It’s Midsummer Night’s eve 2007 and it’s just hit me that it makes it ten years since we took part in the IE-HTML Summer 97 contest.  That was a big milestone for me work-wise – and for us as a family too!  Our eldest daughter was on ‘work experience’ with us in the run up to the contest for a project that she had to write up for school.  I think it was her first real taste of working in a team and it was a really fun experience for us all, lots of pressure, time constraints, late nights at the code face – and a lot of laughs. 

The competition – if I recall correctly, and bear in mind it has been ten years! – was to create a website around the theme ‘Midsummer demonstrating the capabilities of Internet Explorer (at that point it was still version 3 – IE4 came out a few months later) and Microsoft was the sponsor.  Client side scripting was still largely in its infancy, as was CSS.  The browser wars were (more…)

Last night I installed Ubuntu Feisty Fawn for the first time on a real PC. I’ve been running it virtually for a little while but a test rig freed up so that I could finally have a play! 

I was amazed how easily it installed.  Actually it took me longer to get Nero installed on my Vista PC so that I could burn the ISO to disc than it took to install it.

It quickly found the network and the web without me having to do anything – very impressive.  But having started pretty late last night I was dismayed to see that there were updates to come in once the install was complete.  Should I download the updates or not?  I decided to go ahead anyway figuring I would leave the PC on overnight if necessary, but again Ubuntu impressed me by downloading and installing 60 updates by the time I’d finished brushing my teeth. 

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I’ve been going around and around trying to install my WinTV HVR 1100 on Vista and it just won’t work! 

I’ve mentioned this previously but I came to the conclusion that it was defective hardware at fault.  When I eventually received a new card I had exactly the same problem.  I was pleased then when Hauppauge brought out a page and a download for installing the PVR but … unfortunately that didn’t work either. 

I’m seeing the error “Drivers have NOT been updated. INF File Open Failed.”

At least some people are getting this error because they have not extracted the installation files to the correct location.  But I’m still seeing the problem even though the files are indeed in the right place…

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Is it me or can you not drag items onto the taskbar in Vista? 

Sure in XP you couldn’t drop items directly onto the taskbar (if you did you got the “You cannot drop an item onto a button on the taskbar...” message) but if you hovered over the taskbar button and waited for the application to restore you could then drag the item into it. 

In Vista this seems buggy at best.  You can hover forever and the application will not restore.  Sometimes it just starts flashing orange but doesn’t restore. And very occasionally it will restore the application and you can drag your item it. 

But what makes the difference? Who knows … perhaps it is the position of the stars???

Had some unexpected fun recently squishing a 8 GB USB key. Not that I realized it was 8 Gigs at the time. Or that it would still work afterwards!

Destructive testing is always fun.  Especially when I get to use heavy vehicles in the test!  I couldn’t believe it when Adrian told me it was an eight gigs I had just squished though.  Gah! Why couldn’t he have got destructive on a two-giger!!! Anyway surprisingly all turned out fine (you can read the results here) and what’s more he gave me the drive afterwards.  

I am now the proud owner of a – slightly dented, frozen, boiled - Corsair Flash Voyager GT.

I received an email today from a Vex Visitor who informed me that Yahoo! doesn’t like my Feedburner link and won’t allow him to add my feed to his MyYahoo! content page.  I’ve found various solutions for this one of which involves clicking on the MyYahoo! chicklet on Feedburner’s RSS page.

However, if you use IE7 RSS Feed pages are displayed in IE7’s own style (see screenshot below).  So Feedburner’s list of other RSS tools and the other chicklets (including the MY Yahoo! button) are mysteriously missing.

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