I retired from personal blogging in July 2008 but you can find me over at blog.xero.com
Follow @roddrury
Noticed on Wired.
http://blog.wired.com/cultofmac/index.blog?entry_id=296135
 |
Here’s a cool new toy. The Belkin Wireless minimouse. $NZ85 @ www.quay.co.nz . It has a really nice weight and definately gets the comments when demo’ing. |
Last weekend I did a Peter Hart Windsurfing course. Peter had quite a bit of gear to take back to the UK so managed to convince him I should buy his slightly used Mistral Syncro freestyle board before he left.
I was using an AHD MaxRide 65.4 DRT as my light wind wave and freestyle board but at 104 litres it wasn’t quite bouyant enought. The new Mistral Syncro is 115 litres so hopefully that will make the difference.
I had a Mistral Stinger over 10 years ago and that was one of the best gybing boards I’ve ever used so I’m excited about the Syncro.
The design spec is as follows:
We have the ultimate shape that will allow you to experience it all with just one board. The magazines call it freeride or freemove. We call it the time of your life, or simply: SYNCRO.
Never have the characteristics of speed, maneuverability and control ever been combined so successfully in one board shape.
We have established a high performance board line with the SYNCRO, a line that benefits from the best features of the BEAST and JOKER, but combined into a board shape package that is much more multi-faceted. This is why the brand new, built to fly, SYNCRO feels so good everywhere: whether in moderate waves, jumping, drag racing or freestyling; from duck gybes to willy skippers – The Syncro boards can do practically everything. The outline and trimmed rocker promise you a fantastic ride: the curved shape is well matched by the thicker wave rails and the flatter/scoop-rocker line. Additional features like the Hollow Point Squash Nose with channels and swallow tail allow the shape to help sailors attempting modern freestyle maneuvers. The SYNCRO 90 has even more to offer, working perfectly as a wave-freestyle-Board, due to the fact that it has the wider outline of the JOKER combined with the rocker-line of the BEAST. Finally, all SYNCROs are fitted with the new, modular shock absorbing footpads.
All SYNCROs are supplied with the special wave-/freestyle fin. Designed by Kai Hopf and produced in the high precision, moulded PrePreg Technology.
I ‘ve been using MindManager from MindJet for the past few days. I had a quick play a few months ago but this time took the 30 minutes to go thru the tutorials.
MindManager is my new favourite thing. I don’t know how I lived without it before.
Been trashing this album for the past few weeks. Soane: Tongan Chic. Totally recommended.
New Zealand music is so good right now.
Information is now available on the Full Text Features of the next version of SQL Server.
SQL Server “Yukon” Full-Text Search: Internals and Enhancements
Key things are performance …
For example, on the same hardware, with the same data set, building a full-text index on 20 million rows of character-based text data took roughly 14 days in SQL Server 2000, while in SQL Server “Yukon”, the same index required less than 10 hours.
Can’t tell if passing variables will work yet.
E.g. This works in SQL2000
SELECT ProductModelId, ProductName
FROM ProductModel
WHERE CONTAINS(CatalogDescription, ‘ ” aluminum alloy “ ‘)
This does not
SELECT ProductModelId, ProductName
FROM ProductModel
WHERE CONTAINS(CatalogDescription, ‘ @SearchTermVariable ‘)
The seperated architecture still means that big searches cannot be prefiltered by rows. Therefore on big FullText catalogs you will end up with a large set of hits out of the FullText Search into TempDB before applying row restrictions based on the data in the SQL tables.
Living in New Zealand we were blown away when TechTV arrived (on Saturn) a couple of years ago. Never had we dreamed we would have a whole channel about technlogy and fairly recent (like under 1 week).
Sure it showed 20 minutes of TechTV self advertising every hour and the stories were repeated again and again, but TechTV has been great.
I like the enthusiam of Leo but it used to really bug me how he would interupt interviews and not let people talk. Also he was on too many shows. Anyway Leo is out of there, and Chris is back.
Paul Allens Vulcan just sold TechTV to Comcast so be interesting to see how it changes.
Have a look at http://www.go-l.com.
For years I’ve wondered why PC manufacturers don’t create a sexy, no compromise range of PC products.
Lieberman appears to lay an ‘ad-agency think’ wrapper over manufacturing targetting the growing niche of users where the ratio of (value of work product)/(value of tool) means give me the best tool possible dammit.
So if PC manufacturers don’t deliver this new model evolves to fill the void.
New Zealands own Tony Bain is on this weeks DotNet Rocks.
Tony is now based in Melborne but will be well known to most NZ developers.
We’ve been using Tony on a number of projects over the years and its great to see his profile being raised internationally. Go Tony!
Noticed on Omar Shahine’s blog. Very relevant if you’re doing image manipulation.
http://blogs.msdn.com/omars/archive/2004/03/29/100941.aspx
And here are the results. The average time it took to process 37 JPEGs taken from the same camera and roughly the same size went from 631ms to 6.76ms. So, this new method is 93x faster. Holy Cow!!! I thought that maybe something was wrong, so I re-ran the tests many times, and always got the same result. Simply mind boggling. This probably brings the .NET implementation to the same speed as writing native C++ code against GDI+.
The good news is that the article mentions that this fix will get rolled into the next Service Pack. However, you’ll need to modify your code as I did to take advantage of this.
blog