Monthly Archive for: ‘June, 2006’

It Overtakes Me…

Whilst I’m on the subject of music…

One of the greatest surprises that day-to-day life can offer is when I Google for the name of a track used on a favourite advert and find to my surprise that it’s already in my CD collection (or rather, iTunes library). It was the case when Apple use “Jerk It Out” by The Caesars to advertise the iPod, and tonight it’s happened again with “It Overtakes Me” by The Flaming Lips, as used on that great Becks advert.

Some days it feels as if there’s almost too much good new music to keep up with…

The Delgados

It was almost a decade ago now. In the early hours of a winter’s morning in Nottingham, staggering back to digs after having danced ourselves dizzy at The Irish nightclub, I was having a conversation with housemate Rich wherein we were trying to enumerate our five “Best bands in the world, ever”. Yeah, it was one of those typical drunken conversations, and it was punctuated on at least one occasion by me falling A over T on the icy pavement. Anyway, having named the usual suspects in my list, I then made the sudden inclusion of The Delgados. I seem to remember this being met with drunken snorts of derision from Richy…

Well, this week I have been mostly listening to the recently released double CD of Peel Sessions, and it’s bloody brilliant – reminded me why I loved the band in the first place. The recordings sound fresh and new, yet the songs are familiar – it’s an absolute joy to listen to. There are also some fun cover versions here, including a lovely rendition of ELO’s Mr Blue Sky, with Emma on vocals. Definitely one of my albums of the year (if compilations are allowed…?)

Maybe I was right all those years ago, after all…

My Vista Dreams Are Over (for now..)

Alas, less than two weeks after I attempted to move lock, stock and barrel, over to Vista, I have been forced to repave my machine with XP Pro.

The OS itself was working well, stable enough for home computing purposes, and I really liked the glass interface and tightly integrated desktop search capabilities. But the sticking point was the current lack of support from other hardware and software manufacturers – which will hopefully be rectified by the RTM release.

I managed to get Daemon Tools working, I successfully installed all of my hardware (although I could only get my Creative Audigy 2 ZS soundcard to produce sound from the main two of my 7.1 speaker setup, and it was a bit crackly). I even made use of the free eTrust AntiVirus (as my copy of Norton AV wouldn’t work on Vista). None of these problems were insurmountable, but the deal breaker was my inability to get CheckPoint SecureClient working – which I need in order to work from home.

So, faced with a choice between battling along the M62 to the office every day or reverting to XP for another few months… well, it’s not exactly a difficult decision.
I’ll go back to playing with the Vista Beta on a Virtual PC for now.

Brucie and Suz tie the knot

Congratulations to my good friends Bruce and Suz, who have finally tied the knot today, 9,300 miles away in Palm Cove, Queensland. Good on ya!

Smorgasbord 5

Gates to end daily MS role, to spend more time running his charitable foundation. Say what you want about the man, but he’s a great philanthropist. Wonder how well MS will cope without his regular influence?

Joel Spolsky – My First BillG Review. A good read – I always wondered about that “1904 Date System” checkbox in Excel…

Google Browser Sync – a Firefox extension that continuously synchronises your browser settings across multiple computers. Very handy if, like me, you use FF both at home and work.

Disappointing to learn that the RTM version of Office 2007 probably won’t have the “Save as PDF” feature, due to Adobe’s legal wranglings. Seems they want the standard to be open, just not that open? Whatever. Oddly, the feature can be made available as a free download – go figure.

Good article by Rick Strahl in Code Magazine on the release of Web Application Projects, and how these differ from the stock Web Projects in ASP.NET 2.0. I wish these had been available from day one, it would have made our migration of ASP.NET 1.1 applications much easier.

If you’re a software developer using MS technologies, you really should subscribe to Somasegar’s blog. Recent announcements thereon have included details of the MSDN Wiki, Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals, and the rebranding of WinFX to .NET Framework 3.0 – more juicy detail about that can be found on Jason Zander’s blog.

My favourite funny animal story of the week – Tabby Cat Terror for Black Bear.

Coding Horror – Desktopitis. Yuk, I hate the way people use their desktop as a dumping ground. Personally, my desktop is used as a kind of inbox for the files I’m currently working with, but my goal (as with my inbox) is certainly to get the number of items down to zero. Oh, and I use TweakUI to get rid of silly things like “My Computer” and the Recycle Bin…

Ooh, a new version of Google Earth is available, with a “streamlined UI” and masses more detail. Looking good…

Getting Daemon Tools to install on Windows Vista Beta 2

Some people tend to live by the mantra “don’t touch it until Service Pack 1″. Me, I’m more of a beta 2 kinda guy – anything earlier is just too much pain, anything later and I’m convinced that all the cool kids are laughing at me…

Anyway. Here I am, learning to live with Windows Vista Beta 2, finding my way around, and reinstalling all my software. The first hurdle I hit was getting Daemon Tools to install, which was somewhat problematic as I keep most of my other software as ISO images on a portable hard drive.

The solution? Well, it seems version 3.33 of Daemon Tools, which is still available from their archives, will work on Vista (I’m running build 5384), but you must first disable the User Account Protection (UAP) feature of Vista, which is designed to prevent you from doing anything silly and inadvertently screwing up your PC. So, remember to turn it back on afterwards, and don’t come crying to me if anything goes amiss during the install…

Update 19 Nov 2006: This blog entry still gets an anomalously large number of page impressions, so I thought I would mention that version 4.0.6 of Daemon Tools offers full Vista support.

Application Integration

OK, well, in contrast to the message box in my previous blog entry, today I was presented with this great message from IE7:

Ah yes, that’s what I like – nice tight integration between applications. In all likelihood I’ll probably still read my RSS feeds using Bloglines (on Firefox!), but anything that encourages my non-technical friends and family to start making use of RSS is a real boon in my opinion.

Another great bit of integration from MS that I do make use of is the ability to flag a task in OneNote 2007 and have it appear in Outlook’s task list. Very useful indeed. For more examples of the integration between OneNote and Outlook, see Chris Pratley’s blog.

I have to say that I’m really impressed with the quality and quantity of stuff coming out of Redmond recently – especially the betas of Vista and Office 2007.