Knowing .NET

Since the Earth orbits the sun elliptically and therefore a) accelerates and b) has to turn about a degree more than a full circle to bring the sun into the same position, sunrise and sunset are not symmetrical around local noon. Here in Hawaii, the sun set today at 5:45, a minute later than it was setting a few days ago. Of course, it’s still rising later, too, so the total daylight will continue to shorten until the 21st. But the afternoons are getting longer!

You can generate your own sunrise and sunset tables here.

In Vincent Maraia’s The Build Master (recommended) there’s a helpful little chart on the size in lines of code for Windows NT:

At the PDC, I bought a bluetooth “Freedom” keyboard, unaware that at the time there were no drivers available for the Tablet PC. Although Freedom eventually released a driver, the keyboard is unacceptable for typing.

I then purchased a wireless keyboard from Motion (reduced to $89). It arrived promptly but I could not get it to install correctly in Bluetooth (the exchange of passkeys did not work). After a few calls with Motion tech support, they sent me a replacement. It installed flawlessly and I am writing this entry with it. It seems to be quite a nice keyboard — I would say it’s about average laptop size and has very nice key motion with good audio feedback. Yeah, I think I quite like it.

My latest column for SD Times discusses Windows Live.

According to Russ Beattie, an average of 3,700 “ad unit impressions” per day results in around $111.79 in revenue. I recently added Google AdSense text ads on my Web pages, and will be interested in seeing the results, since I know that most people read this site in their aggregators.

Beattie generally talks about cellphones, which is probably a more income-generating topic than programming Tablet PCs and the ins-and-outs of the software development tools industry, but if just one person buys a Tablet via a click-through, I would imagine I could make a buck or two.

Project Gotham Racing 3 has an undocumented (as in, not in the documentation, not as in “unknown”) split screen mode that allows head-to-head racing on a single XBox360 with multiple controllers. At the opening screen select “More” and then “Change Profile” and, start hitting “A” on the other controllers to link up. Sweet.