Windows 7

Today I installed Windows 7 Beta on the Acer Laptop, in the past I have had issues with this laptop’s wireless adaptor, so have left it running XP.

After initial install, the WiFi was not recognised, but a wired connection back to the HomeHub, and several downloads later all the hardware (except the video card) is recognised. I have now managed to download the XP driver and persuaded Windows 7 to load it, but the Experience Score (See Below) performance really seems to be no better afterwards!

Once I removed the network cable, I managed to connect successfully to my Wireless network, with only minimal fuss… so another positive result for Windows 7.

The Windows Experience Score is a rather disappointing 1.0, but that is down to the VideoCard, and I don’t seem to be able to find a Vista/Windows 7 driver.  The CPU is 2.5, RAM is 3.1 and HDD is 1.9  Having said that, the PC itself does boot up quickly, and is generally running “better” under 7 than XP.

Alex is pleased, as he finally gets access to Mahjong and Purble Place ;-)

IE8 RC1

I installed Internet Explorer 8, Release Candidate 1 last night, you can get a copy at www.microsoft.com/ie8.

So far, nothing really to report, it feels similar to IE7, a bit prettier, but most importantly – nothing is broken this time.  Last time I tried IE8, too many pages just didn’t work.

So far, so good!

Oh Bugger!

Yesterday I finally conceded defeat, the 240GB HDD I have been using with Vista 64 is just too small and too slow.  I need to replace the drive.

I purchased a 750 GB Samsung drive (7200 rpm, 32 MB Buffer, SATA II) for £65 from PC World, and when I got home installed it into the PC.

I then downloaded a trial copy of Acronis True Image 2009, as it is supposed to be a fully working version for 14 days, and has the capability to ‘clone drives’

After I installed it, a reboot was required – BSOD Boot Loop!!

After a lot of messing about, I have started re-installing Vista (32 bit this time) on the new drive.  Last night was a late one, but I am almost back up and working, OS updates, Office, most of the Music, Pictures and Video files are back over.

Still on the ToDo list:

Photoshop & Dreamweaver, restore ‘My Documents’ and configure Outlook.

No doublt I will find other stuff to put back on over the next few days, but for now it’s looking pretty useful.

More Training!!

Seems that I have been chosen, along with two of the other support guys to be the prime for a new product that BT will be bringing to market in the coming months, and that the servers will all be Linux based…

As such we are all to be ‘Linux Trained’ to and ‘Advanced Standard’. Not sure I know what any of that means, but it could be fun!

Dreamweaver CS4

Well BETA anyway...

It's not actually due for release for another 9 to 12 months, but you can download the beta now, and as long as you have a valid CS3 product key, you can run it in parallel till CS4 is officially launched.

You can find out more on the adobe labs website, but its mainly a radical overhaul of the user interface, along with some very nice new features.  I installed it Thursday, and even in this short time, I really don't want to go back to the old version...

Another Bank Holiday over

... back to work in the morning.

It was a bit strange today, I have had several Mondays off on the bounce recently, but because a) Amanda and Alex were at home (Amy is away for the weekend), b) Everyone else was off and c) the weather was pretty lousy, it has been a strange day.

What I have managed to do quite a bit of today is: Photoshop CS3 scripting in Javascript.  I am attempting to semi automate my monthly calendar production.

The twp difficulties are 1) I am not too familiar with Javascript syntax and 2) There is not a lot of information about the programming API available.

So far, I can open a dialog box, ask for the Month, Year, Start day and the number of days in the month, and use that information to create a separate document of the same dimensions with the date data printed on it.  This can then be copied over my template with a suitable blending mode, and it sort of works.

I do however need to spend quite a few hours yet working out some of the details.  For example, I can't yet put a drop shadow, of bevel & emboss on the dates etc.

Update your AV for free

If you want a good *free* antivirus, why noy try the latest version 8 of AVG...
http://free.grisoft.com/ww.download?prd=afe

If you go directly to the AVG site, it's quite difficult to find the free version, but WAY too easy to get the paid for version.... hmmmm accident or design??

Cool Technologies

I have been playing with Dreamweaver CS3 recently, and have completed a couple of training courses on Lynda.com on AJAX and SPRY

My test sites are at

http://ajax-test.rockbox-themes.org/ and

http://spry-test.rockbox-themes.org/

The Ajax one is quite simple to look at, but was a real pain in the but to build - lots of Javascript and PHP code, all to get a page that does exactly the same of the pure HTML version it replaced!
The actual difference is that the AJAX layer makes the web page work more like an application.  When you search on a traditional site, the query is passed in the URL and the results displayed on a separate 'results.html' type page.  With AJAX, the results are posted back to the same page as the query was performed on, making multiple searches much easier.

