Tuesday, December 27, 2005

Until the windows world is completely managed (never), .NET devs are going to have to get their heads wrapped around unmanaged resource cleanup.  Here are some good resources to get you started:

In addition, Francesco Balena has posted a pattern that avoids most of the complexity of the disposable pattern.  For more, see his post.

Tuesday, December 27, 2005 10:59:46 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [0]  | 

A remind to anyone with a Hitachi Deskstar T7K250:

If you're expecting 3.0Gb/s performance, remember that you're not going to get it until you turn it on.  The drive ships in compatibility mode (1.5Gb/s) since some systems don't support 3.0.  Here the link to the utility that allows you to enable 3.0:

http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm

Tuesday, December 27, 2005 9:36:11 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [0]  | 

On my new computer, I was having trouble with my mouse cursor sporadically freezing.  About once an hour it would just lock whenever it was and refuse to move for 10+ seconds.  I went to the Asus newsgroups and saw that others were having trouble specifically with USB mouses, but offered no solution.  For several weeks I just put up with the problem.  I couldn't see any correlation between what I was working on or running when the cursor would freeze, but I did find that pressing any keyboard key (including [Control]) would free the cursor... so for a time I went on with my life just pressing [Control] whenever the cursor locked.  BUT I happened to be messing around in the motherboard BIOS and saw an options for USB 1.1 support.  It was turned on, so I thought I would see what would happen if it was off.  Sure enough... no more mouse freezes.  Any hardware guru care to explain why? :-)

Tuesday, December 27, 2005 9:31:56 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [1]  | 

I stumbled across a helpful compatibility guide on the 64bit version of windows today:
http://www.3dvelocity.com/articles/win64compatibility/win64softlist.htm

...but until Cisco's VPN client supports x64, I sadly won't be able to use it on my primary computer.

Tuesday, December 27, 2005 9:23:34 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [0]  | 
 Thursday, December 15, 2005

So, I was reading Mike Gunderloy's Larkware News, and realized that Windows XP had gone open source!  ...but not by Microsoft's choice.  Apparently, there is an open source group that has been working on duplicating the windows API using open source code.  The name of the project is ReactOS and the website is at http://www.reactos.org/.  Now all I want to do is download the source and see if I can make a contribution...

Here is ReactOS running Unreal Tournament:

Thursday, December 15, 2005 9:28:11 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [0]  |