I am slowly getting though my to do list. One of the issues that I was working through was that I was getting some really strange position reports uploaded to my database after being sent through email. I traced this to two different report formats being used. One of them has a timezone correction in-built, and the other does not. When they are imported they overlap in the wrong places causing issues.

The HardOCP WWW Site has a story on how to water cool the XBOX 360. They were planning to try this even before the issues with the 360’s power supply came to light. This unit keeps the internals of the 360 much cooler allowing a longer life for the unit with fewer failures.

News.Com.AU has a short story about how the world is moving to Electronic Ticketing for airline flights. The first internet booked flight was conceived only 10 years back in an english pub, and now accounts for 35% of all tickets world wide. IATA want this to increase to 100% within two years, saving the industry about US$6.5b annually. SITA and BMI were involved with the first trial where tickets were sent out or available for pickup at the airport.

And onto the Bizzare, the SMH Arts section has an article about the Castrati Opera Singers from Italy. A museum is now trying to track down paintings of the most popular six Castrati singers from the beginning of the last century, and the end of the century before. Some audio recordings do exist from memory, on the Edison Photograph. The important thing to note about the Castrati singers is that they are a cut above the rest…

Finally, in VisualBasic 2005, microsoft was unable to include the Refactoring tool in time for the production. They have therefore made a deal to provide a Third Party Product for free. Refactoring is an automated method for breaking up functions and subroutines, changing the order of paramaters, adding paramaters and the like, but doing this automatcailly.