It is the summer that just keeps on giving. Won't end, is damn well September and still too hot.

Dell laptop update

Well firstly the bug that can never be fixed has been fixed. A few people suggested calling Dell. So I did. What is the worst that could happen? They would laugh at me and tell me that it was an act of god and therefore not covered under the warranty?

Anyway, after talking to his manager the Dell engineer agreed that it was probably damn annoying and I had a new screen the next day. I obviously felt a little guilty at having an engineer drive all the way from Portsmouth just to swap a screen, but he had other jobs in the locale so that was pretty cool.

DRM Cracked, for a little while

So I must admit I took a gander at Fairuse4wm, I have quite a few old DRM-protected albums I purchased from MSN Music. I don't mind the concept of paying for music online, in fact I took great pleasure in going thru the catalogue...

Robert has changed his mind and now thinks release candidate one is going to be great, this makes me want it more and hopefully I can pester NVIDIA to give me some special drivers to play with if they don't release any to the general public. I really want to start playing games on this thing.

I won't be switching my main rig to Windows Vista until I get the final version in my hands - don't get me wrong, I love a good reformat, but I don't like doing it when I just know that I am going to have to do it again. I prefer spur-of-the-moment formattings, the one thats that are so risque as you are never sure if you will remember to backup your mail or favourate and perhaps your documents. I live life on the edge don't you know.

So if you get the guy who said beta3 was needed to say rc1 is good or to be clearer "will rock us", that just makes me want it more - we have been promised a build before the general release canidatate one which has been guestimated by Paul...

When I was installing the July CTP of Windows Vista, something horrible happened. Summer basically. Not a big fan of it at all, you are expected to go outside instead of being a geek.

Summer also brings bugs, I have no problem with them as long as they don't interfere with me, but that is rarely the case. Flies seem to have an addiction to skin and storm bugs seem to have an addiction to TFT monitors.

Not only was my 19" Dell TFT infected by a bug, but my newly aquired top of the range (that range atleast) Dell D610 become infected by the vicious stormbug exploit as well.


Pretty frustrating really and destroyed the good vibes I was getting about the last build, perhaps why I am so eager to get the next thing Connect throws at us. But I know the bug will still be there.

Don't tell Dell (hah!) but I took my laptop apart as much as I could, I really...

Ok so this week lots of controversy in the Windows Vista arena with various high profile beta testers saying Vista should be delayed by a month or two and an additional beta added.

I feel I need to vent somewhere and I found Paul Thurrott's response pretty damn funny and so true. (check it out here: http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/winvista_ready.asp )

Regarding businesses waiting to deploy Vista - The company I work for only just rolled out WindowsXP and we are still refining it, granted we are slower than most but how likely is it large (or sensible) businesses will be rolling out Vista anywhere near the launch time? It is going to happen of course but only a few months afterwards.

Regarding beta3, how true! I remember when Microsoft where trying to drop the beta system completely and people were running around panicking because then they wouldn't know what progress was being made? How about using it and reporting problems, that’s why you...

Been working hard on www.osnn.net this evening not that users will really notice as most of the work was on the backend, I made the decision to stop using iframes for the headlines on the forums as there are a few issues with the newer versions of Intenet Explorer 7. It was also a change I wanted to make due to the way the page rendered it - the desired effect was correct, but the loading is now better.

Had to write some weird vBulletin functions that took me quite a long time but eventually nailed it, don't think loading will be any faster (or slower for that matter) but it looks better when it loads at the same time as the rest of the page and there isn't a flicker of white. Anyway, very happy with result although I still need to compensate for a few issues such as long thread titles and maybe add something more interesting to the mouseover.

Once I was done testing it in Internet Explorer 6, turned out I had missed something that Internet Explorer 6 didn't...