SPRY is adobes AJAX implementation framework, it is far easier to use than hand coding everything, but at the expense of some flexibility.

One thing I was quite pleased with is the tabbed panels example:

http://spry-test.rockbox-themes.org/Tabbed_Panels.php

But what is particularly interesting on that page is the two RSS feed tabs.  They were built using yet another cool technology: XLST...  You create an XLS file, which is linked to an XML based file.  This XLS is then merged with the HTML file on the server side.  This allows you to embed XML data into your own page.

New Toys...

Well sort of.

1) New Painting.  As mentioned previously I have just ordered a new Mark Spain artwork for the lounge.  I now have a delivery date of 21st of April, so I have two weeks to ensure that the decoration etc. is complete.

Today we went to the Halcyon gallery in Birmingham, where they were opening their "Figurative Collection" show, and we had chance to meet non other than Mark Spain himself.  A really nice guy, and the free champagne was rather nice too.

2) New HDD for the PC.  Lofty is in the process of reconfiguring his Media Centre PC, and as a result has a couple of 500 GB HDD's going spare.  I have taken one of them off his hands for the princely sum of £40.

I intend to put this new drive (well 12 month old actually) in this PC, and take the opportunity to completely reload Windows Vista.  I currently have C: on a 75 GB drive, and D:, P: and M: on a 240 GB drive.  The plan is to go to a single large C: on the 500 GB, with data, pictures and music in the My Documents, My Pictures and My Music, and use the 240 GB drive as a backup device for those three locations.

Has it really been a month..

... since I last posted here?  Good grief, time flies when you are having fun!

'What's been going on?' I hear you cry, well not a lot actually.  Currently decorating the lounge, in advance of a new painting - 'A Moment of tranquility' by Mark Spain

Ceiling and woodwork has been painted, walls have been re-papered with textured paper, and one wall has actually been emulsion'd to finished colour.  Still not 100% sure on other wall's or curtain colour, so some work left to do yet.

Apart from that, not a lot... Tidied out my CD collection for a recent 'Car Boot' sale, sold about 100 CD's - still *way* too many left really.

Not too much time off from work, but work itself has been pretty quiet.  That's the 'end of financial year' effect - it's either completely mad, or deadly quiet, depending on wether there is any telecom's budget left to be spent before April!

Took a day trip to see Lofty one day, he is now separated from his wife, and filling for divorce.  It's the happiest we have seen him in years!

Have been spending quite a lot of time on Photoshop, working my way thro' the tutorials in Matt Kloskowski's "Layers - The complete guide to Photoshop's most powerful feature', and a couple of online training courses ay Lynda.com.  I have been really interested in the area of 'retouching' and now need to get the camera out and take some good pic's on Amy and Alex so I have some material to work on!

The Beta version of Lightroom 2.0 is now out, and I have taken the opportunity to start from scratch again withLR.  I started importing pictures into LR before I really understood what was going on, and as such - it was always a bit of a mess.  Lets see if I can do better this time!

Golf has been a bit thin on the ground in March, every time I had a day off, the weather was terrible.  Never mind, with the clocks going forwards, evenings are fair game again now ;-) - at least they will be once the decorating is finished...

Firefox 3 Beta 3

I have recently installed the latest version of FF 3, and am generally quite impressed. 

I found two Issues

1) The Roboform Toolbar needed to be updated to latest version (6.9.87) which was not a major problem

2) The 'Home' button has been moved from the 'Normal' position on the Navigation bar to the bookmarks toolbar.  This was a major pain in the butt!  Fortunately there is a fix on the Mozilla Forums:

make sure you right-click on the toolbars and select 'customize' before trying to drag the 'Home' button from the 'Bookmarks Toolbar' to the 'Navigation Toolbar'. Leave that 'customize' window open while dragging buttons. If that still doesn't work, disable any weird extensions you have running that might not be completely compatible with this new build.

Unfortunately it seems that many of the developers consider this strange positioning to be 'More Logical' and this tweak may be needed more than once.

Plunge Taken

I have been able to install a Beta version of SP1 for Windows Vista for some time now, but as the first attempt to install the 1st Beta almost killed my PC, I have been somewhat reluctant.

Today, however, I took the plunge and installed Vista SP1 RC Refresh 2.  Initially it refused to install - a problem left over from the first abortive attempt - but a quick Google sorted that one out.

It took about 1 hour to install, and every seems to be exactly the same afterwards.  Hardly surprising as no new features are being shouted about by Microsoft on this SP.  In fact the only real indication that anything has occurred is the Kaspersky software firewall asking if it's OK to continue attempting to fire up a modified executable.

