I would like to believe that this is genuine. If it is, then there’s hope for us all. But it’s probably a fake. Still, one can dream…
(hat tip to Nicholas over at From the Heart of Europe)
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Life: Absurd and Potentially Short
Salam Pax has another blog entry that makes me realise how lucky I am.Leave a comment
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I Think, Therefore…
…well, what, precisely? Philosopher Alex Byrne writes about consciousness in a lucid manner. Simply wonderful.Hat tip to Mind Hacks for the link.Leave a comment
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V&A or D&G?
A bizarre little story today about the Victoria & Albert Museum authorities. They are refusing to invite Gerry Adams to an opening of an exhibition on Che Guevara next week, preferring instead to have a gaggle of fashion models and photographers attend the opening bash. The temple of art and culture has seemingly become merely a temple of convenience. To add insult to injury, the museum shop will apparently have Che Guevara lip balm on sale. The mind boggles.Leave a comment
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Metro-Net
Geoff Manaugh, over at BLDGBLOG, brings the work of Martin Kippenberger to my attention. The idea of Metro-Net is subtly intriguing. Somehow it nags at me, like a dream that hangs just beyond one’s reach in the conscious while simultaneously fading and fleeing from one’s grasp.Leave a comment
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Birthday Girl
Pavlov’s Cat looks sidewise at the world and comes up with this somewhat uncomfortable thought.Leave a comment
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Tasteless, Crass, Stupid and Cheap…
… that is PZ Myers’ consummate summation of Left Behind: Eternal Forces – a new video game. The objective of the game is to convert or kill (with extreme prejudice) Catholics, Jews, Buddhists, gays, and anyone who advocates the separation of Church and State. Charming.Leave a comment
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Live Long Enough…
…to find the right one. The Sugar Babe Love Campaign – a safe-sex cartoon about growing up and finding true love. Frissons galore. Hat tip to Inquietudes for the link.Update: apparently, the animation is by Wilfred Brimo, and part of a French AIDS-awareness campaign. Brimo did a similar cartoon for the same campaign in 2005, where many of the ideas first came through. I love the scene in the ski lodge, with the polar bear getting in on the act…Leave a comment
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Which Country Should You Be Living In?
According to this quiz, I should be in:Which country should you REALLY be living in? Russia
A vast terrain filled with beautiful scenery and interesting characters. You don’t trust the world. You feel they are always up to no good. Which is why you’d make a great Russian. You want life to be simple and have no desire for riches, fame or wealth – and thats the only way your government would have it.
Click Here to Take This Quiz
Brought to you by YouThink.com quizzes and personality tests.Not quite the answer I was expecting… 🙂 And in view of Russia’s attitudes to gay people, somehow I don’t think I’ll be applying to move there anytime soon…Leave a comment
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Stripping the Enamel
I know that poking fun at Disneyworld is a soft target, but it gives me enormous satisfaction – particularly when it is done so satisfyingly as in Tim Adams’ column in The Observer today. There’s something about the place that I found creepy, while at the same time I confess that I did enjoy some of the rides. I think it’s the constant artificial cheeriness of the place that made me feel as though the enamel was being stripped from my teeth.Leave a comment
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And Lo, It Shall Come To Pass…
Sam Harris points out why the bible is a product of its time, and not a very good one at that. There were clearly no mathematicians involved…Leave a comment
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Cosmic View
I think I’ve mentioned Cosmic View by Kees Boeke before. There was a copy in my local library when I was growing up that I came across and was immediately intrigued by. The online version of the book is here.In similar vein – but with seemingly an infinite capacity to zoom in – here is the 10 ways interpretation of the same idea. Stunning.(hat tip to Neatorama)Leave a comment
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Who Is This Stanley Kurtz?
As he admits himself, he appears to have a bee in his bonnet about gay marriage. Frankly, he should just keep taking the tablets, because he appears not to be talking any sense whatsoever. I’ve categorised this post under "Society", but perhaps I should just define a new category: Wingnuttery.2 responses to “Who Is This Stanley Kurtz?”
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Hi Geoff. I’ve commented on this post on the links! Not on here, and I’m too tired to repeat them. That’s what happens when you have relatives to entertain and the only way to get through it is to drink wine. Always makes me sleepy.
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Hi Gelert. Thanks for the comment both here and at Hollandaise. Hope the wine was a good one…
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Windows Photo Gallery on Vista Beta 2
When the build 5308 of Windows Vista came out I took a look at the bundled Windows Photo Gallery application and was not too impressed. Now that beta 2 of Vista is out, I thought I’d look again to see what has changed in Windows Photo Gallery. As far as I can see, from my standpoint of wanting an application to manage image metadata, the answer appears to be: nothing.
Windows Photo Gallery does appear to expose the Keywords metadata of the legacy IPTC/IIM specification in image files. These are exposed as “Tags” in the Photo Gallery application. But nothing of the rest of the legacy specification appears to be supported, and nothing of IPTC Core seems to be supported. Well, OK, it’s still only beta, but it would have been nice to have seen a step or two forward being taken.
