There was an article the other day on the excellent blog Earth2Tech about a man who has documented his results with his Prius, which he had modified to be able to be plugged in (to a standard electrical outlet). According to the article, the man is now getting 136.45 miles/gallon, or 1,307 miles on a single tank of gas, much better than the very good 60 miles/gallon the Prius normally gets.

My initial reaction was, wow, I need to trade in my car, get a Prius, and get this mod. Then I started clicking around on the Hybrid Plus site (the guys that did the modification to the Prius). It turns out it isn’t so cheap. In fact, it’s pretty expensive, costing up to $32,500, which is more than the car itself. Too bad, because I could live with only going to the gas pump once a month.

Even if this was affordable, I wonder how much it would cost to charge the car every night? According to their site it should only cost around $25 extra a month for electricity. If true, that’s not bad at all.

Anyhow, it’s neat technology that’s just way too expensive for the average consumer. It was also announced last week that Toyota is testing a plug-in hybrid in Japan. Hopefully it will make it’s way into production in the United States and will be a little more affordable when mass produced.

If you want more information, I suggest checking out Hybrid Plus’s FAQ site, it’s a pretty comprehensive site with answers to many of the questions I had.

Several months ago I lost my primary hard drive on my P.C. died and of course I had no backup strategy. Some of the data I lost is irreplaceable. Once I got my new computer I vowed to myself that it wouldn’t happen to me again. I needed a backup strategy, one that I could set up and then forget about, with the knowledge that it was taken care of. Oh, and it needed to be free or extremely inexpensive, because I’m cheap like that. The solution I chose was Mozy Online Backup.

The first step is to sign up for an account on Mozy’s web site. You get 2 gb of backup space for free or for $4.95/month you get unlimited backup. The next step is to download and install the Mozy software. Once complete, you are ready to select the files you want to back up.

Here is a look at the dialog used for choosing the files you want Mozy to back up:

As you can see I’m not using a lot of my space at the moment. I am mostly backing up my writing documents and other similar data. I had been backing up my photos, but stopped doing that as the backup took too long (the only drawback I have seen). I’m running the lowest bandwidth DSL and my upload speeds aren’t that great. I have backed up my images to CD and that will have to do for now. Without the images, the backup is extremely fast.

The first time your backup runs, Mozy will copy all of your files to your storage space on their server. After that, Mozy only copies those files that have change or those that are new, greatly speeding up the backup process.

On the scheduling side, there are several different options with Mozy. You can specify a certain time or day to have your files backed up, or as I have configured my system you can have Mozy do an automatic backup if your system has been idle for a certain period of time. Again, Mozy only backs up data that has changed or that is new.

Overall, I am very happy with Mozy. It is free, it is reliable, and I don’t have to think about it. I would like to test it out on a higher speed connection, just to see how it would perform with larger amounts of data.

As most of you know, Microsoft introduced a new feature with the release of Windows Vista - the Windows Sidebar.
On the surface, this seems like a pretty cool feature; the ability to have a lot of different information right there on the desktop. Well, I’ve been running Vista for about five months now and I would have to say I have mixed emotions, at best, about Windows Vista Sidebar.  To the right I have posted my current Windows Sidebar.

The Positives

• Information right there at you fingertips. I really like the CPU/RAM meter that lets me know how my system is performing.
• Customization. Anyone can develop gadgets and these can be added to anyone’s sidebar.
• Looks. I have to admit, the Windows Sidebar just looks cool.

The Negatives

• Windows Sidebar takes up a good deal of memory. I’m not really sure how much memory the Sidebar is eating, but you don’t get an image rotator, an rss feed ticker, etc. for free.
• Lack of cool widgets to add to the sidebar. Other than the few that came with windows, I really haven’t seen any widgets that make me want to download them. Microsoft has a Gallery site where users can upload their widgets, and rate those available, but I just haven’t found anything of much use there. Most of the widgets there are weather related, ticker related, or some type of skin for the clock. Maybe as the technology is out there and matures there will be some more cool stuff, but right now I’m not blown away.
• I really don’t look at the desktop that much. The only times I really look at my desktop is when I startup my computer, when I shut it down, or when I launch an application (and that’s usually from the quick launch). I really just don’t spend much time perusing my desktop.

