|Absolute Value|

Anyone else thinks that Dave Slusher is turning into an old man?

I love the look and feel of Windows XP. No one can deny that the user interface is very slick. The only other GUI that compares to XP is Mac OS. So imagine my dismay when I compiled my first VB.NET application and ran it. The controls still look like Windows 2000 controls. No XP look and feel at all with any control.

Bear in mind that my first .NET application was written years ago. I can only hope that VS.NET 2005 provides an XP look and feel. So in desperation I started searching the web for some replacement controls.

The company I found is Skybound. They give most of their controls away for free but a fee for the source code. I started using their VisualStyles product. The look and feel it provides is great except at a large performance cost. The loading of forms and controls is exponentially greater than without the tool.

Are there any other better tools or am I missing a really simple option in Visual Studio? Skybound have a great set of tools available but the performance degradation is not worth the enhanced look and feel.

Google launched Google Local and Google Maps for the UK today. Absolutely fantastic use of technolody!

Now we really get to see how many pubs there really are in London

I download a fair amount of torrent data with my laptop. I try to support podcasters if they have torrent feeds by running my laptop as a seeder. I also download the Ubuntu torrents to use in my virtual machine as well as seeding for other people’s benefit.

There is a drawback to the use of torrents. Torrents are broken up into hundreds of pieces per download and downloaded as they become available. This creates a large amount of fragmentation on your disk and it becomes even worse if you are using your machine as the downloads run (which I do). The disk slowdown becomes increasingly noticeable especially when I am running my laptop as my development machine and compiling while these downloads run.

I did some investigating into this problem and I have found a great way to solve it. If your torrent client (in my case Azureus) has the option, check the box that allocates and zeroes the download when you start downloading. What this does is allocate file space on your machine in advance which means that the only fragmentation that is going to take place is in the actual file itself which you can fix with an application like contig.

Hope this tip helps!

I have never been a fan of leather jackets. Never liked them, never wanted to wear one. This has been like this since I can remember. I always thought “old” people wore leather jackets. Either I am now old or I was mistaken during my misspent youth.

Back to the story. A while back, I was in Greenwich market after spent lunch in a great Thai restaurant . We walked underneath the Thames into the market for some light shopping and while there, I passed a stall that sold leather jackets. After a short time of trying on and chosing one I liked, I paid for a great piece of cow ass (The best piece of cow ass I have ever touched, in my opinion).

From that day on, I have proudly walked the streets of London, parading around my dried up cow ass for everyone to see. I liked it so much, I wore it pretty much every day during winter travelling to and from work. This was until I started noticing how many other people are wearing the EXACT SAME JACKET.

This is now seriously bothering me. I have counted most of the copies I see and I have hit 23. Yes, 23 people with the exact same jacket and this includes a person we saw in the newspaper wearing one. This is compared to Paul’s jacket, bought at the same stall in Greenwich, of which I have seen ZERO copies. This came to a head last week when I refused to stand at the same bus stop with a guy that had the same jacket as me.

Something needs to be done. I don’t know what to do yet but the fact that I have moved from East London to West London and still see people wearing this jacket is a problem for me. Any ideas?

Here is a picture of my jacket. If you like it, stay away from me

I have started using Adobe Premier to capture my video. However, uncompressed, the video is 6 GIGS including audio for only 30 minutes of video. My laptop cannot handle this load. Does anyone know how to capture video using Adobe Premier directly into a compressed format?