And while I’m being a grumpy old man, I might as well rant on about the way in which Microsoft have implemented searching by tags in Windows Photo Gallery. To my way of thinking, searching through a collection using multiple tags is an “AND” function. That is, if I search on a collection using the tags: “restaurant” and “London”, I would think that the result would be a set of images that contains only pictures of restaurants in London. Nope, not according to the good people in Microsoft. What I get is a huge set containing all pictures having the “London” tag and all pictures having the “restaurant” tag. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, <grumpy old man> bloody useless, you bunch of idiots </grumpy old man>. Lord knows, I’ve ranted on about Adobe developers in the past, but at least they managed to implement tag search as an “AND” function in the Organizer of PhotoShop Elements, as well as giving an effective “OR” function into the bargain.
Microsoft developers also seem to have a totally different brain pattern to me when it comes to selecting images by using the Rating criterion in Windows Photo Gallery. I would have thought that if I select the “three-star” rating, I would see all photos that have a “three-star” rating… Er, no, what I see is all photos that have a “three-star”, a “four-star” or a “five-star” rating. If I want to see just “three-star” photos, I have to explicity CNTRL-Click on the “four-star” and “five-star” rating. Now maybe it’s just me, but this seems totally counter-intuitive. I’ve spent 20 years with Windows saying that CNTRL-Click is used to first add additional objects to a selection. Now, Windows Photo Gallery is trying to tell me that it’s used to first subtract additional objects from a selection… I think I’m getting too old for this.
2 responses to “Windows Photo Gallery on Vista Beta 2”
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What If…
… during World War II, the US military had decided to continue investing in Project X-Ray, instead of the Manhattan Project? Would the world have ended up any differently?
What was Project X-Ray? Here’s the entry in Wikipedia…
(hat tip to the always fascinating Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society for this)
One response to “What If…”
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Poor MSN Spaces and Hotmail.
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El Chaltén
Maciej Ceglowski, over at Idle Words, offers a fascinating slice of history about borders, Bailey’s and ice, illustrated with some glorious photographs.Leave a comment
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The End of the Hunt for HIV?
News comes today that scientists believe they have tracked down the original source of the HIV pandemic – two colonies of chimpanzees in Cameroon. Striking to think that a virus that originated there now infects over 40 million people worldwide. One hopes that the search for the cure will also produce results.Meanwhile, in related news, the power of delusion remains strong in some – but the sad fact is that it kills needlessly.Leave a comment
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The Joys of Software Support
This week’s Technobile column in the Guardian has Kieren McCarthy delivering a few well-aimed barbs at the so-called "support" offered by computer companies. He also takes some hefty swipes at the "support" forums inhabited by geeks who either dismiss queries with irrelevant opinion ("using Windows? What a loser, you should get a Mac") or who reply with technobabble that confuses the poor questioner even more.I have to say that sometimes I have found a workable reply to one of my questions in these forums, but often searches are fruitless. Part of that is down to the fact that I’m often to be found trying out beta software. And despite what some commenters have said here recently, I do understand that beta usually means bug-ridden. But when the bugs are so obvious, one sometimes wonders why the software isn’t called an alpha release…I’ll leave you with an example of a bug I came across yesterday when I decided to try out the RSS capabilities in the beta 2 release of Internet Explorer 7. I imported my list of RSS feeds from my trusty news aggregator (RSS Bandit) into IE7, and sure enough, all the feeds were present and correct. Well, my hierarchy of categories was lost and I just had an alphabetical list of 300 feeds – not very useful (hint to the IE7 developers). But when I tried to access any of the feeds, I got a file download security warning, so in effect, the RSS capability is useless. I see I’m not the only one who has this problem, but so far I haven’t found a solution to this. Oh well, time to delete the feeds (which I have to do one by one, on 300 feeds – another hint to the IE7 developers: batch is your friend). Back to RSS Bandit…Leave a comment
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Microsoft: Open Mouth – Change Feet
Sometimes I think that Microsoft is its own worst enemy.Today, Microsoft has announced the availability of Beta 2 of Office 2007. So off I go to the web site to register and download the beta. First of all I get presented with a new file download manager- SmartSource – yet another one in a long line of download managers from Microsoft. This one uses the .NET version 1.1 framework. Er, excuse me, but Windows Vista comes with .NET version 2.0. So immediately, there is a problem.OK, so I finally get the software downloaded. And I manage to install Office 2007 Beta 2.But then the fun starts. The Beta insists on having a new (beta) version of Windows Desktop Search installed. OK, but after installation, I discover that my MSN Search Toolbar in Internet Explorer has been hosed. Sigh – did I really expect Microsoft product groups to talk to one another?OK, I then want to install the next beta from the Office 2007 suite. So I start up the SmartSource application again. What’s this? "The email address specified is invalid! Please contact customer support or try again."Er, no, my email address is perfectly valid – it’s your software that is a pile of fucking crap. Oh, and what’s that about "contact customer support"? You provide no bloody means of contacting your bloody customer support. Try again? I don’t think so. Linux is starting to look awfully attractive right now.12 responses to “Microsoft: Open Mouth – Change Feet”
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You do understand what "beta" means, right?
