Tom’s weblog

Just trying this out, picked up the wordpress app for for my iPod. Pretty nice can do all usual stuff on the blog and I don’t have turn on the big computer. I am being so green.

Sometimes we hear about how google searches are no longer any good and Microsoft likes to make it sound like their search is so great but every time I use Windows Live search I am disappointed and when the same search is run at google I generally find what I need on the first page. For instance this morning I wanted to resume a big download from MS that I had to suspend the other day. I figured there must be a way to launch the file transfer manager that Microsoft uses but there was nothing in my start menu. I typed the query “reopen microsoft file transfer manager” into IE (because that was open) and it used Live search and I was disappointed, nothing obviously relevant. So I turned to google (this time in firefox) and right near the top is a link which has the information I want and it is a page at Microsoft no less.

Hopefully Microsoft does not buy Yahoo, it also returned the same useful link near the top of the results, at least there is some competition for useful search results out there which likely be lost of MS bought Yahoo.

Microsoft can not even index their own web sites for useful searching, why would anyone expect them to index other sites usefully? And the unfortunate news this week out of CES is that MS has bought off Verizon and Dell so that Live search will be the default on their platforms, there are going to be a lot of disappointed users out there who don’t realize there are other choices easily available which do a much better job

Had a weird thing today, there was a rally downtown for Obama so we went by just out of curiosity but they would not let me in to the ball room until I had made a donation, quite odd since they were doing an auction at the time, might have wanted to bid on something. Came back later and asked about that, first they said it was a security matter (bogus!) then the guy finally settled on the excuse that they needed to do that since it might mean that republicans would come in and eat all the food, this seems very unlikely. He couldn’t just admit that they wanted you had to contribute in order to join in. Weak. Once we got in, the kids got something to eat and I checked out the silent auction, had already spent everything so did not get anything else. Oh well, chipped in a little bit to help him out.

I am feeling a quite frustrated with Apple today. Over the weekend I thought I would update my ipod touch to the new 2.1 firmware so I went into itunes paid my 9.95 (had not paid for 2.0 yet) and then nothing. The only download that happens is a little 0.4 kb file which does not tell me anything and that is it. I suspect that the powers that be at apple get quite irritated when the firmware is put up for download allowing people to just grab it free and update their hardware but with experiences like this why should one go through the legal channels to obtain these updates? I will try again to get this tonight suppose if it still does not work I can try to get my money back from apple but the phrase fat chance springs to mind. I can always dispute the charge at the credit card company and would be well in my rights to since they did not deliver the goods.

Earlier this decade a lot of conservatives were saying that even though Saddam Hussein did not have WMD it was good thing we took him out because the Iraqi people were suffering under him. Well, what I want to know why in the world is Bush not sending hundreds of thousands of troops into Myanmar to take out the Generals there and bring relief to the people who are suffering from the cyclone and their authoritarian rule? Seems like if that argument is going to valid for Iraq then it should be applied in all instances where citizens are suffering.

I was downtown a couple weeks and there was an anti-abortion group there with a large poster on the side of an RV. It was an interesting message they had, the caption on the sign was “He’s not heavy he’s my brother.” The picture was that of a fetus apparently in utero. I found this quite offensive actually since there is only one way for a woman to carry a fetus which is her brother is if her father impregnated her. So along with everything else these groups advocate apparently they also feel that incest is acceptable. Amazing.

Will the demise of HD DVD push you to buy a Blu-ray hi-def player?

So this poll which appeared at Computerworld after Toshiba announced the end of HD-DVD asks a very specific question. But notice, there is no possible answer here for “Yes, I will buy a Blu-ray player now”, worthless poll. If you are going to ask a specfic question then at least give the option to answer said question in a positive way.

I was considering installing XP today on a new drive I picked up last week (a vast expanse of 500 gigabytes woohoo) when it occurred to me that the next service pack for XP is due out soon. Wanting to save some time since it can typically take an hour or so to install a service pack I went to google and searched for “windows sp3 status”  whereupoon I get a “We’re sorry” page, apparently this is similar to automated requests from virus or spyware.  This took me by surprise, just what is the spyware looking for here? This seems like a pretty generic query to me.  Turns out I just need to remove the status term and it works but if I simply search “windows status” it works.