Prognosis

Though I like the Windows Sidebar and think it will gain usefulness as more and more people use Vista, I certainly don’t

think anyone should upgrade to Vista just for this feature. Right now Windows Sidebar is just eye candy for me, though it’s eye candy with potential.

As a database administrator you may not know every single database on your SQL Server intimately, though you may still be expected to make it perform like you do. No matter how many times you explain the importance of indexes and even what an index is, sometimes your users just don’t get it, just as they may explain their queries and data to you many times, but it just doesn’t make sense. Luckily, Microsoft has developed a set of tools that can help: the SQL Server 2005 Performance Dashboard Reports.

It is pretty simple to install the Performance Dashboard once you have downloaded it from the above link. I will point you to this link which walks you through installation as they to a fine job of describing the process.

The great thing about these reports is that they keep track of activity on your server for you. You don’t have create a trace or anything like that. Simply have your users go about their every day jobs of using their applications that go against the SQL Server and the information that Performance Dashboard needs will be captured.

Once installed you access the reports by right clicking either the server name or database name in Management Studio and then selecting “Reports” and then “Custom Reports…”.

Navigate to the folder that chose to put the reports in during installation (the default is C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Tools\PerformanceDashboard). You will see a list of reports. I suggest starting with performance_dashboard_main.rdl. Click Run to run the report. You will see the following report:

I ran this just after a restart of SQL Server, so there isn’t a lot of information in there yet. However, by the end of the day this report will prove very valuable. The part I want to concentrate on, though, is the link in the bottom left that says “Missing Indexes”. Click on that to run the Missing Indexes report:

(click for full size)

The columns you should concentrate on here (or at least the ones I concentrate on) are Average User Impact and Proposed Index. The Average User Impact column tells us how much of a benefit the user would see if you apply the proposed index. The higher the number, the more you should consider applying the index. The Proposed Index column actually contains the code you need to create the index. What I do here is I sort this report by Average User Impact, then export the report to Excel (right click anywhere in the white space and click “Export” then “Excel”).

This allows me to select the text in the Proposed Index column, copy it, and then paste the code and run it in Management Studio.

I have seen some great benefits with the Performance Dashboard. In one case we had a query that once took nearly 10 minutes to run return results in under a minute after we applied some of the Proposed Indexes.

As always, feel free to leave any questions in the comments of this post. I’m also interested to hear any success stories for those who have also used these reports.

By now you have probably heard about the One Laptop Per Child Foundation’s goal of mass producing a affordable laptop (their initial goal was $100, but it will probably be $150) especially for children of the developing world.

The more I hear about these laptops, the more I want one. It’s designed to be durable, very efficient (supposedly it will have a 12 hour battery life), and will come with at least two of three options: a crank, a pedal, or a pull-cord. In other words it’s just a cool piece of technology. It turns out I may be able to get one of these after all. According to this article I saw yesterday on Boing Boing, the XO laptop may launch at $350 by Christmas. The article also states that the laptop may sell for as much as $550.

If this does indeed go on sale for $350, I would buy one immediately. I’m not so sure about the $550. There is something about buying a device that costs $150 to produce for $550 that just doesn’t sit right with me. On the plus side, any profits from the sales would be put towards the goal of providing these machines to people in developing countries.

Here are the specs for the XO.

So, what is you opinion. Would you be interested in buying one of these laptops?

I just got back from a 400 mile car trip (one way) with my wife and daughter. Yes, that is a long time to be in a car. I have to tell you, though, it could’ve been a lot worse if not for XM Satellite Radio and my Delphi Roady XT. It’s tough enough finding a decent radio station in the town I live in, let along along my entire travel route. That is what makes XM Radio so nice (and I’m sure Sirius as well). Rather than gush about the virtues of satellite radio, however, I’d like to tell you a little about the Roady XT.

