Not often I have linked to another site for the last 12 months, mostly because alot don’t grab me, but the execution of the M5 is top notch. It also features some old favourites such as The Designers Republic and MK12. Pity I don’t like the music though.
The site is sponsered by of all people Coke Cola, some kind of exercise in branding which I think totally misses the spot – I am not going to buy more sugary drinks unless it infused with a high quota of ginger and pertains to come from Jamaica.
I was just installing MSDE 2000 release A on my local machine to do a little bit of pre-application testing and after downloading the 43Mb exe from http://www.microsoft.com/sql/msde/downloads/download.mspx and unzippin I ran setup and got the error:
” A strong SA Password required for security reasons. Please use SAPWD switch to supply the same………”
To get around this, instead browse to where it has unzipped itself, and run it with the option:
Well I have been offline recently due to a router going bang, and then the back up cheap ADSL modem that I bought (a Speedtouch) doesn’t work properly with my Linux based firewall. So in the meantime I am just using this from the one PC – instead of using my powerbook to work on this blog.
This gave me time to sort out my PC and Macs, upgrade, clean up the systems, install more into Subversion on the Mac. I have Cubase SL3 installed on both so I took sometime to organise the projects with Cubase as music projects can quickly get huge and hard to manage all the samples, sounds, versions, audio tracks, freeze tracks etc. In fact I would like to get Subversion working with Cubase, something I have not heard of anyone doing yet.
I’ve been using Thunderbird for a year or perhaps more now, and although I like it I have always been thinking that the Junk filter wasn’t working properly. Well it seems I over trained it.
Everytime I got Junk email I pressed it, apparently this is not the way, and since clearing it out its been a lot better. Trouble is it is not perfect still. I am using AVG to filter for virus and trojans but now I am going to try POPfile. POPfile also use Bayes filters, but works as a proxy.
Very interesting post on the blog of Ex-Internet Explorer UI Developer Scott Burkin about why he switched to firefox.
I don’t understand why people are still using IE at all anymore, but I guess there are just people that think its ok – the truth is it has had some security bugs, but they are fixed quickly, and they haven’t led anywhere yet. IEs integration into the OS worries me when using it aswell.
He does highlight some issues with firefox, one being putting the search on the page function at the bottom of the window – but I have always been impressed with this. Other browers – including Camino (which I almost always use on OSX) just clunk instead with outdated pop-up boxes.
And he is right – the go menu is a complete waste of time. Kill it again please. Perhaps I will bring out a plugin that will sort all these issues out! Now there is an idea of what to do to kill some free time, and then in the next release have it built in to the App (Say Dashboard anyone?).
Well one of the things that I wanted to implement on my V2. blog software was a live Ajax search preview, so instead I have adopted it into WordPress. I read all the code and stuff before googling to find that someone had actually read a tutorial, what they didn’t mention was that had an updated post with fixes for firefox. Oh well it was easy following the instructions and it works well being served from dreamhost – I wondered whether having a shared server would have performance problems but it appears not.
Its not the only Ajax functionality on the site, it can be seen live on the comments system, and its mainly behind the scenes in the WordPress backend.
I haven’t posted anything about the Nano before, mainly because it came out whilst I was busy not posting but reported on the BBC site (its not like I read much iPod stuff elsewhere at the moment) here is there is a fault with the lovely little screen on a very small percentage.
Lets hope they work it out as this is my favourite model they have yet to come up with, I love the thiness, portability and just the solid state nature of the thing. I am sure that some examples are very strong as tested by by arstechnica a few weeks back, where one reporter took to seeing how much it would take to destroy one. They also showed off the lovely packaging that you get with it…
But it seems that some users are getting just a few hours use out of them before cracking the screen from as little as pulling it out of a pocket. Not good at all.