It gets even stranger, apparently the problem only occurs when I search from the firefox specific page, kind of wonder what is going on here. And I just tried it again and the query worked, perhaps google figured out I am not spyware or something, whatever it is they are doing something interesting here.

When I logged into my linux box this morning the quote that come up was:

“He is the best of men who dislikes power.”

Interesting quote that and also interesting that this apparently came from Muhammad. I’ll leave the interpretation to the reader.

I got a copy of visual studio 2008 at work and was eager to give it a try after going to a demo at microsoft and heard about its capabilities. For the most part it worked well but it has given some problems that make non-starter for me. The big one is that I was working on a new page with a number of gridviews on it and when I selected the edit template option the view changed but the correct controls that would allow me actually edit the templates never came. In fact all of the gridviews disappeared from view. When I closed the page and reopened things were good again but the edit template still did not work.
Obviously we are going to have till service pack 1 on this product also. I wish that microsoft would realize that this shoddy work gets very tiresome.

The other problem I am not sure I can blame on visual studio 2008 or not but it is was certainly coincidental. After installing the application on a toshiba laptop the configfree program started crashing and blue screening the computer on bootup. I cannot definitively say it was visual studio that caused this but the problem did not exist before it was installed.
Also a big annoyance concerning VS is that when installing it insists on including a large amount of stuff for doing windows mobile development. I do not need this and never wanted it but it all goes on anyway. This of course makes uninstalling this thing a cast iron bitch since there about 15 items that have to be removed. Would it be so difficult to make this as an optional install?

So Apple announced that third part development will be allowed on the iPhone and iPod touch, very cool news and certainly took them long enough to realize the desire there.

As I thought about this more I realized why Apple took the stance they did initially, they could see that this product was going to be very popular and widely used so to keep it from going the way of Windows where there are tens and hundreds of exploits and viruses a day being released Apple said no development then no exploits. I can understand this attitude, Apple has been skating by on their perceived security for a long time now. We all know that if the Mac were to have been as big as Windows is now then a lot of bad stuff would been released for it, perhaps it could not do as much but that would not stop the criminals from trying. So in order to avoid that security black eye Apple said no development outside of the browser, a strategy which has been an abysmal failure.

Going to be interesting to see what security they add to the iPhone since it apparently has little security at this point.  If it did then it would not have been so easily hacked and then rehacked.

Went in to the Department of Licensing (DOL) to renew the tabs on the car today which went fairly smoothly.  One very interesting thing is that Washington citizens are now required to show a valid drivers license in order to renew their car tabs. Not sure what problem they are trying to solve here, if someone is driving around with an expired license then when the police pull them over they will be punished. Why should having a properly licensed vehicle require the registered owner to have a valid drivers license?  I could very well be registering the car so my child could use it and I no longer drive for whatever reason.

What is truly amazing here is that this is the same department that issues said drivers license, seems like they could easily check this themselves.  When I pointed this out to the person behind the counter I was told that at an earlier time DOL had spent 39 million dollars to try to connect the two databases and the process failed. This is just truly amazing, how hard is it to add a new field to the car tab database where the registered owners drivers license is stored and then create a process which would check said license against the drivers license database.  Something like this should not take longer than a month to put together, lets give them 3 months since they are an odious bureaucracy who the Vogons would be impressed by.  Certainly not 39 million dollars worth of work here.

I had to pick up a new dvd writer since the Sony I had picked up a couple years ago stopped ejecting the disks and would scratch them. Disappointing. So I went up to Frys and found a Pioneer drive that came with Nero and got it.  My first attempt to install the Nero software was and absolute failure, it did warn me but I figured I could install the version on the disk and then upgrade with the latest update, no go.

The way to make this work is actually quite easy. Download the latest update from the nero website and start the install using that. When the screen comes up asking for the key click on the button (might be a link) at the bottom on this screen there is Check button, insert the CD that came with the drive and click the button. This will cause the installer to pull the key from the CD at which point the install can continue.  Everything should work properly now.  Good luck, hope this helps.