SQL Server Reading

It's been a while since I sat down a read a decent book in the SQL server space - I'm fairly sceptical about the new additions to most database products recently - they've not really been addressing core functionality - just adding minority requirements that don't really gain much.

Considering the above I wasn't expecting much from a single read so bought a collection of books and though that across them I might find a few useful bits and pieces - I was pleasantly surprised by all three books - each had something unique to say and each approached the subject in quite distinct ways.

Links to the books below:

VisualStudio 2010 performance

Editor performance in VisualStudio on my machine is best described as dreadful - it's very rare to be working on an editor where you actually have to look up to see where the cursor has actually got to especially when touch typing - and yet in VS2010 you have to because it reacts so poorly.

There's a semblance of a fix which has worked for me by turning off the hardware acceleration (due to VS2010 being a WPF app). Tools -> Options -> General -> in the middle are a bunch of options for experience - turn them all off and see if you find that it speeds up.

Compro VideoMate S350 on SuSE 11.2

Well according to the forums people have varied luck with the S350 - I guess there must be multiple models out there as I finally got mind working although it was a bit of a challenge.

The card has the following chipset

saa7164 - this is detected as an unknown card
saa7130/34 - this is detected by v4l2 and driver version 0.2.16 is loaded
saa7133 - this is detected correctly as a Compro VideoMate S350/S300 (card 169)

After dbb_init() the adapter is registered
saa7133[0]
Zarlink ZL10313 DVB-S

This gives you a single channel DVB-S adapter to play with

Hauppauge Nova-PCI

Hauppauge Nova-PCT DTV tuner

Requires the following settings in /etc/modprobe or /etc/modprobe.d

options dvb_usb_dib0700 force_lna_activation=1
options dvb_usb disable_rc_polling=1