Some interesting ideas behind a passive home are:

1. To keep the house tightly insulated. Hence, using wood over concrete as main building material, which is a better insulator. Also, using very thick insulation like 40 cm thick walls and 30 cm thick floors, 50 cm thick roofs.

2. To trap and reuse the heat generated by house inhabitants and appliances. Heat exchange system in a  passive home keeps it properly ventilated and warms the incoming air with trapped heat.

Results: 90% less energy costs as a compared normal houses.

Swedish Government is constructing buildings based on this concept and trying to commercialize it, so that the cost of construction can be made competitive. Also, scientists have come up with viable plans to convert an existing home to passive home.

Since internally generated heat is an important element in keeping passive homes warm, they say it is important that the inhabitants are active in a passive home

Do watch this CNN video to get some idea about passive home technology.

Sources:

1. Image: http://www.yourhome.gov.au/technical/fs45.html

2. Link to Video: http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/tech/2009/07/09/gg.boulden.sweden.passive.houses.cnn

3. http://www.energysavers.gov/your_home/designing_remodeling/index.cfm/mytopic=10250

PS:  I don’t like WordPress for not letting me embed external scripts in a post. I really want to move out from WordPress to Blogger. Any suggestions that would enable painless and seamless migration?

Source: http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts-apparel/unisex/itdepartment/5b7e/

Keeping the Math aside, I think an ardent MJ fan would go to the concert and keep the ticket as a souvenir.

Sources:

1. http://timesonline.typepad.com/science/2009/07/will-your-michael-jackson-tickets-be-worth-more-than-a-refund.html

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minority_game

Result: Commit would fail, because the later working copy doesn’t get the file lock, only the first one does.

I stumbled upon this while locking a file via URL path, using FinalBuilder Subversion file lock (Actually ‘Subversion Generic‘ action). Although the lock is successful and can be seen from repository browser client, the working copy didn’t reflect it. So I had to lock the file based on its working copy path, and not based on its URL path. This made me realize that locks are specific to working copies, apart from being exclusive to users.

Also, if somehow you delete the working copy that had locked a file and cannot restore it back, the only way out seems to be breaking a lock on that particular file. Or is there any other way out?

Sources:

1. http://groups.google.com/group/tortoisesvn/browse_thread/thread/dbf3269ae304761d
2. http://tortoisesvn.net/docs/release/TortoiseSVN_en/tsvn-dug-locking.html

Found this article on StackOverflow. But it doesn’t show any clear winner for free, private or personal and online subversion repositories.

So your suggestions are most welcome…

PS: I think I found one: http://beanstalkapp.com/ . They provide 100MB storage and one repository that can be accessed maximum 3 users. Cost none.. Not bad huh?

path1 should not have a front slash at the end and path2 should not have a front slash in the beginning. Things get really bad otherwise. I have realized this after wasting 5-6 hours of precious weekend sleep. I can’t help cussing myself, because I have a feeling that I had made this mistake before. @#$@#!$@#$%@#!@#@!$.

i.e.
string path1 = "c:\\tempdir";
string path2 = "subdir\\";
path3=Path.Combine(path1, path2)
/*path3 = c:\\tempdir\\subdir\\*/

But,

string path1 = "c:\\tempdir";
string path2 = "\\subdir\\";
path3=Path.Combine(path1, path2)
/*path3 = \\subdir\\*/

In my defense, I strongly feel that the library function should have taken care of this subtle variation. (Blame .Net )

Anyways, find more information about this function here.

majorversion.minorversion.releaseversion.buildversion

Whereas, a .Net component has different interpretation of these numbers.  i.e.

majorversion.minorversion.buildnumber.revision

This means, if you have an  exe or dll with fileversion 1.0.0.2 from a vc++ project, then corresponding assemblyversion for a .Net exe or dll for same build would be: 1.0.2.0.

This was causing little confusion while I was working with FinalBuilder to version all project executables before applying MSBuild.  Right now, I have kept consistent version format for all project types  and am interpreting them as win32 style version information.

Any opinions?

Following are some quick references and cheat sheets you can easily find on www.

MS Word 2003 cheatcheet & MS Word quick reference

Sources:

1. http://www.customguide.com/pdf/word-quick-reference-2003.pdf

2. http://www.its.qut.edu.au/assist/userguides/exfiles/word.pdf

the project could not be opened because it refers to a device plaform that does not exist in your datastore

The reason being VS 2005 cannot work with .NET CF v3.5.

The workaround is to set project file’s .NET CF target framework to v2.0. i.e.

<TargetFrameworkVersion>v2.0</TargetFrameworkVersion>

Sources:

1. http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/netfxcompact/thread/f51d6fdb-2758-4b60-9527-149a18498481/
2. http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.pocketpc.developer/msg/8df085eaffb916a5