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Welcome to it man. You wouldn’t believe the stuff we see in support; it’s frightening at times.
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i believe they have disabled the smart download software, now when going to the download site, all you get is the direct file links, you just need to go back and go in again and download normally
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As Brian has mentioned, I’m not sure you quite grasp the concept of beta software.
Beta software has bugs, beta software is not the final, polished, tested, QA’d product. This is not just applicable to the product itself but often the installation/uninstallation process, documentation, support and all the other things that you expect from a proper release.
If you install something like a beta of office on your own machine and expect to be able to use it with no pain/frustration you might be in for a bit of a shock.
I generally don’t install betas of significant products (OS, office, developer tools) on real hardware that I rely on day-to-day to do my job. If I do then I make sure I test them out on a disposable virtual machine first or speak to people who have. -
Yes – I do understand what beta means. I’m complaining about a) the SmartSource application – not the Office Beta and b) about the fact that different product groups in Microsoft have a tendency to trample over each other – introducing new features that break other product software.
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The SmartSource software was the LEAST of my problems, (although problems there are!), I can’t get an of the products to activate.
Keeps asking me to check my internet connection, well that’s working fine otherwise I wouldn’t be typing this would I?!! -
Gerry, I sympathise. Although I have to say that so far the Office Beta is behaving well for me. That’s more than I can say for the Vista Beta 2. After two attempts I got it installed on one system, but get BSOD on start up if I try and install the soundcard drivers. On another system it fails to even install – it claims that Winload.exe is corrupt (but it isn’t of course. I suspect that a SCSI card may be to blame, which is confusing the setup process…
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Humph. It wasn’t the SCSI card causing the install process to fail with Vista. I have no idea what it is. System recovery fails as well. So far then, two machines – both of which therefore do not have a working version of Vista that I can play with. So Beta 2 does not impress.
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Folks – update on status re: the Office Beta effort. Apologies on the issues with SmartSource – it has been sidelined and was obviously not tested for typical scenario. (ug). Vendor being used is working to address and upgrade it. For now, please use the direct download links (click directly on the product link) – they work great and assuming you have a solid high bandwidth connection should serve you well. Volume was forecast for 5000 concurrent sessions and we peaked at 10K concurrent yesterday when the servers hosting bits began to tip. Capacity was doubled quickly (thanks ms.com!) and we’re no longer seeing problems in that regard. Now, the next link the chain is beginning to feel the impact of Europe and Asian users coming online to get the bits. Activation servers for Office are seeing 30 hits per second, which is higher than we’d expect. Still working to investigate but fear not – folks are on it. Please be patient and all will get worked out soon. In addition we’re hearing reports of the French and German copies of Office Professional being corrupted on the download servers. Those are being updated and should be cleaned up soon as well.
Why don’t we have all this well scoped, pre-planned and "Katrina-proofed"? Because this is beta, because there is huge pent up demand that we might not see simultaneously in a real world scenario, because we’re purposely setting this up to test a few areas in the bits distribution and deployment chain to ensure we’re going to be ready for prime-time, and because we’re hugely focused on making the products great so we can get them out to you in a timely fashion. The beta experience is to be expected to have bumps along the way, and we thank you for working with us and your patience as the kinks get worked out. We’ve already gained some good data in simply the issues we’ve seen with the downloads.
Are there lessons we can learn from the stupid mistakes? Yes, of course. We’re noting them and will hopefully do better next time around. Our major investment is in making great products and thus, we don’t optimize for the greatest, smoothest beta experience, but we know we can do better than this, and we will.
thanks again for your patience.
Sue Hill
Office Customer and Partner Programs
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Well at least I know now there is a problem with activation, and I guess I’m uninstalling SmartSource too now by the looks of it.
To say I was pissed off with it was putting it mildly. I’ve been happily using the previous beta versions happily for ages now with no problems, so the fact that having spent all morning uninstalling, downloading, and installing for absolutely fuck-all benefit was, to say a little irritating?!
I’ll give it another go in the morning and see what happens! -
Sue, I appreciate the time you’ve taken to respond to the issues we’ve all been having. Nonetheless I have this feeling that you (Microsoft) are being a trifle disingenous when you claim that you misjudged the pent-up demand. The way I see it, the left hand (Microsoft marketing) has been stoking the fires of demand furiously, so the right hand (online services) should hardly be surprised when everyone duly delivers a Pavlovian reaction to marketing folks and their strokes…
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Well it’s taken almost 23 hours but I’ve finally got Office + Sharepoint Designer installed AND activated!! Can I go to bed now?
Just for a laugh I installed Expression Web Designer… can anyone point out the difference to Sharepoint Designer because I can’t see the slightest one?!
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