Then a few nights ago I came across the Dell SX2210 on the Dell website. It seemed to tick all the boxes, full HD (1920×1080), was a 22″ screen (well 21.5″ but who’s counting) and it looked the part. Best part was it had nearly £45 off so was only £175. There were some decent reviews of it on the dell review site so I decided to take the plunge.

Delivery was quick, ordered very late Thursday Night and it arrived Monday morning.

First impressions

The monitor looks very stylish, and has a white back with small white trim noticeable at the front bottom.
I can’t see any dead pixels on there which is a bonus.
The screen is very clear and bright. The monitor is setup at the side of an Acer AL2016W and is noticeably brighter with better colours. The Acer seems dull and the whites don’t seem as crisp.

I’m hoping to hook the Xbox 360 up via HDMI to see how it looks playing games b ut for day to day use I’m more than impressed.

It does have a glossy screen, which I tend to prefer and I don’t really have any issues where it is sat in my office.

I would definitely recommend this monitor so far, I may even treat myself with another one to replace the Acer which is a poor monitor in all honesty.

I thought I’d download it and give it a go. So I’ve been using it for, well, since I started writing this post.

If you allow it, it will take a look at the theme you are using so you can author your posts and view them styles as they would appear on the blog. You can also view in a plain layout, view the html source, or preview the post how it’s going to look in you blog, as mentioned above.
Just on a side note about the HTML, Microsoft don’t tend to have a good history of creating HTML editors that actually put out good code. It seems they’re learning from their past mistakes, for now at least, the code produced here is pretty good.

Tags are added as Keywords in the properties box of a post as well as choosing the categories and other settings for the post.

Publishing is straight forward using the aptly titled Publish button on the toolbar. This will send the post off to your blog and publish it. You also have options for saving the draft locally or publishing the post as draft to your blog.

First impressions are good, I don’t totally see the reasons yet for having something like this, unless you have multiple blogs in which case it would save time logging into different blogs to post. I’m sure I’ll see other benefits after I’ve used it a while.

I’ve used Subversion for years and didn’t really want to move to Visual SourceSafe. Subversion does everything I need it to and I’ve never felt the need to move and be locked in to anything else. Unfortunately running windows meant I needed to find a way of installing Subversion on a windows box and running it as a server, I didn’t want to run Apache just for the sake of it. So here it is, my install technique for installing, running and managing repositories on Windows. One point to make, is that this guide uses Tortoise SVN to manage the repository. I could probably have done it just as easily from the command line but I have Tortoise installed so why make life hard.

1. Download and install the latest version of SVN setup.
2. Create a directory on the c: drive to hold the repository (i.e c:\svnrepo)
3. Extract SVNService.exe to the same directory as svnserve.exe
4. Install SVNService as a service using the following command SVNService -install -d -r c:\svnrepo
5. Start the service from Windows Manage Computer

Creating a repository

1. Create folder inside your SVN Repository (c:\svnrepo) in this example we’ll create folder called test.
2. Create a temporary drive locally containing 3 folders; trunk, branches, tags
3. Right click on the parent folder and got to TortoiseSVN > Import
4. In the URL box at the top enter the path to the repository, i.e. svn://<server>/test
5. This will import the 3 folders into the chosen repository.

Adding a Project to a repository

If you already have some files for a project that you have started that you wish to import into your new repository, please follow these steps.

1. Browse to the parent folder of the files you wish to install.
2. Right click this folder and choose TortoiseSVN > Import.
3. This time we want to import the file into the main trunk, so the path to the repository will be svn://<server>/test/trunk

Checking out the repository.

Now we have the project imported into SVN we need to check out a local copy to work on.

1. Browse to the parent directory of where you want to checkout the project to.
2. Right click and choose SVN Checkout
3. This will bring up the Checkout window. Enter the URL of the Repository in the top box (remember we want to checkout the trunk so this needs to go at the end). The checkout directory will default to the directory we clicked in 2, add the name of the subdirectory you wish to check the files out to at the end.
4. Click OK, if the directory you specified does not exist you will be prompted to create the directory, do so.
5. All the files will be checked out into the folder you specified. There will also be hidden folders beginning with .svn created in the directories, DO NOT delete these as they are used by Subversion. You can now work on your local copy.