I was introduced to XM Radio when we bought my wife’s VW Beetle, which has a built-in XM receiver. I immediately loved how you could actually tell who was singing the current song that was playing and even the name of the song. I also fell in love with the XM comedy station. When it was time to buy my new car I wanted XM as well, but it wasn’t meant to be. That is until last Christmas when I decided I wanted an XM receiver. All I really wanted was a receiver that was cheap and easy to install. I picked the Roady XT.

Cost (5 out of 5)

Being a new dad, I don’t have a lot of spare cash around, so this category is one of the most important for me. Last winter I think the going price for the Roady XT was around $59 dollars, but since we got it at Christmas-time I think it cost us aroudn $35. I just did a search on Wal Mart’s site and they now had it listed for $29. That is a pretty good value for what you get, in my opinion.

Ease of Installation (5 out of 5)

There really isn’t much at all to installing the Roady XT, and I’m not one who does very much with car audio. As far as mounting goes, the device come with a cradle so you can mount it right to your heating/AC vents. It also comes with a flat, magnetic antenna that you simply stick on top of the car and forget about (though hopefully you remember it in the automatic car wash).

You have two options for getting the receiver to play on your car’s stereo. You can either have the Roady professionally installed and wired to your sound system, or you can do what I did and use the FM Modulator. Simply tune your car’s FM radio to a station with a strong signal and point your Roady to the same station. The device will then transmit via FM to your car radio and out your car’s speakers. The only down side of this is you may have some visible wires unless you can tuck them behind the dash. I’m more concerned with function and ease (and cheapness) of installation rather than cosmetics, so this isn’t a big deal for me.

Features (5 out of 5)

Here is where I really love the Roady XT and satellite radio in general. The receiver we have in my wife’s car must be first generation, because it lacks some of the features my Roady has.

My favorite by far is the up and down arrows on the receiver, which allow you to surf what is playing on the radio without leaving you current station. For example, I can be listening to comedy on one station, while checking out what is playing on the other stations. If I find a song I want to hear, I simply push the select button, which then takes me to the music station. This may not sound like a big deal, but use it for a few days and try to live without it afterwards.

Another cool feature is the Ticker feature. You can set your Roady to display certain select Stock Market quote or even sports scores. For example, I have mine set up to display the scores of the Pittsburgh Pirates, Pittsburgh Steelers, and Pittsburgh Penguins, so at the touch of a button I can see the score of any of their games. This is convenient when traveling or even late at night when you missed the score of the game and you are driving you daughter around trying to get her to sleep. Unfortunately there is no feature that calms your road rage when you discover your favorite team lost again.

The Roady also has the ability to store up to 30 of your favorite stations as favorites, but this is pretty common with any receiver.

Sound Quality (3.5 out of 5)

I have read reviews that said the Roady didn’t have great sound due to the fact it was transmitting to the radio via FM. I would say the sound in my experience has been pretty good. The only time I have had a problem is when I’m in the mountains and the satellite is blocked (and would be for any satellite receiver) or when traveling and my preset XM station wasn’t available in that area. In that case all I had to do was change my station and everything is ok.

Overall (18.5 out of 20)

I would surely recommend this receiver to anyone who would like to give XM radio a try. I have been using this device for seven months and love it. There is little cost risk involved and the benefits are great. This is especially nice for someone who doesn’t want to pay for installation but is sick of the same radio stations playing the same music over and over.

Since I’m currently on vacation writing this on the free wireless connection at the Holiday Inn, I thought I’d take the easy way out today and post a video. I saw this on YouTube the other day and it cracked me up. It was called Will it Blend? and featured a guy putting and iPhone in a blender. I just find it amusing to see someone take such and expensive and coveted device and destroy it. I don’t really have anything against the iPhone or iPhone users, but I couldn’t bring myself to spend that much money on a phone. If you gave me one, on the other hand…..

Anyhow, check out this video. I think you’ll enjoy it:

I thought today would be a good time to share a SQL Server tip I use frequently at work. The data I work with and report on is often presented in a crosstab fashion. This is fairly easy to do in Microsoft Access, as Access has a built in Crosstab Wizard. T-SQL, the query language used in SQL Server, however, has no such functionality. You have to code it yourself.

