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 Read the rest of this entry »

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???