My first ever hard-disk was a whopping 2GB when 340MB was considered high-end.  £800 meant it was a steal — an end-of-line trade-only offer…

A massive double-height 5.25″ SCSI behemoth from DEC that sounded like a turbine powering up. It had a gyroscopic effect that could whip your hand off and a seek noise that resonated through the house in the early hours of the morning as another caller trawled Black Ice BBS’s file library.

Yesterday I predicted the ability to run XNA code on our Xbox 360’s today.

We’re not quite there yet but we are a lot closer than most people believed this time yesterday.

I’m not sure why it doesn’t do this as standard but a simple event handler should do the trick:

People have asked (in the IRC #CSharp) why adding text to a TextBox is so slow and flickery. Normally they are trying:

Internet Explorer 7 has just offered to install itself on my machine helpfully already downloaded, all 14.8MB, by Windows Automatic Update.

One can assume that IE’s market share will shift from 6 to 7 practically overnight unless significant numbers reject the update or have switched Automatic Update off completely.

There’s a possibility that tomorrow will see the announcement of XNA Game Studio Beta 2 with support for compiling and running applications on your Xbox 360.

Originally this was scheduled for the final 1.0 release and would involve a $99 annual fee for the privilege but what better way to get hype and excitement than to offer it free for a month or two while it’s being polished and tested during the beta phase?

This is now a very old build, check out the Parallels Desktop product page for the latest official release.

Parallels have put ‘internal build 1966’ of their excellent Mac virtual machine (VM) software Parallel Desktop up in their forums.

A few things bug me about the Windows user interface and as I currently have no inclination to head over to Vista I thought it was about time I dug around and found some tools to address the job.

Windows will often make a mess of your desktop by moving the icons around normally because the resolution switched.

AnkhSVN has been updated since this post.

AnkhSVN is a Visual Studio add-in that delivers Subversion functionality where you need it and Arild has just made available release candidate 4 of the forthcoming 1.0 version.

I’m a fan of parameterized queries with a strong dislike for building SQL (or other magic strings). Encoding, escaping errors, localization formatting problems and injection can run rampant when you think everything is a string.

Today I found myself a quandary as I needed to SELECT records based on a list of values I had. e.g.

A few weeks ago I got a cut, mysteriously, on my left middle finger right on the outer knuckle joint. In fact on the very spot of an old scar — I forget which of my many little incidents caused that one but it probably involved a BMX and my childhood thirst to perform tricks beyond my ability.

Anyway, this cut bubbled up into a nasty looking thing. A tower of bubble, bubble within a bubble.