Archives

Archives / 2005
  • Visual Studio 2005 Toolbox

    So far just about everything I've encountered in Visual Studio 2005 has been fantastic. Some of the most subtle changes to the IDE have made my life dramatically easier.

    The one exception to this is the new Toolbox. Aside from a very cluttered Tree View, it dynamically loads up all this stuff from my projects. I'm sure some people love it but with a very large project it takes 2-5 minutes to display the toolbar. This wouldn't be so bad if I could just turn it off, but so far I can't seem to find any way to do so.

    UPDATE:
    Thanks to Raj I was able to turn off the auto-population feature. Simply set AutoToolboxPopulate to False under Windows Forms Designer  section of the Visual Studio Options dialog.

    I must have looked though the Options dialog a thousand times and never noticed this. Maybe that sleep thing would be a good idea after all. :)

  • Flipsyde

    I'm not a big rap music fan.  But someone turned me on to Flipside the other day and after hearing "Someday" I was hooked.  

  • Atomic Time

    I thought I was running late this morning. Not the typical "Monday morning 5 minutes" late sort, it was more of the "where hell did my morning go" variety. As I drove my daughter to school I glanced down at the clock. I expected to see "8:45" or something in that vicinity but it said, in very loud green LED, "11:52".  If you happen to be in the suburbs of Boston this morning and head an odd snapping sound, that was my brain literally ripping in half. I could have sworn I left the house around 20 of 9....

    The problem with not having caffeine in the morning is that one's brain has a tendency to shoot off into the strangest of directions and what would normally seem like absolute lunacy takes on a much more "absolutely logical" feeling. So rather than assume, "damn my clock is wrong" and went with the "my god, I've lost hours". I'm pretty sure this sort of decaffeinated thinking explains 99% of all alien abductions. Luckily after a few seconds of abject horror my brain found some residual caffeine in the recesses of my cranium and realized it was in fact the clock that was wrong and not the universe collapsing on itself.

    Being a geek this got my thinking that what I really need is an atomic car clock. And once I reached the office I decided to find one. Unfortunately I found nothing. But I did find some C# code for syncing up with an atomic clock using the Network Time Protocol (NTP).

    C# NTP  Client - This is a code sample by Valer Bocan in Romania. I've not done much with it yet but looked fun.

    Dimention4 - Free atomic clock sync software. Works really well.

    U.S. Navy - The U.S. Navy has a simply web page with US times for each time zone on it.

    Funny. Now that I think about it... I never fixed the clock in the car.

  • God Bless Nicotrol

    Almost 3 weeks without a smoke. Now I just need to figure out what to do with these 10lbs I've seemed to have picked up along the way. Maybe I could use my new lung capacity for vigorous exorcise.... yeah, that will happen..

    So far the only side effects are the 10lbs and the strong desire to randomly strangle people on the street with a dirty sock. But I'm adjusting. :)

  • Hmm

    Another season... another Super Bowl...

    Bwuhahahahaha!

     

  • Missing Driveway

    If anyone has seen my driveway, please send it home.

    We got a little bit of snow last night.