Dan's Blog

A mixture of tech and books

Entries for September, 2008

The Painted Man by Peter V Brett

“Enter a world were darkness belongs to demons”

The Painted Man is Peter V Brett’s first novel and was published in the UK by Harper Voyager in September 2008. The book is due to be released soon in the US where it will be called The Warded Man. The Painted Man is book one of [...]

Gong Fu Set

Today I became the proud new owner of a Gong Fu tea set which I have had on order since last week. I bought the set from Jing Tea here.

The set is primarily glass and consists of a pot, a pitcher, 2x double walled glass cups (80ml). I purchased the master set which also includes [...]

Read Committed Snapshot In SQL Server 2005

Why do it?
Once concurrency on a database reaches a certain level the chances of deadlocks increase. Whenever a deadlock occurs there will be at least one transaction that is a victim.
Deadlocks also have a negative effect on performance.
What about protection of data
Without going into detail (see further reading below) READ_COMMITTED_SNAPSHOT provides the same level of [...]

Number of working days in the UK

Assuming a 365 day year (no leap years, too rare)
Start with 365
Deduct 104 for weekends
Deduct 20 contract holidays (4 weeks @ 5 days),
Deduct 9 public holidays.
Makes 232
The 9 public holidays are:
2 each at Christmas and New Year (thats [...]

N810 Internet Connection with Sony K850i

I’ve been trying to get my N810 Internet Tablet (which is a very handy device) working with my SE K850i mobile phone. My network provider is Vodafone and I have a decent data account on it, so I thought why not, ill make use of the tablets large screen and excellent MicroB web browser via [...]