Global Toad News

One of the methods that is promoted as way to organize your thoughts is to use a Mind Map, a great tool to use for this is FreeMind (which is a free Mind Mapping program written in Java).

Check it out.

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When using VMWare server , I noticed that there wasn’t an “easy” way to set the processor affinity (as there is in their ESX product which is more of an enterprise level product). After looking into this more I found that you can force virtual machines to NOT use certain cpus. For example if you have 2 processors, you can use “processor0.use = FALSE” to limit the guest to the second processor.

If you have more processors you would just need to add lines for all the processors you don’t want to use. Processors are numbered from 0.

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I have had intermittent problems with the USB bus under Windows XP (when the same computer running Linux had no problems), and had long speculated that there was a problem with Windows and laptops when using USB 2.0 devices.

It appears that I was correct. Microsoft has just issued a patch for Windows XP and the USB 2.0 bus. Whether this resolves all the issues I have only time will tell, but it’s a start.

You can get the patch here.

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At Tom’s Hardware there is an article about how to take Intel’s new $130 Pentium D 805, and make it work like an extreme edition CPU that costs $800 more.  Definitely a good article if you are thinking about upgrading your computer.  Though to be fair, to acheive the maximum benefit from this process you would probably have to spend $200 or so on a water cooling solution for your cpu and you definitely would need beefy power supply (I would go with a 600 watt one).

Still 4.1 GHz is a good thing, and this chip appears to be able to deliever.

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Occasionally I run into people who think that Microsoft uses Visual Source Safe (VSS) to handle source code control. No matter that I tell them that Microsoft has another product for source code control, heck you can even look at how they are coming up with the rest of the world with their unveiling of their CodePlex site.

VSS is a relic a bygone age, but I still see die hard VB fans who are clinging to VSS and claim that it really can do everything that other products can do, but they don’t seem to ever get it configured to do that. I think the real thing is that they see VSS as well integrated into their Visual Studio IDE, and since it works for them, it must work just as well even if you never (well hardly ever) use the Visual Studio environment.

Even those issues fail to address the fact that VSS was designed really as a limited solution and never really came up to PVCS or other solutions in terms release points and such.

But that’s just my thoughts.

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Google has released a software development kit (SDK) for AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) You can get it from here.

You can work through the tutorials from google.

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Recently I was evaluating the use of Microsoft Sql Server 2005, and while I missed the seperate query analyzer, I was getting used to the interface.

Until I tried to reattach a database from Sql 2000, then the whole UI on my machine went south.  I could no longer restore databases, or do much else in the interface (I could run queries).  Since this was just a testing of the waters, I went back to SQL 2000 (since all the other servers are SQL 2000) and everything is fine again.

The point isn’t to bash anyone, it’s just a warning that with SQL 2005 you could have problems that render the UI unusable (and I am uncertain of what those problems are) since Microsoft has rewritten the UI (which is a good thing), but there are “failure” points in the UI that could render you being forced into just using CLI tools manage your server.

So I’ll just stick with Sql 2000 for now, thank you very much.

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