December 2004 Entries
Interested in creating a custom case for your computer? Well, Bit-Tech has posted an article on the creation of the Hypercube, a custom built case that looks phenomenal.
Now Playing: Jars of Clay - Worlds Apart
Merry Christmas everyone!
Recently, I created a custom control that collapses its self. This control was to be round in shape so the background had to be transparent. But when I set the BackColor = Color.Transparent I received this message; “This control does not support transparent background colors.” I felt like Lil’ Jon “WHAT!” After some research I found the solution: SetStyle. The SetStyle method enables or disables certain ControlStyles for a control. So if your custom control needs to use transparency or an alpha color less than 255 use this:
SetStyle(ControlStyles.SupportsTransparentBackColor, True)
Now Playing: Alicia Keys - Karma
So what’s you’re excuse on not watching Lost? It is by far the best show on the major networks. J.J. Abrams is the new Joss Whedon. If you haven’t seen Lost yet now is your chance. ABC will be showing the first two episodes tomorrow night so fire up those TiVo’s. And speaking of Joss, did you know that he’s writing a comic book. But not just any comic, he’s writing the X-Men. The name of the book is “Astonishing X-Men” and it is quite, well, astonishing. If you’re a Joss fan or a fan of the X-Men you...
Bungie has released another round of updates. Included in the updates are two new playlists Team Slayer and Rumble Training. I've already played a Team Slayer game and it rocks. Other updates include extending match times and modifying the playlists so scarcer games play more often. To receive the update just log into Xbox Live.
Now Playing: Rich Mullins - Hold Me Jesus
I've got a bunch of music in my iTunes database. But the iTunes database doesn't just store music file location data it also stores all of your playlists, play count and other meta data. Since I've rated all of the music in my database I really needed to move the entire database over to the new machine. So first I started to copy all of my music files to the new machine. Make sure you copy the music to the same folder(s) on the new hard drive. If you don't then you have to edit the "iTunes Music Library.xml" to...
I'm currently migrating from my old notebook to the new one. Here's a trick I've found regarding the Windows XP built-in zip utility. My major problem with the Windows XP zip functionality is that when you view a folder in Explorer the zip files in that folder a are listed as zip folders. Now, if you're like me and like to keep an archive of downloaded files the explorer tree will start to get real long. So here's how you turn off the built-in zip utility. In the Run dialog box type regsvr32 /u %windir%\system32\zipfldr.dll. Then, rename the %windir%\system32\dllcache\zipfldr.dll to...
I've been issued a new notebook for work. It's a brand spanking new IBM ThinkPad T42. I couldn't of gotten it a moment too soon. You see my old notebook, a ThinkPad T30, is a piece of junk. I've already had the motherboard replaced three times already due to a faulty DIMM slot and two weeks ago it happened again. That makes four bad motherboards in two years so the new computer couldn't of come at a better time. The specs on the new T42 are Pentium M 1.7 processor, 1GB memory, 75GB hard drive and a fingerprint reader. That's...
I've been very impressed with the new Ameritrade site. I used to get lost all the time on the old site. Simple things like making a deposit into my account were way too complicated. Now a simple wizard walks you though the deposit process. One thing I've always wanted to see was how much money I have made on a certain stock. I could never figure this out with the old site. Now all I have to do is click on Portfolio and all of my gains and losses are there. They have also placed a clean looking portal on their site that...
PBS has made The Elegant Universe, a show discussing the current theories of physics, available online. Could be worth checking out.
I recently commented on Reemer's site that I thought that ESPN.com was the anti-Google. I would like to take a moment to explain that comment. Google's homepage has twelve links. ESPN.com has over two hundred. ESPN has content everywhere. Flyouts, personalization bar, tabbed boxes, adds, top and left navigation ESPN.com has it all. I love it when ESPN.com has a big story like the Giambi on steroids or the BoSox winning the series because the bigger pictures makes the home page so much simpler. I very rarely scroll "below the fold" because it's so cluttered and I can never find what...