What is the power factor? What is the power factor of compact fluorecent bulbs? Do manufacturers of compact fluorecent bulbs cheat with their promised energy savings? Continue reading for answers to these questions.
The problem: a blog post is supposed to show a temperature chart. The chart is served by a remote server, running SQL Reporting Services. The table with the temperature data contains 100,000s of rows and the server that hosts the SQL database and Reporting Services is an older Athlon box. Serving that image can take [...]
When I grew up in Europe in the 1970s and 1980s, there was a noticable shift in public opinion away from support for traffic-enabling policies towards support for traffic-restricting policies. This manifested itself in numerous construction projects all over the continent with the objective not to build something, but to “unbuild” (Rückbau). Communities began to [...]
Can it be saved? That is the question that should be asked instead. Probably not, is the likely answer. Spending money on a bail-out of the US auto industry will be like pouring water in a bottomless bucket. US auto makers have created a market for themselves that allowed them to comfortably deliver 1950′s technology [...]
Sometimes we need to reduce the granularity of date ranges by combining serveral contiguous rows into one. While this is a common classic SQL problem, I was unable to find an elegant solution that also performs well, and came up with my own. This article explains the problem and outlines the solution using a Common [...]
Crude oil futures swung wildly again today, first rising to a record and then tumbling as investors wrestled with the latest developments. With little in the way of news to explain oil’s turnabout, analysts pointed to Saudi Arabia’s weekend decision to boost production and to Tuesday’s expiration of crude options, which are agreements to buy [...]
For the 2nd time in about a year I ran into what appears to be a fraudulent seller on Ebay. The last time it was someone who messed up by purchasing a large lot of bad memory chips himself, but who still went ahead and sold it off on Ebay (see my earlier post about this [...]
Others have shown how to copy music files from an iPod to the local harddrive without costly software. If you follow these instructions, you find yourself with a huge number of files in a single directory. All the files on the iPod have 4-letter names, such as BQEH.mp3. This is easy enough to fix, for [...]
I wanted to know exactly how much throughput I get from my new switch (HP ProcCurve 1400-24G) and found a network performance test tool that is available on many platforms – iPerf. I installed it on my Pc (Asus P5NSLI MB with dual-core Intel Pentium 4 3.4 GHz, a Raid 0 configuration, and a Marvell [...]
The outsourcing and offshoring trends of the early 2000′s were an indication that executives increasingly thought of software development as a commodity, i.e. something that is purchased in large quantities at a certain price per unit (e.g. $/hour) and the less the company has to pay per unit, the greater the savings will be. It [...]
