Abby and Win’s Blog

Archive for December, 2008

Christmas has come and gone and I am a year older. Unlike the Christmas I’ve celebrated in the past, it’s been 2 years in a row that I wasn’t in the Philippines. It such a different way of celebrating there. I feel it’s more festive and fun especially with Abby’s family. I just buy a lot of toys for myself to fill in the gaps.

This year I decided to jump in to the Blu-ray world. I’ve been trying to decide between getting a PS3 or a stand-alone player. I ended up getting a Sony BDP-S350 a couple of weeks ago. Spending the extra $ for a PS3 didn’t make sense since I won’t be playing any games. I did however like the wireless connection but it isn’t worth the price difference. This player is great and the quality of Blu-ray is phenomenal. So during the past week I’ve been buying a lot of movies on DVD and BD. Here’s a list of stuff I recently got.

• The Wire: Complete Series (DVD)
• Voltron: Volume 6 (DVD)
• House of Flying Dragon (BD)
• The Road Warrior (BD)
• The Clone Wars (BD)
• Charles In Charge: Season 1 (DVD)
• Eagle Eye (BD) – I picked this up today at Best Buy. It was advertised to be released on December 30th. I don’t know why they had it for sale along with Resident Evil: Degeneration.
• 3:10 To Yuma (BD)
• Rambo (BD) – The newer one
• The Forbidden Kingdom (BD)
• Cloverfield (BD)
• Sleepy Hollow (BD)
• The Italian Job (BD)
• Shooter (BD)
• The Dark Knight (BD)
• Hancock (BD)

If you haven’t seen a good demo of Blu-ray, I highly suggest you look for one. Most of the store demos I’ve seen were using TVs that didn’t have a good Hz. I noticed certain parts of the movie (usually when there’s a lot of rapid movement) speed up and slow down. I asked a store associate at Best Buy about it and they told me it had something to do with the TV’s refresh rate. Not sure if this is true but it sound like it made sense – I mean I’m no HDTV expert. Also, don’t bother with the expensive HDMI (HDTV is worthless if you don’t connect using this) cables. I picked one up from Fry’s – 10ft v1.3B for $20 – elsewhere they’ll run at least $8. It works fine.

I just want to thank my mom and mommy (Abby’s mom) for hooking me up with most of those movies. Abby also got me another pair of Wallabees (brown suede ones) – very nice.

My Mom threw Abby a baby shower last Saturday. Despite the weather we had a lot of fun. We got lots of gifts for the baby, so thank you very much for everything. I took some pics and video. You can check them out below.

Pictures at Flickr.com

Video Part 1

Video Part 2

I just got my Targus XL backpack from Amazon. The bag is huge. It fits up to a 17″ laptop and has plenty of compartments. I am able to carry the following items:

• HP dv9999us laptop (17″ laptop) and cables
• Apple MacBook Pro (15″ laptop) and cables
• Canon CanoScan LIDE 500F scanner and cables
• Logitech USB mouse
• Targus PA248U laptop cooler
• Western Digital Passport 250GB (portable HDD)
• other little things

I was curious and weighed the back it was about 23.9 lbs. I still have room to spare and if I wanted, I could carry a book or 2. But it was getting way too heavy.

I’ve been looking for a new laptop for a couple of months now. My MacBook Pro is nearly 3 years old, still has the original Core Duo cpu, and it over heats so much it just freezes. I had Apple look at and they replaced a heat sink but it seemed like it didn’t help. They also replaced the battery and power adapter plug – still didn’t help. They finally said that the temperature is normal and they can’t do anything else. My co-worker’s newer MacBook Pro doesn’t heat up as bad. Anyways…

I started looking at the netbooks. They are very light-weight, ultra portable, no CD/DVD-rom drives. I thought it would be perfect for what I need. I can still carry my MBP and have a netbook too. I waited and waited. Then I saw an ad at Office Depot for a laptop. It was a total opposite of what a netbook is but for the price I had to take a look. I ended up buying the HP dv9999us. Here are the specs:

• AMD Turion-X2 64bit 2.0GHz
• 4GB ram
• 250GB hdd
• 17″ WXGA 1440×900 BrightView LCD
• USB 2.0 (4x)
• Firewire 400 (1x)
• S-Video out
• Built-in web cam
• Media remote control
• 2 audio out headphone jacks and 1 input
• 5-in-1 memory card reader
• Express card slot

You can view the hardware specs here. So after about 2 weeks of use, here’s a list of likes and dislikes.

LIKES:

• 4GB ram
• 64 bit OS and CPU
• numeric keypad is part of the keyboard
• 17″ screen is great
• Vista Home Premium 64bit has been impressively stable (so far)
• memory card reader
• has remote control for media software and can be stored in the extreme card slot
• built-in webcam
• after rebates the laptop costs only $490
• physical on/off switch for WiFi
• no incompatibilities so far being Vista and 64bit (programs that are 64bit are stored in the Program Files folder while the rest are stored in Program Files x86)
• S-Video out support
• light scribe DVDRW drive

DISLIKES:

• media buttons on top of the keyboard are too senstive
• video card is not all that good when it comes to games
• right, Shift button is awkwardly positioned and size is smaller than usual – I sometimes press “/” key to the left of it
• heavy 7.7lbs (but it is a 17″ laptop)
• media software isn’t too responsive, too cluttered – OS X has a more intuitive interface
• lots of pre-installed software (can be removed, but why are they there in the first place – doesn’t exists in any Apple computer)
• took almost an hour to access the desktop during first boot – must be a Vista thing
• no HDMI support, but no biggie
• sometimes I hear buzzing sound when the laptop seems like it’s heating up – I’ve had this happen on several other laptops so it seems normal

Overall the laptop is great for the price. My views towards Vista have changed a little bit. It seems the 64 bit version runs a little more stable than the 32 bit version. I do miss my MacBook Pro and OS X but I don’t miss the overheating. I still have Apple desktops at home and at work so it’s not that bad.

A client at work wanted us to create a way to duplicate existing records on their website with a click of a button. These records involve multiple tables in the database. Some of the tables contained a lot of columns. We tried to do most of work using ASP but sometimes the browser would time out and Dreamweaver would crash.

Then I thought, why don’t we have our SQL server do most of the heavy lifting. I created a stored procedure that query the database for the record(s) that need to be duplicated and have them duplicated. Below is a short example to get you started.

First you need to create a stored procedure in SQL Server.

CREATE PROCEDURE stored_procedure_sample
@record_id INT OUTPUT

AS
BEGIN

INSERT INTO table_name (column1, column2, column3)
SELECT column1, column2, column3
FROM table_name
WHERE record_id = @record_id

END;

GO

Next you need to create the ASP page that process the request. You can use form variable or URL query string. For the example, I will use a form variable. Let’s imagine on page1.asp there is a form with a hidden variable that contains the record_id you want to duplicate. You submit this to page2.asp and here’s a sample of what page2.asp should look like.

<%

Dim connString, rsCmd

connString = “your connection string”
Set rsCmd  = Server.CreateObject(“ADODB.Command”)
rsCmd.ActiveConnection = connString
rsCmd.CommandType = 4
rsCmd.CommandText = “stored_procedure_sample”

rsCmd.Parameters.Append rsCmd.CreateParameter(“@record_id”, 200, 1, 4, Request.Form(“record_id”))

rsCmd.Execute

%>

What page2.asp does is it takes the form variable “record_id” from page1.asp and tells the stored procedure to get the values for this record and insert it as a new record. That’s pretty much it. Just a short, simple example on how you can create a stored procedure in MSSQL Server and use it with classic ASP.