dtemp has a good outline here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/dtemp/archive/2004/08/17/215764.aspx

Essential SQL Server Date, Time and DateTime Functions

I've always find out strange to work with date and time in SQL Server, it just feel so ... unnatural. The aforementioned link list the important date & time function in SQL Sever. Goodness :)

Unfortunately, I'm not a typical home computer or business laptop user. I'm a developer and use my laptop for home development etc. Running Vista is putting extra strain that I don't need. I've put up with it for a while before deciding it ain't worth it. On top of that I have a few more grief with Vista:

- It's too damn chatty. Dialog boxes keep popping out asking me to do something. It's annoying. There's gotta be a way to turn this off.

- Windows Media Player (WMP) stutters near the end of the song. Something that I can't figure out how to fix yet, at the last few seconds of a song, WMP seems to have problem playing back and it introduces a couple of second of "WMP remix".

- WMP takes aaaages to move from one track to another if you force it to move.

- Heavy disk access. Vista seems to keep reading/writing the disk all the time. I've turned off indexing and disk IO is still noticeably (much) higher than XP.

- No nVidia driver for Vista just yet. nVidia hasn't released the GeForce Go 7800/7900 driver for Vista.

- It tries too hard (to be smart that is). There should be a "I know what I'm doing" option that will automatically set everything to "Advanced" mode. For example, not allowing you to do "select all" in read-only and protected folders is probably a life safer for some, but totally annoying for me.

Is it all doom for Vista then? I don't think so. For a start it's very good looking bordering MAC OS X' sexiness. Compare Vista to XP side-by-side you'll notice the big jump in UI.

Also most of my grief above can be attributed to my type of user (developer). A typical home user who use the computer for simple internet/email, games, simple Word & Excel will probably benefit for Vista's new features and the rather harsh safety options. I for one will wait until I absolutely have to upgrade to Vista.

Initially I thought this was a simple problem, simply uninstall then re-install. Well I was wrong, it turned out to be quite serious and common problems. Despite following suggestions from AVG forums which other people seemed to be quite successful, I can't uninstall AVG. Downloading a new executable, run as Admin, uninstall doesn't work. Installing it over the existing install also doesn't work too well.

Simply put, I should have uninstalled AVG before upgrading to Vista. Anyway I thought I was screwed and need to reinstall Vista from scratch, kinda a drastic method. I'd rather not.

Well the solution turned out to be quite simple. Suddenly I realised what if I supplied AVG with a new and valid license? So if you double click AVG's installation, just before the install starts it'll show you the license (generated I presume) for you. So copy that license into a notepad. Reboot Vista, AVG will complain about the license thingy. Paste the license that you took down earlier and voila, it's all good.

This is the background of the problem as I posted in MSDN forum earlier today:

I'm currently at loss with this current problem. This is the scenario: I have several c# libraries (all strongly named) in my solution. This solution processes data and serialised the result into a MS SQL Server database.

I have a test project that accesses the database and deserialise my object and it is working perfectly fine, so I'm certain that the serialisation/deserialisation code is working, but just not within VSTO framework.

Now this error is suspiciously related to way VSTO is run by Excel. I spent ages trying to figure out what went wrong since all the assemblies are available and loaded properly. I even tried strong naming all the assemblies.

I almost gave up before fortunately helped arrived from this thread. Basically it gave me the idea of hooking to AppDomain's AssemblyResolve event to find out if there is a problem. Yes there was, but in a completely different assembly than the one that was in the exception message!

Apparently this is a common problem when .NET is hosted by an external application. Often the virtual machine has difficulties loading assemblies. For example your project requires assembly A and A requires assembly B, normally you only need to add reference to A and the virtual machine will be able to load assembly B automatically, but not with VSTO. The solution is to strong reference (add the reference from Visual Studio's add reference dialog box) the assemblies, and voila, everything works ... half a day later.

Things to watch out is the escaping of the binPath. If there are spaces in your binPath you must escape it using the " character which must be escaped again using the \ character.

For example:

c:\sc create MyService binPath= "\"c:\program files\my service\service.exe\""

A good article about this class is available here. Don't I wish that this class is available in .NET 1.x, this would have saved me heaps of ground work in GUI projects.

So migrated the photos, added the Creative Commons copyright and that's pretty much it. I still need to tweak bits and pieces of it, but I'm quite pleased that it's been working really well. This is my third attempt at online photo album heh, hopefully this Coppermine will stay for a while.

This is already looking so much better than crappy Whereis mapping engine. When Google add the direction engine I can't see any reason why I would want to use Whereis.

Update: Wrong info, Google actually puts Australia on the map not just NSW.

I need to put more anti-spam plug-ins to buff up the defense. Unfortunately I couldn't get the CAPTCHA plug-in to work. With this current anti-spam measure those spam still made it to the system, I'd like it to not enter the system at all if I can help it.

You can pretty much disregard the instruction on MovableType website for "upgrading" MovableType installation. This is what you need to do:

1) Backup everything, including your MovableType's database. I'm using BerkeleyDB so it's very easy for me.
2) Extract MovableType's tar.gz file into a new directory
3) Fix your mt-config.cgi. For me there are only two (yes two) settings that I need to fix. The path for my new MT 3.2 install and the location of the datasource. Point the datasource to the old MT 3.1x BerkeleyDB
4) On your web browser go to your new MovableType 3.2 directory's mt.cgi. That will automatically sets the upgrade process and voila you're done.

This way my templates, old generated files are still the same. One thing that I still couldn't figure out is that I can't see all the comments on the comments list. They are there if I go to the individual entries but a lot are missing from the main comments page. I hope this is not a sign of a corruption again.

Once again I was thwarted by the cryptic Perl error messages. This time though I had my resolve to use MovableType 3.2. I found out that installing it fresh seems to work, so rather than doing an "upgrade" I exported the content of my old blogs and imported back to the new installation.

It seems to work good enough, but it does have a few drawbacks:

1) Archives by default are stored in the root blog directory. I didn't realise this because before all my archives are neatly stored under the "archives" directory.

2) MT 3.2 seems to generate different filename than the MT 3.1x for items with longer name.This is the new filename while this is the old one. I suspect a few my internal links will be broken if I don't leave the old files.

But apart from those two issues, arguably quite bad if a blog is popular but mine is not, everything seems to be working quite well.

Next step is to customise the styles, at the moment both blog have the standard styles that come with the default install. It actually looks better than my old one :)

I remember buying the first book April last year and have been studying whenever I have the time. It hasn't been an easy process, the most difficult task is to actually find the time to study. Not to mention the amount of material to cover. When I first started studying I thought I can finish the entire set in 5 months, at 1 exam per month rate. Reality doesn't seem to agree. I've been told that the 'normal' time to finish MSCD .NET range between 10 - 18 months. I know a few people who didn't end up finishing it, you do need a lot of determination and encouragement to study.