The videos on Bing are really great

I were really ahead of the curve and predicted that Microsoft would name it's new Search Engine "Bing". The videos on Bing are really great. Microsoft could have a game changer here!
http://www.decisionengine.com/Default.html

How to speed up Visual Studio 2008's slow WPF designer

Walt Ritscher explains "How to speed up Visual Studio 2008's slow WPF designer"

buy books @ amazon

I decided today to order some ASP.NET MVC Books for a project I develope for myself. Many issues are covered out there in the internet but sometimes it's much easier just to open a book and read in it. As a person who spend's lot of time in public transportation I try to use this time to learn and reading books.

So my today spendings are for the following books:

- Learning JQuery 1.3 by Jonathan Chaffer
- ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly - Maarten Balliauw
- Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0 - Rob Conery
- Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework - Steven Sanderson

Since all the books are available only in english I decided to check which amazon store would be cheaper for me and I got surprissed with some facts during my comparsion.

some examples:

• amazon.com offers me a free shipping as long as the shipping address is within US. really cool, I'm leaving ins Swiss and after my login they should know that and don't offer me anything like that!
• amazon.com offers me a package of common books together -> at the amazon.de store they didn't recogniz that I like to buy a bundle of books and they didn't offer me any offers at all.
• after my selection i got the following checkout sum:
  amazon.com: 133.61 USD
  amazon.de : 133.22 EUR
• Based on google conversation 133.22 EUR are 186.67 USD - this is quite a lot of money!!!
• amazon.com and amazon.de both are offer me now to pay my bill in my local currency - based on my credit card payment currency. This save's me some 2.5% fee at my visa provider :-) nice.
• Once the conversation is done I got an order toatal on amazon.com (173.03 CHF) and on amazon.de (139.01 CHF + 66.08 CHF => 205.09 CHF) this makes a difference of: 32.06 CHF

32.06 CHF is around 21.10 EURO and around 29.55 USD difference. In terms of global crises I think this is a lot of money and people out there should check where they buy books -> especially technical books which are mostly written only in english.

My personal conclusion is quite simple, there is no reason why I should spend my money at amazon.de!

Diving in Eilat Mai 2009

more pictures available here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/schuetz/DivingInEilatMai2009

Colorizing Code using Google's Prettify

Colorizing Code using Google's Prettify

http://www.opencodeproject.com/article.php?id=32

rounded corner for box styles in XHTML / CSS

Today I found a cool generator for rounded box layouts which is pretty simple to use. You only have to define your colors and click the button. You get all sources to create pretty rounded css boxes :-)

Simple and greate: http://www.neuroticweb.com/recursos/css-rounded-box/index.php

Css:
/* set millions of background images */
.rbroundbox { background: url(nt.gif) repeat; }
.rbtop div { background: url(tl.gif) no-repeat top left; }
.rbtop { background: url(tr.gif) no-repeat top right; }
.rbbot div { background: url(bl.gif) no-repeat bottom left; }
.rbbot { background: url(br.gif) no-repeat bottom right; }
/* height and width stuff, width not really nessisary. */
.rbtop div, .rbtop, .rbbot div, .rbbot {width: 100%;height: 7px;font-size: 1px;}
.rbcontent { margin: 0 7px; }.rbroundbox { width: 50%; margin: 1em auto; }

HTML:

<div class="rbroundbox">

<div class="rbtop"><div></div></div>

<div class="rbcontent">

<p>

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Duis ornare ultricies libero. Donec fringilla, eros at dapibus fermentum, tellus tellus auctor erat, vitae porta magna libero sed libero. Mauris sed leo. Aliquam aliquam. Maecenas vestibulum.

</p>

</div><!-- /rbcontent -->

<div class="rbbot"><div>

</div>

</div>

</div><!-- /rbroundbox -->

Images:
They provide a download for needed images.