Nothing of Interest

A nice snowy day in Ottawa. So I am simply browsing around looking for interesting things. Vista is due soon and it will be interesting to  see how much stuff comes out alongside it. I recall Win 98 and XP launches, so much activity followed it was impos to keep up.

 

It has been quiet on the release side latley and very few venders hav updates for Vista - lets see - I expect a massive impulse of patches and updates but who knows.  For sure there will be many disapointed people around if they updgrade XP and programs fail to work, its does not reasure you when aplications ask for two or three confirmations prior to running only to fall over because you forgot to run in admin mode or failed to goto the compatabilty tab and set XP first.

 

When other VIsta features fail due to drivers or other programs it could make for fun reading across the forumns as people quierie the Beta test. It was large but for sure many regular uses will have give it amiss. When games fail or wont work well with Vista the gaming comunity will have fun working out ways to turn Vista back to XP.

 

I have decided that fine tuning Vista would be of little use as most adjustments mean turning off Vista features so I may as well simply put WIndows 2003 onto the machine and disable it advanced server features, put up with its securty but small % of comatabilty issues and make do. Its the features that make Vista Vista and like it or not they add to its workabilty and stabilty over time.

 

Well off to wander the net, for now a snowy pic to enjoy....

 

Take a seat in Greenboro ...

Good Sale

Well some kinda real estate salesman eh!

Vista Problems Anoyances Issues !

Well  Vista is giving me problems, don't get me wrong overall I like it a lot. It feels more stable than xp and things tend to recover themselves. Only once have I had to completly close it down and start again.

Issues that repeat themselves, on two machines;

Notification Icons in task bar do not always show up. The switches to enable them in taskbar properties are grayed out and so can not be used. (Power, Volume, Net and Clock are seperate to program notification icons in the task bar and work when they wish.)

Windows Media player continues playing and auto repeats if you close it whilst its working, only way to stop it is through task manager - closing the process. Definatly a bug!

Programs often freeze and show '(Not Responding)' in the title bar, click on them and they 'white out' after a while most will spring back to life. Idea that this is memory related and once they swap back into memoerythey work fine.

Hard disk shuffle - often slowing Vista down while it moves things around for lno reason whilst you are runnig only one task ; IE: Web Browser.

Skype 3 - volume control messes up (on phone panel) - blame skype !

Internet Explorer 7 crashes at random - report back blames Firefox (not running)

Hardware Volume control buttons on Sony Vaio do not function with or without driver installed, worked fine in both ways on XP

Installing Dreamweaver breaks Vista Help - Doh - did no one test this or notice in Beta !!

Updates insist on being installed even if set to advise only, especialy Defender Updates - they don't get installed but they just wont go away sometimes.

Task bar has changed - you can no longer pull a toolbar off onto the desk top - IE an not create a launch bar across top of screen like in XP.

Simply copying shortcuts of desktop into a folder Vista takes more time drawing a dialog to calculate time remaining than and then inform you to wait than to copy the file.

Same drive copying is way slow - considering its just a rename, could it not just confirm and operate in the background !

More Info on copy dialog is a waste of time, does not feedback what file is being copied no real usful info at all. In fact given the extra line of info why not just show it where the arrow is anyway. Sam space.

Oversimplified Control Pannels lead to feature hunting - nothing is where you moight expect at times. Need a central control pannel in some way. Good one for 3rd party tweakers I guess.

UAC hold your hand way to much - will put people of using their PC , especialy new users and the elderly.

Give me your issues, anoyance bellow. Tips welcome too !

Vanishing Point Box 3

Well box three is open and much harder, more need for the clues from the events me thinks. Good work so far in the past few hours four puzzles have been solved. And much work on the others.



Another gripping day ahead!



www.vanishingpointgame.com

www.neowin.net

www.unfiction.com

Vista Oh Vista !

Well I eventually got all the updates and add ons installed to bring my Visual Studio up to Vista development standards - what a mission, 10:30am to 11:30pm yesterday and the a couple of hours this morning.



All that to find some strange default setting by those who should know better.

Your would think the default layout for .Net3 would be a Vista Form look but know you get a XP look as default Doh! and when you choose a Windows App well one could expect a XP look as substandard but no you get Vista !!!! I am sure there is a logical explanation with this somewhere but to the layman it just looks sloppy and unpolished.



Well all is working well in Vista land, no hardware issues and the re-install has got rid of most of the issues I had with the last install. Difference fresh XP install to Vista Upgrade last time, this time fresh XP install to separate Vista clean install. Guess a clean install is well worth it, given my past issues. By the way my laptop refuses to boot from a Vista RTM DVD ?? no idea why but hey its working.



