Monthly Archive for: ‘November, 2006’

John captured my happy smiling self today:

 

Here’s another quick Vista tip that might also save you money!  Although Vista comes with inbuilt firewall,  anti-spyware and parental controls, there’s still no out-of-the-box antivirus (presumably much to the relief of the countless AV product manufacturers around the globe).  So after a fresh install you’ll probably find the Windows Security Centre looking something like this:

 
 

Furthermore, you might well find that the copy of Norton AV you bought in 1996 is not compatible with Vista, and probably no longer eligible for definition updates!

Don’t let this scare you into rushing out to PC World and spending fifty quid on whatever Symantec or McAfee are pushing, unless you’re sure it’s what you want and need.  There are free alternatives out there which will probably suffice for the average home user.

I’m currently using AVG from Grisoft which is Vista-compatible, has downloadable updates and is absolutely free.

From an anecdote on Scott Hanselman’s blog:

He said "Humour me." He’s from the Bay Area, but you can always here the "u" in words like Humor with Jeff. It’s how he maintains quiet superiority over you and I.

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I’m glad to hear that I’m not the only one who finds the “shut down” icon in Vista totally confusing.  See, the thing is, the default icon looks like this…

 

…which you might think turns the computer off (after all, it looks identical to the symbol on the “off” button on my monitor, and PC).  But it doesn’t.  By default, it puts the PC into “Sleep” mode (a fact that admittedly is explained if you pause the mouse over the button for long enough for a tooltip to appear).

It’s possible to change this button to an actual “Shut Down” button – I know this because it’s the first thing I figured out how to do once I woke my PC from it’s unintended slumber.  Here’s how you do it:

From the Control Panel, choose Power Options.  You’ll get a window like the one shown below:

Next select “Change Plan Settings” beneath your currently selected “power plan” (if you’re in the habit of changing between power plans often, you’ll want to make this change to all three of them).

Now, what we want to achieve is considered “advanced”, so click on “Change advanced power settings”.

In the Advanced settings window, scroll down and expand “Power buttons and lid”, then expand “Start menu power button”, and choose “Shut down” from the drop down.

 

Confirm out of all those dialogs, and next time you click on the start button, you’ll find that the “Sleep” button has been replaced with a slightly different and a touch more red “Shut Down” button:

If you’re wondering what the “Hibernate” button looks like (I did), you’ll find that it’s indistinguishable from the “Sleep” button, which confirms Joel’s theory that nobody really knows the difference between the two!

 

Don’t get me wrong, I do love Vista and have no desire to go back to using XP.  But when installing a fresh build of XP there were certain changes I always had to make (such as removing that bloody dog from the Search function or uninstalling MSN Explorer), and I get the feeling that it won’t be long before I have a similar mental list of crucial tweaks to make to Vista installations.  Thank goodness I don’t have to suffer the ignominy of a standard desktop build at my current place of work.

As a professional developer who spends every working day writing software which must meet the differing needs of many different users, departments and even companies within the group, I’m also well aware how an initially “simple” piece of functionality can quickly grow horns and become very complicated indeed.  But as Joel says in his final paragraph, maybe we should try to cease the “make everybody happy” approach and instead develop simpler, better, systems that encapsulate the best practice, or at least compromises that everyone can agree upon.  It’s certainly food for thought.

And now… I’m going to turn my PC off
 

Here’s something odd, then: On Sunday, in a Tesco car park, I was pushing our trolley of groceries back towards the place we’d parked when suddenly I saw what I thought was my car being driven away from me!  Same make, same model, same colour, and same registration plate!  I was just about to abandon our shopping and hotfoot it after the thieving toerags when I realised that the registration was actually one letter out – where mine ends with “N”, this one ended with “M”.  Otherwise, they were the same.

 What are the chances of that, eh?
 

Woohoo!  Well, I know what I’m doing this weekend

Tum-te-tum…

 

When I put my first personal website online in summer 1997, it proudly boasted an "About Me" page… and not much else!  Then in later years such navel-gazing homepages drew ridicule, and I took it down, in favour of letting the software downloads, photos and of course the online journal speak for themselves.

Well, now it seems that the "About Me" page is back in fashion.  In fact it’s practically de rigeur, blog readers expect such a page to exist so they know a little about the person whose opinions they’re reading.  Ever a slave to fashion, I’ve therefore cobbled together a brief biography of yours truly which you can find at http://ianfnelson.com/about (or by clicking the "About" link at the top of every blog page).

So if you’ve ever wondered who I am, or (more likely) know perfectly well who I am but are curious how I view myself, now’s your chance to find out. 

On this Remembrance Sunday, permit me to share with you a photo that my cousin Helen took this week of our Granduncle’s grave in France.

Private William Henry Worfolk (1896 – 1916) of the York and Lancaster Regiment was my Grandfather’s elder brother (by four years), and was only just old enough to fight (and die) in the First World War.  A couple of years later and it could just as easily have been my grandfather, and then I wouldn’t be here to tell you this tale.  Ninety years on from that most bloody of wars, we still have much to be thankful for.
 

Those of you reading this through an RSS aggregator may not be aware that I’ve spent the weekend changing the appearance of my website.  I decided to upgrade my blogging engine to Community Server 2.1 SP1, and I’m glad that I did so – it’s come along in leaps and bounds since 2.0. 

I took this opportunity to pick a new theme – “Paperclip”.  Those nice chaps at Telligent have made available the Photoshop file used to create the banner image, so it was simplicity itself to replace the default image with one of my own.  Those stones you see above make up part of the Giant’s Causeway in County Antrim which Joce and I visited last month.