David Carrington

You may have mixed results with this, as it won’t work everywhere. It’s worked in 3 of 4 places I tried.

Step 1) Download and open up Google Earth, making sure to turn on Street View layer

Step 2) Find one of the cool-looking Street View bubbles

Step 3) Turn on the timeline view to see aerial photo dates (the clock icon)

Step 4) Double click the street view bubble to enter the panoramic photo and see the new date appear:

Looks like Google had a busy Summer in the UK last year!

Tapping away on the Nokia N97 wondering whether this WordPress mobile client is any good.

Seems OK.

Update: seems to work reasonably well on Android too (G1).

I’m a big fan of Modern Warfare 2 (on the Xbox 360) and here’s typically how I play.

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I just had a frustrating little SQL Server problem earlier today and would like to share the handy solution I found via Experts Exchange.

SELECT ResponseXml.value('(//Reference)[1]', 'varchar(50)')
FROM Transaction

A fairly simple XQuery request of an XML column but annoyingly it didn’t work, and it turned out to to be because the ResponseXml had an unnamed XML namespace, which SQL Server doesn’t handle too nicely.

<Message xmlns="http://www.example.com/">
<Reference>123</Reference>
</Message>

It’s the xmlns attribute (XML namespace) that causes the problem apparently, and the simplest solution I found was this snippet:

SELECT ResponseXml.value('declare default element namespace "http://www.example.com/"; (//Reference)[1]', 'varchar(50)')
FROM Transaction

I just had to tell XQuery to use a different default namespace – a lot simpler than other suggested solutions such as removing the namespace from the XML.

It took me three hours to drive the 25 minute journey home last night through the extreme weather conditions (2 inches of snow). Luckily I was allowed to leave early so it actually averaged out ok in the end.

So above is my little setup.

• Dell Mini 9 netbook
• hooked up to my 24″ monitor
• with my N97 providing my music for the day
• and Modern Warfare 2 on the Xbox providing lunch time pressure release

Completely different to my usual remote working setup where I take my 17″ laptop to my girlfriend’s and work from there. Now I just wish that work’s VPN had Windows 7 support.