Windows Updates

Paul Thurrott's Supersite for windows notes that there are two new updates for Vista, that are not yet on the official update site:

December 2007 Windows Vista Application Compatibility Update
The December 2007 Windows Vista Application Compatibility Update is a package of software updates that address common application compatibility issues in Windows Vista. This update is cumulative, and it supersedes update 935280. In addition to the fixes that are contained in update 935280, this update improves support in Windows Vista. This update also includes fixes that are contained in update 932246.

An update that improves the performance, responsiveness, and reliability of Windows Vista is available
This update improves performance, responsiveness, and reliability of Windows Vista in various scenarios.

Useful Free Software

Any DVD Converter Professional is an All-in-One DVD ripper and video converting tool which helps you rip movie from DVD-Video disc to all popular video formats and convert video files between all popular video formats with fast converting speed and excellent video quality. It is a video converter which converts almost all video formats including DivX, XviD, MOV, rm, rmvb, MPEG, VOB, DVD, WMV, AVI to MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, 3GP or FLV movie formats for iPod, iPhone, Zune, PSP or other portable video device, MP4 player or smart phone.

You can get a free version that does enough for most people, of pay $20/30 for a version with a few extra features - Feature Comparison page

very usefull for changing all those DivX / Xvid downloads into DVD ready format ;-)

Lightroom 1.3

For all those Lightroom users out there, version 1.3 is now available from Adobe

From the Readme...

Lightroom 1.3 includes corrections for the following issues:

• Writing XMP metadata automatically has been corrected for performance issues
• Printing with the native resolution option enabled no longer sets the wrong dimension for portrait oriented images
• Prior to Camera Raw 4.3 there was the possibility that artifacts in edge transitions could be introduced through the Bayer demosaic and luminance noise reductions algorithms. This has been corrected.
• The Canon sRAW format and the Fuji compressed RAF formats are now supported.

Lightroom 1.3 includes the following enhancements:

• The import dialog now offers the option to render 1:1 previews as part of the import process
• The export dialog layout has been enhanced
• A Lightroom Preview Export SDK is available for developers to create and distribute Export Plug-ins. Further details are located on Adobe Labs

Are You Secure II?

My subscription to McAfee expired today, but I have not been too happy with that application for a while, it seems to be really eating memory and CPU cycles.

Added to that the latest edition of PC PRO did a group test on security software, McAfee only managed to detect 78% of the test infections!  The winner was Kaspersky Internet Security with 98% - and it's cheaper (£66 for a two year subscription with anytime download) - having just installed it and started it running, it's already found one e-mail virus that McAfee had missed!!

Are you up to date?

Secunia have released a BETA version of their Personal Software Inspector - Find out if you have been keeping up to date with all those little apps you have scattered all over your hard drive.

New Blogging Tool

Windows Live Writer: Works fine with Vista, seem to be easy enough to set up, and will upload images to my FTP folder when I attach them to a blog...  Have a look at it, it's free

HTMLvalidator/ has just been updated to 8.04(beta) If you are responsible for a web site, and have any interest in ensuring the code is as clean and standards compliant as it can be - then this is a program you should not be without.

Changes since 8.03:
Editor
Dragging and dropping a Batch Wizard target list file (that has an lst file extension) onto the editor in the professional edition will now ask if you want to open it in the Batch Wizard.
Batch Wizard
Following links should now work when links contain ";jsessionid=".
Improved Syntax Checking
Now assume that <%...%>, and will evaluate to a text string when CSE HTML Validator tries to determine if there is text in elements such as "b". This should eliminate messages like this for source like this <% =MS.SomeRoutine %>: The "b" element contains no text and may be useless. Consider removing this element or placing text in it so that it contains text.
Recognizes more font family names as valid.
Bug Fixes
Fixed a bug that calculated an incorrect absolute URI in certain rare situations.
New TreeView component to fix access violations when tool tips were on.
The tidyprofiles.xml file is now properly stored and referenced to in the user's application data folder.
Recognizes the CSS "counter-reset" property.
Other
Many Microsoft Vista improvements to better support the look and feel of Microsoft Vista.
Improvements when adding file associations.
Paths in the old 8.3 format that are passed as a filename argument to the command line processor are now, in most cases, converted to long filenames before processing.
Miscellaneous user interface improvements and fixes, including new tip messages.
Now creates the registry key that HTML-Kit looks for when it looks for CSE HTML Validator. This should cause the menu option Tools->Check Code Using CSE HTML Validator to appear in HTML-Kit when CSE HTML Validator is installed.
Minor updates to the documentation.

DO NOT play this game

Desktop Tower Defence, no don't... It is very addictive.