along with several OS/2 books and other old computer books. I threw them all out, sad to say. It’s a small apartment I live in, and there’s no room to keep outdated software, or books about outdated software, lying around. Goodbye OS/2, dBase IV, Clipper 5.2, Lotus 123 for DOS, and Novell 3.11. I’ll miss you. Or not, in some cases.

iBook problems and Jethro Tull

I noticed that Apple added a bunch of Jethro Tull stuff to the iTunes store this week. Tull was my very favorite band back in my teen years. They’re still a sentimental favorite, though I don’t listen to them much anymore. Browsing through the stuff in iTunes made me think a bit about which Tull albums I had on CD, vs. the ones I only ever had on cassette or vinyl. While I have about a dozen Tull CDs, I’m missing a few key albums that I never got around to re-purchasing. I also realized that I’d never ripped any Tull into my iTunes library. I decided to correct that by ripping the 20 Years of Jethro Tull box set.

I didn’t get very far, since my iBook wouldn’t pull the first CD into the drive. Nor would it pull any other CD into the drive. After some research, I eventually figured out that you can fix this problem by inserting a CD into the drive right as the iBook starts. OK, that’s kind of weird. The drive sounds kind of funny now, but it’s loading, reading, and ejecting CDs fine.

Getting back to Tull, I found a few casettes that I didn’t have on CD, so I figured I’d look into buying them from iTunes, or maybe just getting the CDs from Amazon. As usual, the iTunes version is more expensive than buying the physical CD from Amazon in most cases — usually $10 from iTunes and $8 from Amazon. The one notable exception is “A”, which comes with a bonus DVD if you get it from Amazon, so it costs a bit more than just buying the album from iTunes.

Somerville

The new building a couple of doors down from mine is apparently going to be a Marriott ExecuStay. It looks like they’re almost finished with it. It seems kind of weird to have an upscale extended-stay hotel just down the street from me. Are there really a lot of people out there who’d want to rent a room in Somerville like this? I have no idea how much they’re charging, but what I’ve seen of these places is that they’re usually $99 a night, or something like that, with a 30-day minimum. I guess there are probably a fair number of people who stay in Somerset County for business reasons for a month or two, maybe working for one of the pharmaceutical companies around here, and I suppose downtown Somerville would be a nice place to stay, versus staying somewhere on Route 22 or 206.

Hey, maybe I can talk one of the maids over there into coming over and cleaning my apartment!