New harddrive

I just installed my new Seagate Momentus 100GB 7200RMP harddrive in my Toshiba Tecra M4. There is a noticeable difference in speed when using the computer, especially in disk-intensive applications like video-editing apps etc. The computer boots faster, and applications generally loads quicker. The whole thing just feels quick and snappy.

The upgrade process took me approx. 45 minutes, using Acronis True Image to clone the disk. I chose the Seagate disk after reading this report comparing a few small SATA harddrives. Thanks to these threads on the Tablebuzz.com forums for hints and tips!

Homework and Google

Allthough this is not a Tablet PC issue, I just have to share the story with you.

One of my daughters were doing here homework yesterday. Her task was to find the names of birds and plants from small black and white images on a hand-out. The funny thing was that instead of opening her book to find the answers, she turned to Google Images and startet to search. For each image she made a few guesses that she entered in Google Images search. If the resulting images resembled the ones on the hand-out, she trusted that she had found the correct answers and wrote them down. When I checked, almost all of her answers where correct.

I'm loving my new battery-pack

Last night I even left my powerchord at work when I left. Since tomorrow is ascension day I didn’t take the chance to leave it at work tonoght. I will try to stay on batteries to see how long they really last. Right now (after a couple of hours of use) the battery meter tells me that I’ve got approx. 6 hours 30 minutes left. It feels good! Next week I hope I’ll be able to order a new 7200 RPM SATA harddrive to further enhance my Tablet PC experience.

Edit and Continue in VS 2003

I’m mainly using Visual Studio for my development, allthough I have Visual Studio 2005 installed on my computer. There are two main reasons for doing this. First and foremost, VS2003 is less resource hungry than VS2005. Allthough I can run VS2005 on my Tecra without problems, 99% percent of the time I doesn’t use any of the functionality of the newer version. Secondly, our product is done in .Net 1.1, and we dont have the time at the moment to port it.

One of the new cool features of VS2005 is Edit and Continue: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/05/08/445742.aspx

I was a bit surprised when I saw this, since I’ve been using the functionality in VS2003 for a long time. Here is how we do it:

• Open your project in Visual Studio (2003) and hit Ctrl+Alt+P (Processes)
• Select the aspnet_wp process and press attach. Make sure you select attach to the Common Library Runtime
• Set a breakpoint in your code (this can of course be done before attaching to the process) and access the page from your browser.
• When your application breaks, change something in your code and build the application again.

We use this all the time, and don’t have any problems with working this way. We’re also simultaneously debugging legacy asp-code and javascript in the browser in VS2003., which is helping us finding errors in our application and prevent bugs that we’d otherwise would spend a lot of time debugging.

Google's new Java2Ajax kit

Google has just released it Google Web Toolkit, a set of tools that compiles java source code to browser-compliant Javascript and Html.

Since I’ve been interested in (and used) Ajax, I tried the demos that they have published. I am also running Internet Explorer version 7, and have turned on all the debugging functionality in the browser so that I see all javascript errors when watching a web page.

When trying to run the Dynamic Table Example demo, I got a javascript error saying “object doesn’t support this property or method”. This is a typical javascript error you get when f.ex. trying to access a new window you have opened that doesn’t exist (because it might have been caught by a popup-blocker). The same happened when trying the Kitchen Sink demo. Same reason, the javascript doesn’t check if a new window was really created.

I tried to run the demo in Firefox, and everything went fine. Since I always keep old versions of Internet Explorer aruond, I also tried it in IE 6, and it did work.

Not a very big issue, Google, but you should probably have catched the error in your framework when run in IE7.

New battery for my Tecra M4

Today I finally recieved my new battery for my Toshiba Tecra M4. The battery replaces the dvd unit (which hasn’t been used much) and was easy to install.

Now my battery meter is telling me that I’ve got approximatly 9 hours of battery left. As you might have noticed before, I’ve done a few things to optimize my M4 to make it run cooler and less noisy. I don’t think I’ll have the time to check out how long the batteries will last (I need to get some sleep as well), but I’ll see what happens in the next few days.

Next up is exchanging the built-in 5400 RPM harddrive with a 7200 RPM 100 GB  HD to improve boot time and try to further improve the performance of my Toshiba.

Btw, congratulations to Eric Mack who has finally become a YABHTU!

I broke my table - and my tablet survived

A couple of hours ago I broke my office table. It's a table made of glass (although rather thick glass) and it literaly exploded in front of me. I was standing beside the table, so I wasn't hurt except for a small cut in my left thumb.

On my desk I had my beloved Toshiba Tecra M4 and a nice Powerbook (that I have to validate web pages in Safari). They both fell down, but none of them was hurt. My Tablet PC was caught hanging by the ethernet cable and my eargoogles cable. The only thing that took any damage was my mouse. It's full of scratches and cuts.

And I spent a couple of hours cleaning up. In the picture below I've managed to put the two computers on the nearest table (which is now my new table).

Update to the Fan Control Utility

Just wanted to post a note about a very small update to the utility. Thanks to thebithead, I’ve changed the menu item for changing cooling method to “Cooling Method”. Not a big update.. :-)

The tool is updated and downloadable from here.

Programming Fonts

There has been a couple of postings lately about programming fonts. I found a link to this page with a list of recommended programming fonts, but none of the fonts suited me. I think they’re too small. I’ve been using a font called Bitstream Vera Sans Mono that I’ve been very happy with. Today Scott Hanselman blogged about a new font called Consolas, which looks very nice. I’ve posted a picture to show the differences between the Bitstream Vera and the Consolas fonts:

The Consolas font is the font on the right hand side of the picture