UK Hosting Directory

Much as people love hearing on  the new features of ASP.NET, one of the frequent requests that I receive is around performance counters, high transactional sites using ASP.NET and real world applications that do very well on ASP.NET.  While there are thousands of sites out there running on ASP.NET, many of them being mission critical, our own Windows Update is a great example of high performance. Windows Update is something all of us use, whether we like it or not.  It helps maintain your system up to date with critical patches, recommended downloads as well as optional add-ins.  Windows Update also periodically provides major updates such as Service Pack for Windows Vista, Office etc., and it is an essential part of your Windows usage

See original here:
ASP.NET Performance – Windows Update – a great example for setting performance standards

Now that pear2 is in svn.php.net , it is possible to do commits with multiple packages using a feature of subversion called “sparse checkouts.” Rasmus wrote about this for setting up php checkouts here: http://news.php.net/php.internals/44993 Here is the version I used to set up pear and pear2 in a way that will allow committing to both pear and pear2 packages in a single commit. For packages like Console_CommandLine that live in both repositories, this is very useful for tracking merges.

Read the original post:
Setting Up PEAR2 and PEAR Checkouts With SVN 1.5+ – Official Blog of the PEAR Group/PEAR President

Devised for a golf buggy design competition, organized by Callaway Golf, the “Soft Buggy” by Australian designer Hamit Kanuni Kuralkan is a next generation buggy that touts a highly conceptual design. Designed to finish with highly advanced materials, including dielectric elastomer and titanium nickel alloy, the Soft Buggy adapts the landscape to allow better stability around the golf course

Read the rest here:
Soft Buggy modern caddy for retro golfers outshines older buggies

Episode 20 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week your hosts are Patrick O’Keefe ( @ifroggy ), Stephan Segraves ( @ssegraves ), Brad Williams ( @williamsba ) and Kevin Yank ( @sentience ). Listen in your Browser Play this episode directly in your browser! Just click the orange “play” button below: Read the episode transcript Download this Episode You can also download this episode as a standalone MP3 file. Here’s the link: SitePoint Podcast #20: YouTube Deep-sixes IE 6 (MP3, 41.4MB) Subscribe to the Podcast The SitePoint Podcast is on iTunes! Add the SitePoint Podcast to your iTunes player .

Read the original post:
SitePoint Podcast #20: YouTube Deep-sixes IE 6

  One more wine design, this comes from Angeline Oey a visual communication student at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle: “This project is a rebrand and redesign project for two of the Duck Pond Winery product lines. The demographic is narrowed to the 21-30 years old. While keeping the duck illustrations as their consistent design element, I rename their product lines: “Bufflehead” for their red wine and “Harlequin” for their white wine.

The rest is here:
Student Spotlight: Duck Pond Winery

“In 1979, Microsoft had 13 employees, most of whom appear in that famous picture that provides indisputable proof that your average computer geek from the late 1970s was not exactly on the cutting edge of fashion. We started the year by moving from Albuquerque back to Bellevue, just across the lake from Seattle. By the end of the year we’d doubled in size to 28 employees

The rest is here:
"In 1979, Microsoft had 13 employees, most of whom appear in that famous picture that provides…"

Designed by UK based  Here Design : “We’ve recently finished a redesign of The Balvenie whisky, which involved working with a lot of great UK craftsmen to make sure the design embodied the respect that the company holds for it’s own craftsmen that make the whisky. Because the distillery was set up in 1892, we also wanted the design to be a true reflection of late 19th Century archival documents so it was important that each element of the design was limited by the printing processes of that period.” Check out shots of the letterpress and woodcuts after the jump.

See the article here:
Balvenie Whisky

How many of us have seen this example in code we’ve worked on? <?php require ‘/path/to/lib/DatabaseI.php’; require ‘/path/to/lib/Database.php’; require ‘/path/to/lib/Authenticate.php’; require ‘/path/to/lib/User.php’; require ‘/path/to/lib/BlogEntry.php’; require ‘/path/to/lib/Comments.php’; require ‘/path/to/lib/TemplateLoader.php’; ?> …and well you get the point… If you’ve been in the business for any length of time you’d recognize this because almost every single PHP developer does it at one point or another. Until they learn about SPL’s autoload functions, that is

The rest is here:
Making Life Better With The SPL Autoloader – Brandon Savage

My ZendCon 2008 talk, “Rickroll To Go With WURFL, PHP, and Other Open Source Tools” , was just released at Zend DevZone as ZendCon Sessions episode #23 ! If you’re just now finding my blog from there, welcome! And thanks to Eli White , Community Relations Manager for Zend , for selecting it for posting. You can get all of the relevant info using the links below: Slides and videos of the presentation materials ZendCon Sessions page with audio MP3 audio of the presentation iTunes DevZone podcast Enjoy, and thanks for listening! Find me on Twitter or email me if you’d like to discuss the materials.

