Lorin Thwaits

Demo unit on display this week at CEATEC Japan Commercial unit to be sold in December

I am very impressed with everything about the MVP summit. Never in my life have I been in attendance at an event with so much diversity. I've met people from Honduras, Peru, Germany, Lithouania, Ru…

I was asked to be one of the folks answering questions at the big Phoenix "Ready for a New Day" launch event. Definitely a fun experience, and pretty well attended. A common question that came up i…

I recently bought a bigger 80 gig hard drive for my laptop, and wanted to copy the contents of my existing 30 gig disk with an XP install over to it. I didn't want to go buy any drive copying tools…

SQL Server 2005 has lots of new tricks up its sleeve. During our user group meeting this past Wednesday night there was a question about how to use one such enhancement: the PIVOT statement. You ca…

A few months ago I wrote a simple Javascript beautifier, which suited my needs at the time. But since then while dissecting longer AJAX-centric scripts in various websites, I found some things that…

I presented a session on WPF at the Arizona .NET User's Group last night, and today have been getting email and calls from several people who wished they could have been in attendance, and wanted t…

In my last post I talked about a great little UMPC I bought while on vacation in Japan, Sony's VGN-UX50. Once back in the states and having caught up with work again I installed XP Pro English with…

While in Japan a week and a half ago I picked up Sony's new teeny ultramobile (UMPC), the Vaio VGN-UX50. Strongly reminiscent of the OQO, its sliding screen reveals an integrated keyboard. And alth…

The postulation of Douglas Engelbart back in 1965 that the complexity of computers would double every 24 months has held true ever since he said it. Although it was originally Engelbart's theory, i…

If you haven't read this post about dissecting the HD-A1, you should start there.

Upon hearing rumors that Toshiba put a 2.5 GHz Pentium 4 CPU and a gig of PC2700 DDR RAM in their new $500 high definition set-top DVD player, I was intrigued. When I heard that they also put in a …

Recently needed to work on a friend's 12 year old minivan that for some reason still runs. It's ugly, gets crappy mileage, and has 180,000 miles on it, but still went from point A to point B. That …

Ever had the annoying problem of IIS not wanting to start, coughing up the message "Unexpected Error 0x8ffe2740 Occurred."? The reason is that some other application has grabbed port 80. The most c…

Where I work there's a firewall application required in some parts of the network that doesn't play nicely with XP SP2. So we're still on SP1 while the vendor sorts out the problem. Meanwhile I sti…