Author: Andrew Huey

Adium

Some time ago, I tried to set up an IM client on my Mac that would connect to my company’s Sametime server. It might have been an older version of Adium, or it might have been Mercury. I can’t quite remember. Either way, I couldn’t get it to work, and just gave up. Well, I took another shot at it today, this time using the current version of Aduim, and it worked like a charm.

The official Sametime client for Mac is in beta right now. It looks pretty good, from what I’ve seen, but it’s nice to have something that works well in the meantime.

Right Stuf Geneon Sale

Right Stuf International has a bunch of Geneon DVDs on sale, 10 for $50 or 25 for $100. I have to admit I got sucked in on the latter deal. They had a bunch of stuff listed that I’ve been meaning to pick up, plus some stuff I was just curious about. I should be buried in anime DVDs in a week or two. Anything I don’t like can get traded off on Peerflix.

computer books

I just finished ASP.NET 2.0: A Developer’s Notebook. Looking back through old posts, it appears that I’ve been working my way through this one for quite a while now. Oh well. The next book in my stack is Expert C# Business Objects which, according to Amazon, I bought on Sept 20, 2005. So I guess it’s about time to crack it open, right? Of course the C# 2005 version is out now. I’d like to read that one instead, but I don’t want to just toss out a $60 computer book. I guess I’ll start reading the one I’ve got, then maybe think about “upgrading” to the new one if it’s really interesting.

ASP.NET 2.0 – client callbacks

The client callback mechanism in ASP.NET 2.0 was apparently changed during the beta, at some point after the book I’m reading was written. To their credit, O’Reilly covers this in a doc file posted on their site.

Also, this page at the quickstarts.asp.net site describes the current mechanism briefly, and this article on the MSDN site gives a bit more detail.

eBay weirdness

I was looking for something on eBay today, and stumbled across a very odd seller. He’s selling some pretty pedestrian stuff for really high prices.

I wonder if he just got the pricing wrong somehow, accidentally adding $1000 to everything. Or if this is part of some kind of weird plan, setting up an ID that’ll be used for a scam at some point.

ASP.NET 2.0 ObjectDataSource

The ASP.NET 2.0 book I’m reading has a simple example of using an ObjectDataSource bound to a GridView. I’m always a little suspicious of wizard-generated stuff like this, but I’m willing to give it a try. The example in the book did not actually work, though, and a few minutes of poking around didn’t reveal anything obvious that I’d missed.
This article has some good material on the ObjectDataSource. I suppose it’s something I’ll need to look into a bit more, in general.

goodbye Vista

I decided to give up on Vista for now. I restored the backup of my original XP install on my laptop. (Done with Acronis True Image, by the way.) I think if I had a much more powerful laptop, the Vista beta might be usable, but it’s just too slow on a 2-year-old Gateway machine, with 512 MB of RAM and a low-end video card.

I am still looking forward to the final release of Vista, but I doubt I’d upgrade either my desktop or laptop to Vista; I’ll need to wait until the next time I buy new machines.