Category Archives: Ordinateurs

Computers and that

Yo, what happened to that sound?

Posted on November 7, 2006 by Arthur

Via e-mail I received a question about the Toshiba P100-SD3 and sound problems on Debian/Ubuntu: I decided to run Knoppix 5.1 [I’m still not sure about which version that is, but it’s the latest for sure] and see what goes … Continue reading →

Posted in Ordinateurs | Comments Off on Yo, what happened to that sound?

Com0Com

Posted on November 2, 2006 by Arthur

For the uninitiated: Framework 2.0 nowadays sports genuine Serialport communication (via an extra class/component called SerialPort) [MSDN link]. The class supports both blocking and non-blocking forms of communication. A good way to test serial port communication (without the need of … Continue reading →

Posted in Ordinateurs, Programming | Comments Off on Com0Com

The Update

Posted on October 31, 2006 by Arthur

Today, apparently the IE 7.0 update made it into a Windows XP patch. I say ‘apparently’, because while it appeared to be installing right (plus it deleted the previous Beta version of IE 7 I had installed a couple of … Continue reading →

Posted in Ordinateurs | Comments Off on The Update

Knoppix 5

Posted on October 17, 2006 by Arthur

To celebrate the 289128280th cakeday, I decided to load up Knoppix on the P100 laptop. There were a couple of issues, right at startup (where I had to add a couple of commands to skip the ACPI functionality). After detecting … Continue reading →

Posted in Ordinateurs | 8 Comments

Holy Cows!

Posted on October 11, 2006 by Arthur

So, a question programmers (the Earthly types) should be able to answer: How many cows can you store in a genuine Int64? If you’re a smartass, take it away!

Posted in Programming | Comments Off on Holy Cows!

That said

Posted on October 10, 2006 by Arthur

I had the opportunity to play around with Microsoft’s C# and I must admit it’s a breeze (and fun) to learn if you’ve got a C++/C, Pascal or Java background. Obviously, Microsoft’s C# designers took the best of many worlds, … Continue reading →

Posted in Ordinateurs | Comments Off on That said

You asked: How to find count between two dates mssql

Posted on October 7, 2006 by Arthur

Oh: that age old problem. It depends on what you’re looking for? Years, days? Milliseconds? /* Days */ select DATEDIFF(D, getdate(), ’10/11/06′); select DATEDIFF(Y, getdate(), ’10/01/02′); You may need to be careful with using year calculations: obviously MS SQL does … Continue reading →

Posted in SQL, You-Asked | 2 Comments

More Hardware

Posted on September 23, 2006 by Arthur

Alfons earlier pointed to Basix, a company that recently released the One Chip MSX, a computer that is compatible with the MSX1/MSX2 standard1 (A press kit can be found here). Actually, the box is supposed to do more than just … Continue reading →

Posted in Ordinateurs | Tagged | Comments Off on More Hardware

Smaller, smallest

Posted on September 23, 2006 by Arthur

Yesterday, I think, I was briefly skimming Slashdot and found this article at LinuxDevices, with, supposedly, the smallest PC you have ever seen: a Gumstix Netstix 200xm-cf. Looking at the specs, these devices run the same hardware that nowadays power … Continue reading →

Posted in Ordinateurs | 4 Comments

Who slams who?

Posted on September 15, 2006 by Arthur

This article (“The Web is broken and it’s all your fault”) popped up on the Postgres-general list and then made it into Slashdot as ‘Postgres slammed by PHP creator’. The Slashdot thread highlights some interesting PHP flaws and the fact … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming, SQL | Comments Off on Who slams who?

You asked: Satellite P100 SD3 review

Posted on September 11, 2006 by Arthur

Yes a brandnew category at xsamplex: you ask, we deliver! I’ve been working on a Toshiba Satellite P100 SD3 (action picture) for a while now and I generally like it OK. It’s priced fairly well (it’s currently available at Staples … Continue reading →

Posted in Hardware, You-Asked | Tagged , | Comments Off on You asked: Satellite P100 SD3 review

X3: week one

Posted on September 3, 2006 by Arthur

I managed to survive fairly well after the first week of playing X3: At this stage, I own 3 Mercury freighters, 1 Iguanu and my lonely Argon Buster. Here the tips: Tip 1: Making money is a slow process. Your … Continue reading →

Posted in Video Games | Tagged | Comments Off on X3: week one

SYWBAP

Posted on September 3, 2006 by Arthur

I briefly followed the spat between people and other people about the ratio of female / male at ‘Web 2.0’ conferences. One of the most linked images is this one and it’s quite telling, yes. Having been professionally programming for … Continue reading →

Posted in Ordinateurs | Comments Off on SYWBAP