Software utilities

Principied technologies produced a few reports on speed tests for Windows XP and Vista.

From these tests it seems that Vista SP1 and XP SP2 have comparable speed on office tasks. Difference is around half a second for most of the tests, and only 9 out of 128 tests resulted in a difference of 1 sec or more; XP led in 8 of them. Vista SP1 was more responsive than XP SP2 and Vista after rebooting. Vista and Vista SP1 had substantially the same performance. Similar results were derived for home tasks, with comparable results from all the 3 systems. Home tasks included using Adobe Acrobat, Office Professional 2003 and Word (Adding and resizing a JPEG image was one of the tests). Office tasks ranged from using Excel (document management, charts, data handling) to advanced use of Word and Powerpoint, to Acrobat document management.

Google Summer of Code™ will be held also this sumer. Registration will open March 3, 2008 for mentoring organizations and on March 24 for students. All the students can participate, 1500 participated in the past three years. More information available at the official website.

If you have a ASP.NET datalist and you need to show a message when there are no items in the list, you can use a code like the following:

myDataGrid.DataSource = …;
myDataGrid.DataBind();

if(myDataGrid.Items.Count == 0)
{
myDataGrid.Visible = false;
someLabelWithAMessage.Visible = true;
}
else
{
myDataGrid.Visible = true;
someLabelWithAMessage.Visible = false;
}

This is for C#, for VB it wuold be something like:
myDataGrid.DataSource = …
myDataGrid.DataBind()

If myDataGrid.Items.Count = 0 then
‘There are no records
myDataGrid.Visible = False
someLabelWithAMessage.Visible = True
Else
myDataGrid.Visible = True
someLabelWithAMessage.Visible = False
End If

Happy coding!

Apple iPod have a lock that prevents legal transfer of MP3’s to your iPod if you don’t have iTunes installed. Since there is no iTunes for Linux, you cannot use your regurarly purchased multimedia gadget if you choose Linux. But there are around a few guys (see here or here) that breached Apple’s lock, letting you use alternative tools, such as gtkpod, to transfer MP3 to your iPod. Very interesting is a porting of Linux to iPod, available at http://ipodlinux.org.

ICANN announced that 6 of the 13 root servers now suport IPv6 addressing. This means that now it’s possible to use the 340 trillion trillion trillionn trillions of IPv6 addresses (it’s not a joke, it’s real!! the exact number is 3.4×10³⁸) for website addressing. This is crucial, since IPv4 addresses are going to a miserable end soon… The matter is, they say that IPv4 addresses wil finish around 2011, while a complete deployment of IPv6 is expected in 2025. Now I wonder how we’ll surf during those 14 years…