Beware of Halfords sale - HotUKDeals Forum

Beware of Halfords sale - HotUKDeals Forum: "Last week i was looking for bike carriers on halfords and i found a high mount 3 bike carrier for £ 56.

Earyly today morning i get an email informing me about 50% sale on all items including bike carriers. I check the item in question and guess what. they modified the details to have retail price to £ 89 and sale price to be £ 56.

What's the point of having a sale if the price remains the same."

mounting skydrive in windows home server

two days back i finally removed vista from my workstation at home and converted it to become a home server. I was interested in taking some backups to sky drive.

Good search came up with Gladinet which supports mounting cloud based storage and skydrive is one of them (though most people complain about whs not being supported)

Well i installed Gladinet and on running it i got a Port 80 in use error. Which look up suggested that IIS is the culprit (ofcourse WHS exposes itself through web interface too). Opened IIS, modified default website to consume 8008 instead of 80 and that was all.

Gladinet started up jut fine, connected it up to skydrive and copied 10 gigs worth of pictures :)

Intelligent design vs. Evolution

You would have imagined that the place for Intelligent design would be in a schools Religous Education curriculum. Oh well some of the rather stupidly religious and blank minded members of Dover Area School in Pennsylvania, USA changed the rules and made it compulsory for the students to be taught about ID before being taught about Evolution (in a Biology class).

A few days back I even read about Vatican saying that ID had its place in christian explaination of the world and that it should not be taken as a science. I agree there are lot of religions and how far would the board go... accomodate a chapter for each religions version of ID !!! oh well thats a thought... but there's no place for it in Biology class...
In the latest battle, a federal judge said Tuesday that 'Intelligent design is a religious alternative masquerading as a scientific theory and cannot be mentioned in biology classes in a Pennsylvania public school district'

Complete Catalog at Microsoft E-Learning

List of courses at Microsoft E-Learning. A lot of these are free ones. Have a look

Oracle coming out with Express edition

A few weeks back I read in VSJ magazine that Oracle was coming out with Oracle Developer Tools for Oracle 10g database which would sort of enable use of .net framework in Oracle.

I logged into OTN and I had a sniff around. Over the last few years MSDE which is the stripped down SQL Desktop Engine has gained a lot of support and market because even though it's limited functionality, it still can do lot of shit. The new version of SQL Server is also coming out with new MSDE christined SQL Server 2005 Express Edition. What I saw on OTN surprised me. Oracle wants a piece of it too.

The release 2 supports .net framework 1.0 and above and you can write stored procedures and probably functions using .net. It creates PL/SQL wrappers for the .net code and when called it loads CLR as a seperate process and uses LPC to communicate with CLR. That would sort of do the job but maybe take a little longer. The fact that thats all you can do with .net is the limiting factor.

Even IBM who I consider proponents of Java support .net framework 1.1 in there DB2 UDB 8.2 or something like that. They like Oracle allow only Stored Proc and UDFs using .net languages. The CLR is again hosted in a seperate process.

I think SQL 2005 has the most extensive implementation out there supporting, Stored Procs, UDFs, UDTs, Triggers etc.

Free e-learning courses from microsoft

I came across these when I was browsing sql developer center yesterday. There are some great e-learning courses for free for the next 6 months on microsoft learning.

For SQL 2005 click here

For Visual studio 2005 & .net 2.0 click here

Currently I am going through SQL 2005 course. It's alright so far. Give it a go.
Good luck coding.

BrowserCaps and other Browser Testing/Detection Resources

BrowserCaps for ASP.NET machine.config / web.config

Over the last few weeks I have been looking around the net, to find someway, to modify the useragent of IE 7 beta. It would just crash on asp.net application sighting a error converting 7.0b of the user-agent.
Finally today's search lead me to the above site which looks promising.. I will modify the web.config and add new browsers to browscap section.. hopefully it will work.