!!



I hope that MS do something with crash data that they get sent as one or two softwares stop and Vista asks if it can look for a solution, I have yet to have any come back with one exception, IE7 crashed fir no apparent reason and informed me that Firefox was to blame, get a newer Firefox it said. It seamed most convinced. Only thing was Firefox was not and had not been running and the installed version is 2.01 the latest. Oh well I guess we going to get flame wars from Vista's problem solver.



Well I'm off to try some programing and work on the main web page - so much to do.



Oh and a new web address for the main page www.exaggerated-darkness.tk

Much better - check it out. Soon I hope a new web host without the daft advert effecting frames and such.

Vanishing point vanished ?

Well  it's not vanished but the path to riches (well the meta puzzle0 would appear to have vanished. I can see no more to do but await the next box of puzzles.  I guess neowin/unfiction have completed the tasks too fast for the pupetmasters here. Go have a look at the puzzle if you have not yet done so and if you sign up please use me as referer - email: kafsheldon[at]gmail[dot]com Thanks

Loose a day with Vista !

Well feeling it was about time I got back into learning C# I took the plunge (regretfully without prior investigation, assuming all would be well ) and installed Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 onto my fresh Vista install. What a mistake, I knew it took ages to install but today was a nightmare. 10:30am I started and the time is now 5:46pm and I have it installed but still have all the updates to install, in fact for the past 1 and half hours Service Pack 1 has been considering its installation task. Then I need to install SQL Service pack and three more updates for Vista development including a mammoth 1.2Gb download for the Vista Software Development Kit. I know I probably won't need every item that gets installed but I would like an up to date development station to start out with.

Why can't MS just do a updated dvd image for updating / installing Visual Studio, simply use the WGA mechanism to verify the existing installation or require original install CD/DVD to install/update. This would have presented me with a smooth and professional installation option, allowing me to get the job done with minimum of fuss and mess.  Although I will say that the MSDN site was easy to navigate and find required updates and Vista politely told me I needed updates during installation, near the end but hey at the start would have been too much to ask.

Still by the end of tonight it will be up and I shall start my adventure into Vista app development in the morning.

Wish me luck ...

Mystery J ?

An odd thing popped up on the neowin vanishingpoint forum last night, no one seams to have followed up on it so bellow is a screen shot to assist.

powered by performancing firefox

VanishingPoint

Well the whole day yesterday was full of puzzles - and with the help of folk from Neowin and Unfiction all twelve puzzles for this week were sorted throughout the day. Team work pulled it off for sure. And a link to the mysterious white boxes was found as a reward for all our hard work. A mad rush ensued as everyone attempted to get all 18 white boxes counted, thankfully the game organisers had ensured all were reset and findable. I now stand at 18 as I expect most people who were playing do. All in all a fun day and good challenge, cant wait for next week - but at least have some clues as to the 'meta. puzzle to play with for now.

Anyway if you don't know what the above is going on about, welcome back from Mars, head over to www.vanishingpointgame.com and join in you have just two more weeks of fun. Image copyright Microsoft/42 Entertainment.

PhotoArt Update

Well the Indian Dreams Pictures are up on the main page, sort of, small error with the web album need fixing, but al the pictures are up.

The pictures from India were take around Christmas 2005 across north India. Famous buildings a plenty including Quatar Minar , Taj Mahal and others, please take time to enjoy the architecture and beauty of this country.

One day I hope to travel back to explore more of this vast land, until then I am fortunate to hold memories of what I have seen.

No artwork in these photos - sorry but still enjoy.

Cranky

Well a odd site come to my attention today www.cranky.com , a search engine for the over 50's
Go take a look, the most striking feature when I went was the most searched term is SEX, so we know who to blame for all the porn on the web no - its the over 50's then.

Small Update PhotoArt

The PhotoArt index page is now live on the home page. Sneak a look there is more to come soon when the galleries go live across the next days or so.

Vanishingpoint has all but dried up for this week by the look of things with folk at neowin looking into the postage stamps - they must be bored or something, its an online game - get a life.

The British government has stated that schools should shun Vista and Office 2007, see the article at ZDNet.co.uk for more information and my comments. For the record I think they are blind to progress most of the time so head over and read more, leave a comment in support of me will you.

Vanishing Point

Well the start of this journey into Exaggerated Darkness slowly in the main because I am following and playing Microsoft-AMD's Vista promo game at www.vanishingpointgame.com. Stunning and fantastic is what I would call it and most defiantly fun. So stop wasting time here - nothing to see yet and get playing.

Other things to view www.neowin.com, www.engadget.com - updates on CES and MacWorld

See the new iPhone - someone please send me one will you !! Thanks