For this example I’m going to use the data found at the Baseball Archive, which has an extensive collection of Major League Baseball statistics from the 1800’s all the way to last season available for free personal use. The data they provide is contained in an Access data, but I went ahead and imported it to SQL Server. For this example I’m using two tables: the Fielding table to obtain Position information and the Batting table for the number of Home Runs.

Let’s say you wanted to know how many Home Runs were hit per position per year from 2000 to 2003. You could write the query like this (I filtered out the Pitcher statistics because who cares about Pitcher’s hitting stats):

Query 1

select Fielding.POS, sum(hr) as hr, batting.yearid
from dbo.Fielding inner join batting on Fielding.PlayerID = batting.PlayerID
where (batting.yearID > ‘1999′ and batting.yearID < ‘2004′ ) and Fielding.pos <> ‘p’
group by Fielding.pos, batting.yearid
order by batting.yearid

Query 1 Results

This does give you the number of Home Runs hit per year by Position. However, it’s hard to examine two years of numbers without scrolling. Now, let’s look at the results using a crosstab query.

Query 2

/* Cross Tab */
select Fielding.Pos,
sum( case
when batting.yearid = ‘2000′ then (batting.hr)
end) as ‘2000 - Home Runs’,
sum( case
when batting.yearid = ‘2001′ then (batting.hr)
end) as ‘2001 - Home Runs’,
sum( case
when batting.yearid = ‘2002′ then (batting.hr)
end) as ‘2002 - Home Runs’,
sum( case
when batting.yearid = ‘2003′ then (batting.hr)
end) as ‘2003 - Home Runs’
from dbo.Fielding inner join batting on Fielding.PlayerID = batting.PlayerID
where (batting.yearID > ‘1999′ and batting.yearID < ‘2004′ ) and Fielding.pos <> ‘p’
group by Fielding.pos
order by Fielding.pos

Query 2 Results

Much better, right? Here you can see the trends of what is happening at each position per year.

The key to the crosstab query above is the case statement. What the code is going is testing the year and if it is equal to ‘2000′ is summing batting.hr. That’s all there is to it. The last thing I would do is take this code and save it as a stored procedure, so it can be used in you .Net application or wherever.
Improvements:

• Send the year to the query as a parameter so this query can be used for any range of years.
• Number of years could even be a parameter, making this even more “dynamic”
• ?

Any questions? Let me know if you can think of any other improvements you would add to the above code. Also, let me know if you would like to see the above code with the improvements I mentioned.

For a long time now I’ve been into the Classic Gaming trend, with my ultimate goal to have an arcade machine of my own. I have wanted this since I first saw Ricky Schroeder in the T.V. show Silver Spoons with an arcade in his house. My dream cabinet would probably be the vector classic Star Wars, made by Atari, which was my favorite arcade game of all time. I would settle for almost anything, though.

I thought I was getting close, too, when I discovered the multi-arcade machine emulator called MAME, and was able to play a bunch of my favorite arcade games on my P.C. That was fun, but not quite the same. I still wanted to be able to insert a coin and feel the authentic joystick in my hands and I destroyed some Tie-Fighters, while Ben Kenobi told me to “Let go”.

Right before my daughter was born I discovered the wonderful web site called ArcadeControls.com, which is the site you go to when you want to built your own arcade machine. These guys have all done it, and they can show you how. The icing on the cake was when I found ArcadeDepot.com, a site where you can order a build your own arcade kit. Pretty cool stuff. Unfortunately, this all costs money.

Just before my daughter was born, all those retro controllers that plug into the T.V. and play games were released. Figuring I could afford the $20 investment, I bought the Ms. Pac-Man one from Jakks, which also included Mappy (a pretty excellent, yet underrated game), Galaga, Pole Position, and Xevious. A little idea in the back of my mind was that I could take the controller, modify it a little, and stick it in a custom cabinet which would be like the arcade. Unfortunately, the controller wasn’t as responsive as I would’ve liked,especially for Ms.Pac Man, so it pretty much has been gathering dust.

