Scott Hanselman Chat & Wikipedia Goes Mobile

I came back from Scott Hanselman's chat hosted by SA Developer .Net Group in South Africa, Cape Town.

The chat was held at Microsoft offices, Scott talked about the ASP.NET MVC framework
giving a very good demo on a new website: NerdDinner that you will notice still use the default ASP.NET MVC template. After lunch (good food like always!) there was a Q&A session and a discussion.

Next in the news: Wikipedia goes mobile! To try this later on my Samsung Omnia i900, Windows Mobile 6.1 Pro.

Weekly Source Code: Using MySQL Database with Visual C# 2008 Express Edition 15/12/2008

David Bolton that manage the C/C++/C# About.com website post a tutorial on how to use mySQL from MS Visual C# 2008 Express Edition.... The Express Edition is a free version of the Visual C# IDE (not the whole MS Visual Studio.Net suite)

See the tutorial here

VOIPBuster vs Skype - Phone Calls

Looking into VOIPBuster vs Skype for cheap VOIP calls expecially when I goto Uganda (more about that in a later post) I find that:

If you buy VOIPBuster credit you get 120 days free period where you can make free calls to countries unfortunatly for us Uganda or South Africa isn't :-( So nothing is going to be free.

Comparing the prices:

VOIP Buster:

0.060 EUR = R0.797024 (Landline)
0.170 EUR = R2.25728 (Mobile)

Skype:

Landline: R1.612
Mobile: R1.612

So VOIPBuster is cheaper for landline but Skype is cheaper for mobile.

See VOIPBuster Rates
See Skype Rates
To Convert EUR To ZAR

Black: Playstation 2 Game!

Yesterday I received my Black Playstation 2 game that I bought online from Take2
Black is a first person shooter and OBOY the game got good graphics and action packed!

I will write a review soon and also provide some videos.

Meanwhile back to work and looking forward to playing again....

O btw I ordered Hitman PS2 game aswell - its also a first person shooter!

My 27th Birthday

Yesterday, 8 December 2008 was my 27th birthday... beside that I was at work having a normal day I also ate alot of cake!

Last night my beautiful wife (Jolene De Villiers) took me out for dinner and a movie... we watched the new 007 movie: Quantum of Solace Alot of action but the ending was disappointing.

Today my Black Playstation 2 game arrived so having some fun tonight :-)

Scott Hanselman In South Africa!

Yes our favoarite super hero Scott Hanselman is coming to South Africa.
You need to RSVP

I'm going to the 17 December 2008 event.

See you there :-)

Update:

For those that aren't geeks, Scott Hanselman is a big .Net developer working for Microsoft in the USA... His one of the key players in the Microsoft .Net techonology. You can click on his name to read his bio, blog etc.

Weekly Source Code: Get Cents

Part of making changes to the Java currency to words code I pass in a double value parameter to the convert method (not a long) and add support for cents e.g. : $5.20 to equal "Five USD and Twenty cents".

An interesting problem I had was how do I get the cents part? e.g. $5.20 to get 20.

Firstly I had to format the number to round off to the last 2 digits so something like $5.2555 will not work. To do this in Java you can use the DecimalFormat class.

To get the cents I wrote:

double cents = new Double(new Double(number).doubleValue() - new Double(number).intValue()).doubleValue();
int iCents = (int) Math.round(cents * 100d);

The first line of code take the double value and subtract the integer value e.g. 5.20 - 5.0 = 0.20
The second line format the remaining value 0.20 to be an integer e.g. 20

Like always there are many ways in programming how this could be done and yes the above code works 100% since I wrote a very detail Unit test.