I forgot I had taken 3 short videos with my trusty digital camera (a Casio EX-S600 in case you care) while on vacation.  I combined them into a single, streaming clip which you can see here.

Enjoy.

Or don’t.

While attempting to do some data merging across several Excel spreadsheets, I found some interesting behavior in how OLEDB determines data types of columns with an Excel source.

For me, the issue manifested itself with a column that looked like the following (shortened for brevity’s sake):

10132  
10133  
10134D  
10134  
10135

By default, Excel looks at the first 8 rows of each column to determine the type. If most of the items are numeric, it will create the column as an int or double type. The problem is, if the column also contains text data, like the one above (10134D), the column can’t be converted to a numeric type and OLEDB will just drop the value with no error or explanation.

With the above data, since 4 out of 5 are numeric, OLEDB turns the column into a numeric type, and the 3rd row’s column of that data would be NULL.

If you own a GameCube and haven’t picked up Odama yet, what are you waiting for?  I saw this game about a year ago and have been awaiting its arrival in the US ever since.

For those that don’t know, Odama is a game created by Yoot Saito and Vivarium, father of Seaman on the Dreamcast.  Oh, and if you haven’t played Seaman, go buy that now, too.  

Odama combines a pinball with some elements of real-time strategy and tosses in a microphone as an input for voice commands for good measure.

The gameplay itself is relatively simple.  Your ancient Japanese samurai warriors need to make their way from the front of the playfield to the back, through a gate, while opposing warriors attempt to stop you.  All the while you’re batting around this enormous ball (the Odama) like a giant pinball which runs over troops (both yours and the enemies) and kills them.  The ball also destroys buildings and other armaments in its path.  Add to that a microphone where you shout commands like “Push forward!” and “Rally!” to your troops, and there you have it.  A bizarre combination of genres and control interfaces that make for a pretty unique gaming experience.  It takes some practice to coordinate it all, but once you’ve learned how to control the game, it works pretty well.

I don’t get it.  Why are all of the Microsoft folks so excited about running a Windows OS on a MacBook Pro laptop?  The laptop has only one mouse button!  Any XP user knows that it’s extremely difficult, and in some cases impossible, to drive XP without right-clicking.  Now I’m not here to praise or bury Microsoft in the world of UI and usability, I’m merely here to present the facts.

I’ve had no less than 4 Microsoft-entrenched people ask me, “So when are you getting your MacBook Pro?”, to which I reply, “Never.”  Why would I spend $3k on a laptop I’d use almost exclusively to run Windows XP with one button?  Why would they?  Sure, it’s a slick laptop.  No one’s taking that away.  But the fact remains that a MS user is spending $3000 to buy a crippled laptop.  Why not buy one of the many other Duo Core laptops out there with similar specs that provide a much better user experience?

I’ve spent some time over the past week playing with both Virtual PC and VMWare Workstation.  I’ve been wanting to try out some of the beta developer bits from MS (WinFX, Atlas, etc.) but didn’t want to deal with having those pieces on my main development machines.  So, VPC and VMW to the rescue.

I’ve used both of these products in the past and never really found much difference between them.  Apparently I hadn’t looked at the latest version of VMWare (5.5) which pretty much destroys VPC in the realm of performance.

I have created a base XP install in both VPC and VMWare, and the VMWare VM gets to the logon screen in about 10 seconds, while the VPC machine takes about 20-30.  While I didn’t time it, installing Visual Studio 2005 on VMWare was noticeably faster.

Both VPC and VMWare offer similar offerings in terms of differencing disks/snapshots, but VMWare gives you a spiffy tree-like view of the paths you took to create your snapshots and allows you to easily back out to a specific snapshot at any time.

My only beef with VMWare so far is that there’s a known bug that the latest released Vista build, 5342, won’t install.  It installs and works great in VPC (and as a native dual boot on my machine), but no go in VMware.

So what’s the deal, Microsoft?  Sure, you bought VPC from Connectix, but you created Windows.  If anyone should have a speedy virtualization product under that OS, it should be you.  Hopefully the next version of VPC will attempt to rectify the huge performance difference between the two….