Read more:
“Rickroll To Go…” ZendCon Session audio posted! – Brian DeShong

Watch Bill Gates Live in the 5th anniversary celebration of Microsoft Research, India.  Also, present would be the Chief Guest, Hon’ble Shri Kapil Sibal – HRD Ministry of India, Hon’ble Shri Prithviraj Chauhan – Minister of State for Science and Technology, India, Mr.N.R.Narayana Murthy – Chairman and Chief Mentor, Infosys Technologies, Prof.Ashok Jhunjhunwala – IIT Madras, Dr.P.Anandan – MD, Microsoft Research India. When is this event : Friday, 24th July 2009 10:30 AM IST Where do I watch this : Right out of your browser http://specials.msn.co.in/sp09/billgates/   What do I need : Simple, an Internet Connection & Silverlight ( Install from here ) Cheers !!!  

Original post:
Bill Gates Live at Microsoft Research India, powered by Silverlight

The Lotus Lamps by Chris Carter are the outcome of thorough research work and investigation of the market, existing products and upcoming technology. These exotic colorful lamps provide a means of relaxation, substituting the use of candles in the bathroom. Serving safety while bathing, powered by battery, these illuminating lamps can be used in or out of the water

Follow this link:
Lotus Lamps relieve you while bathing

I have earlier mentioned a mirror that doubles as an ironing board and now Seura has designed a hi-tech mirror that doubles as a television. The “One” TV mirror offers you a 19′ high definition LCD television embedded in up to a 45×36 inch mirror. Measuring 1″ in thickness, this technically enhanced television mirror features 16:9 widescreen ratio with resolution of up to 1080p and also supports HDMI input, ATSC/NTSC tuner and PC input, together with 25 watt speaker and a waterproof remote control

Visit link:
The One television mirror adds value to your bathroom

When I see people talking about Unicode and PHP 6 I often see them mentioning one fact as a big change: PHP 6 allows (mostly any) arbitrary Unicode character as (part of an) identifier. So you can have code like this: function 新日本石油 () {     echo “Let’s hope this isn’t an offensive function name… “;     echo “it’s copied from some news site”; } 新日本石油(); Well yes, that’s funny, at first but serves a purpose: Consider you have an application tied to an environment with a special terminology, then translating this terms to English might be extremely confusing (especially as programmers often don’t really know the correct terminology of that domain) and it’s good to call the thing by it’s name – while that can be quite complicated, too, in a previous job we had such a case and often used the German terms which produced quite funny names for getters and setters which didn’t satisfy us …

See the rest here:
Unicode identifiers – Johannes Schlüter

Turbo Training: Advanced Visual Effects 2 Just look at this course outline: (…) Read the rest of Turbo Training: Advanced Visual Effects 2 (216 words) © naveen for CG Persia , 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us Post categories : 3D , Download , Learning , Tutorial , Video Post tags : DVD , Rapidshare , Special Effects , techniques , Tutorial , video learning , Visual Effects you can subscribe to CG Persia RSS feed

Read the original:
Turbo Training: Advanced Visual Effects 2

I recently read a Plus News report entitled:  Male circumcision does not protect women .  There has been enough literature, media attention, and so on to see that male circumcision has been a hot topic over the years.  My interest is not to disagree with the argument that male circumcision can, to a degree, reduce the risk of contracting HIV for that man.  In fact, I support the idea of disseminating information and making male circumcision more accessible in Southern Africa.  That is as long as the reduce aspect is thoroughly emphasized as male circumcision does not eliminate risk, the potential side effects are conveyed, and it is not an imposed procedure. The questions I do wish to raise concern the lengths that are being taken to scientifically prove the relationships between black African male circumcision and HIV risk for black African men and women.  And relatedly, the potential for unintended consequences when the path followed is such a rigorous and relentless insistence on absolute, detailed quantitative scientific proof.  My overall concern is this. The Plus News headline I mentioned could just as easily read: Clinical trial comes to an end, 25 women contracted HIV.  When I think about that alternative headline, my mind goes a couple directions

Visit link:
Ethics, subjects, and proof

With Twitter becoming more and more popular, I have always wanted to explore its developer wiki and find out ways to post to Twitter programmatically.  While there are a tons of third party tools such as TweetDeck etc., that allow you to tweet right from your desktop, I was looking for a resource that allows me to update my Twitter status from ASP.NET.  I stumbled upon this video http://www.pluralsight.com/main/screencasts/screencast.aspx?id=httpclient-consuming-twitter-in-under-3-minutes for read/write to Twitter using the WCF REST Starter Kit Preview 2. I just wanted to take the same experience to post it from ASP.NET Webform, so the credit for the REST logic goes to the above post/video. However, for the purpose of this post, I am explaining the pre-requisites.  You would need to install the WCF REST Starter Kit Preview 2 from http://aspnet.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=24644

Continue reading here:
Posting Twitter Tweets from ASP.NET using the WCF REST Starter Kit Preview 2

As promised here are some shots from my trip to NYC. The weather was great all day on Saturday and so was dinner.  I shot everything with the Sony EX-1 on a tripod as well as some hand-held stuff.  I used Premiere CS4, even though it would hang during editing and crash occasionally.  I’m sure they will work it out. Please