I am by no means a gamer (don’t play, never did a lot (except for Tetris (the original one), The Incredible Machine, and maybe something else) but was fascinated by Crayon Physics Deluxe. I’ve been setting up my father’s and my sister’s computer (they’ve bought themselves an MSI multi-touch all-in-one PC AE2220M) and found an interesting application in the Windows 7 Touch Pack: Blackboard. It reminded me of The Incredible Machine, a DOS-based game in the early nineties. Refreshing the fond memories of TIM, I read the Wikipedia article about it, where I saw the game Crayon Physics Deluxe mentioned. When I saw the demo (the video recording), I downloaded a trial and bought the game. I do own a tablet, and I’m testing it on my kids tomorrow (they are not allowed to work computer otherwise).

With regards to the multi-touch all-in-one PC: it is solid built, the sound is not so great, and the keyboard is too small for my taste and feels very plastic — it is wireless, on the other hand. Otherwise, it’s quite good consireding the price (720 EUR + VAT), sporting a dual core CPU, 4GB of RAM and 640GB of hard disk space. A quality keyboard would’ve made the difference, in my opinion, since the rest of the computer feels quite solid.

Since I’ve had this problem before, and I discussed it with Dejan, I started digging through all of my email correspondence with Dejan, but could not find anything. I checked and changed the collation of a database, still nothing. My best friend, Google, was of no help either. It then struck me. Varchar. It is non-unicode data type. nvarchar is of course, what was needed to fix the problem. It is intriguing though, that all of the other Slovene characters work, but c with caret (č) does not get corrupt as one would expect, but gets converted to c.

A lesson learned, is a lesson earned, I guess. This post is here to remind of this situation next time.

Stanovanje smo vmes že prodali.

USE MASTER
GO

ALTER DATABASE moovme SET SINGLE_USER WITH ROLLBACK IMMEDIATE
ALTER DATABASE moovme COLLATE Slovenian_CI_AS
ALTER DATABASE moovme SET MULTI_USER
GO

Hope that helps anyone.

Both YSlow and Page Speed require the excellent Firebug extension, which is an essential tool for web developers. If you don’t know YSlow or Page Speed yet, now is the time to get acquainted.

• ajax views
• route debugging
• menulink helper
• error handling (controllers, views, customization)
• different view results (RSS view result among them)
• model binding
• custom controller factory with a simple Autofac dependency injection demo
• custom view engine (showing how mobile pages can be served by using MDBF) and
• client & server side validation using the interesting xVal framework.

Get all demos in one zip archive

I ordered business cards and opted for premium Matt paper. I was expecting some premium paper, but was disappointed when I got them. I guess it’s my own fault, because I did not educate myself what exactly does premium Matt paper mean. The shipping was faster than advertised, which was a nice surprise though.