Laptop Diaries

Just building up a new laptop for the family, but this one’s MS Vista. I bought a copy of Norton, of course, but had a couple of problems installing MS Office and transferring data. Most of these seeem to be firewall problems, but it does seem that Vista/XP networking might not be as easy as it should. It would seem that Norton (and Microsoft) now have a new version of ‘Secure by Default’, which borrows from the good old security guru’s axiom, ‘if no-one can use it, no one can abuse it.’

On a more serious note, when adopting W95, Microsoft left the 3.11 program explorer interface in place, with XP you have ‘classic’ look and feel themes, I can’t find the retro interface on Vista and I found trying to get it to ‘see’ the exported devices on my home network exceptionally frustrating, and I still don’t know how we got it to work.

For more, see New Laptop, Studio 15 on my wiki. …

Mucking around

The rest of my August posts to the sun/oracle blog related to creating a personal spore, bluetooth on XP, using twitter, using get satisfaction, firefox 3.*, roller, 2nd brain, the demise of slynkr, the now defunct Grazr and FAT file systems with Virtual Box, together with the advice not too. …

Reading Danilo Poccia’s Italian language blog

My colleague Danilo Poccia has been experimenting with allowing his readers to use Google translate to read his blog. I, at least, will find this useful as Danilo writes in Italian. This could of course be an advantage as the ‘to english’ translators may be stronger, since it looks quite good to me. It also enhances his hit count; it’s only available via the HTML interface 🙂 . He categorises the blog, so finding his professional content is quite easy. Other colleagues experimented with this technique and use case  …

Better Icons in Google Maps

I have been planning my next trip to Slovenia, sadly its only business, and been using google maps to work out the easiest journey; there aren’t that many direct flights to Ljubljana from the UK. I came to the conclusion that the provided icons are still missing some useful objects. I wish they had icons for an office, hotel and school/college. I am using the red bed as a hotel symbol, rather than as a hospital and the extras would be good. How about a mortar board, or is that insufficiently international. …

HP folds Vodoo into its mainstream

It seems that HP are merging their Vodoo line of games PCs into the mainstream. I wonder if Dell will follow with Alienware. The human synergies aren’t so compelling. HP still knows how to design systems and possesses an engineering capability, this is not as obviously true at Dell, and the relative brand values are different.

ooOOOOo

Originally posted to my sun/oracle blog, republished here in July 2016. …

A European Software Strategy

The NESSI steering committee released it’s Position Paper on European Software Strategy. I share an authoring credit, with 14 others, it is the work of a committee. This document reviews the competitiveness of the European Software Industry and makes recommendations for R&D efficiency, SME growth, Open Source use, increased standardisation, investment in regional excellence and strengthening European academia’s software engineering capability. …