That is until this past week, when my 14 month old daughter discovered the controller. We don’t let her watch a lot of television, and unfortunately I don’t get to play many video games lately, so I wasn’t sure how my little one would react to twenty year old games. Let’s just say she’s a fan already, and I couldn’t be prouder.

Her favorite by far is Pole Position. She loves the sounds the cars make as they race around the track. If you can imagine, my 14 month old will walk over to the T.V., make a little “Vroom Vroom” sound, grab the controller, turn on the television, and look at us like, “So, are you gonna play, or what?” I give her a month before she finds the on/off switch, the TV/Video button, and I am obsolete.

Do you know how they have those Baby Einstein videos, which are like crack to these kids? Well, I propose they come out with Baby Bushnell games, to get the kids hooked on the classics at a young age. That would at least give us dads an excuse to play all our old games. Then maybe I can finally get my arcade machine.

Time for a top 5 list. Yay! What better topic for a Friday than a list of the toughest opponents in Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out, one of the greatest video games ever made? Punch-Out also happens to be one of the top five games of all time featuring the character Mario (he is the mumbling referee in this game). What are the other games on that list? That’s a list for another day.

Five Toughest Opponents in Mike Tyson’t Punch-Out
(listed in descending order from easiest to toughest)

5. Great Tiger

The question that should first be asked here is who wears a turban to a boxing match? The Great Tiger does, fool! Anyhow, I chucked the NES controller across the room many times while falling prey to Tiger’s “Tiger Punch”. Whatever you do, don’t let this guy beat you. If you do, the terrorists have already won.

4. Super Macho Man:

This guy was pretty tough to beat until you were able to figure out how to dodge the ‘Super Spin Punch’, which at times seemed to last forever. You could dodge the stupid thing five times, only to get hit on the sixth. Very frustrating. He makes this list because of the “Super Spin Punch”, but also because of that disturbing pecs bounce he used to do. Bad times.

3. Bald Bull (World Circuit Version of course)

Bald Bull narrowly beats out Super Macho Man for #3 on this list. The key to beating this guy was timing. Bald Bull’s signature move was the Bull Charge, and if you didn’t time it perfectly you were doomed. The trick was to count to three as he was charging and hit him in the gut at the perfect moment. I was pretty good a this when I was a kid, but I have played the game recently and this guy owns me. That’s why he beats out Super Macho Man. My reflexes to dodge rotund video game boxers must be waning in my old age.

2. Mike Tyson

007-373-5963. Everyone of course remembers that is the code in the game that will take you directly to Mike Tyson. It is ingrained in my skull. I may forget my own cell phone number or my anniversary, but I’ll never forget this code.

The key to beating Mike was to survive Round 1, in which one punch would send Little Mac to the canvas. Survive this and you have a chance.

If you go through all the trouble of beating the game what is your reward? A listing of all the guys you beat. Yay!

For some reason, Tyson was obsessed with finger speed in this game, with quotes such as: “Great fighting !! You were tough, Mac! I never seen such finger speed before.” and “You think the speed of your fingers can match the strength of my fists?”

1. Mr. Sandman

The reason I list Mr. Sandman as the most difficult to beat is I beat both Super Macho Man and Mike Tyson himself before I beat Mr. Sandman, thanks to the code that would take me directly to Macho Man and the code that took me to Mike Tyson himself. There was no real reason for me to beat the Sandman, except pride.

According to wikipedia, Mr. Sandman “possesses a vast array of jabs, hooks, and uppercuts, and his unique timing can easily confuse players”. Yeah, I remember having trouble with his quick jab. I eventually did beat Sandman, but not before he beat me a few too many times.

Honorable Mention: Don Flamenco.

Don Flamenco isn’t a boxer you think of when you think of tough opponents in Punch-Out. However, the guy was creepy, which should count for something. The magical rose that would spontaneously appear in his mouth always a pretty strange thing for an 80’s video game. He wasn’t a very difficult opponent (it is common knowledge that Flamenco can be defeated in 14 seconds) but I was never sure if he wanted to fight me or dance with me. Pretty confusing stuff for an eleven year old to handle.

So, who did you have trouble with in Mike Tyson’s Punchout?