I really am sick of hearing and reading about it.

So for those of you in feeling the same, here’s a little treat;

Click here to view the embedded video.

Vista since its release has taken some fairly large criticisms for some pretty high profile places and people, in certain cases for good reason.

Well some of you may or may not heard (if not where have you been?) that Apple have released their new operating system; Leopard. Since it hit our shelves I have been reading the reviews and news about the operating system and so far its been a big success but the cracks are now beginning to appear. On Tuesday I read two stories which would concern me greatly before upgrading;

Firstly eWeek reported that the Leopard firewall is less than capable. Several issues including turning itself off by default on installation, even if a user had the firewall turned on before upgrading and the block all function which doesn’t work.

“The short answer is the Leopard firewall is … ugly and a step backwards from 10.4″said Rich Mogull, an independent security consultant.

Heise Security’s Jürgen Schmidt posted an article that concluded “initial functional testing has already uncovered cause for concern,” in spite of the fact that “Apple is using security in general and the new firewall in particular to promote Leopard.”

Secondly Ars Technica reported on installation woes that users are having. Problems with blue screens of death when certain applications are use and lost user settings after the completed upgrade.

So why haven’t Apple received any serious criticism from online the community? A fairly large security issue on Vista would of had the internet in an outrage but for Leopard, nothing? It makes me wonder if the reason people are so quick to criticize Microsoft for Vista is because they don’t like the software giant.

Ars Technica reported yesterday that Verizon, an American EV-DO provider have been ordered by the New York state to pay the sum of $1,000,000 dollars to 130,000 customers that used too much ‘unlimited’ data over the Verizon network, they were also slapped with a $150,000 fine.

The only real unlimited operator we have here in the UK is T-Mobile, the way they cap the downloads of their customers is by using a ‘fair usage’ policy which restricts you to 1GB per month. Its a fairly reasonable limit and far better than Vodafones 120Mb and Oranges 30Mb data offerings. Well this changed recently when O2 became the only operator in the UK to offer the iPhone, it must of course be accompanied by an O2 £35 – £55 pounds tariff which includes ‘unlimited’ data.

Now when O2 say unlimited they actually mean 1400 web pages per day at an average of 4-5kb per page, this equates to a truly aweful 200Mb per month. Now take a look at  O2’s own homepage which is over 33kbs, the BBC site over 22Kb and that’s without images or fancy flash animations. How many websites that you know of are only 4-5kbs?

These sorts of limits imposed by the mobile operators only hinder the up take of internet ready mobiles, PDA’s and other handhelds because the mass market fear being landed with a huge bill at the end of the month. Its just another example of progress being slowed by greed, a shame really.

 So as a work around I decided to move my home PC into the bed room and hook it up to the LCD for the evening. On my laptop I have Windows XP Pro with Media Player 9 and this plays the .AVI files perfectly, on the desktop is Vista Ultimate with Media Player 11 which plays the video and audio of the .AVI files, but about 30 seconds apart. So you see Hiro speaking and all you can hear is Peter Petrilli who was in the previous scene. I tried adjusting the limited WM11 settings but nothing made it watchable. Highly frustrated with this I wasn’t going to let this spoil the evening so I moved the home PC back to our home office, plugged into the internet and downloaded Real Player and Quicktime player, the installation of both took far too long only to discover they needed to then download codecs, I allowed the download of codecs but both couldn’t play the files. Neither of these media playing Goliaths could play a simple .AVI file which my mobile phone can!

Even more angered by this experience I downloaded DivX Player, this installed in half the time of the others and worked perfectly, instantly. Not only that the quality is far superior to even WM9.

So a big thank you to DivX, for saving my evening.

Have you had any problems like this? and what is your favorite media player for playing video file formats?

So I popped over to my wife’s shop Megatech Computers and picked up a MSI StarCam Clip. Its a neat little 1.3 megapixel camera with night vision and built in microphone. I checked the box and it didn’t state it supported Vista but they checked the MSI website and sure enough Vista drivers were available for download so I paid my money and left happy.

I got home and downloaded the 32bit Vista drivers and installed. All seemed well, I plugged the camera in and Vista began scanning the ‘Preconfigured Folders’ for the drivers, it stated that the microphone installed OK but spent over ten minutes looking for the USB camera drivers. After a while it picked up a HP driver from Windows Update that didn’t work. In frustration I uninstalled all the software and drivers and gave up for the weekend.

This morning as a last ditch attempt I put the driver disk with came with the camera into my machine and installed the XP drivers, plugged the camera in and within ten seconds all was installed and working OK. A quick test with Skype and behold, there I am on screen as shown above.

Moral of the story? Was I being too clever, I’m not sure but I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.

The news is, there isn’t any.

Still no offline blogging software for Windows Mobile that works with Blogger.com, hence the distinct lack of hyperlinks and tags (I will amend this later).

If you have found anything that would help I would love to hear from you.

P.S. It took 10 mins to write this over my GPRS connection… I have to find something.

So this weekend arrived and electrical work at our head office meant the power would be off for most of the weekend, perfect timing for the upgrade.

I packed the server up, took it home and began the process.

I spent the first three hours trying to work out why the server wouldn’t detect a hard drive that I had planned to copy the data to, three long hours of adjusting the bios and testing the drive in another machine, fiddling with drive assignment, etc.

The problem…..

The IDE cable I was using to connect. No signs of physical damage but it just didn’t work.

I swapped the cable out and all worked fine, copied the data using the fantastic Partition Manager Server 8.5, around 100GB copied in three hours.

So it just goes to show how easy it is to forgot the simple troubleshooting and jump in at the deep end with the complex stuff. I could of got three hours of my precious weekend back! Orwell we live and learn.

I’ve been searching recently for a mobile blogging client for my new v1415 Windows Mobile smartphone.

You may think it would be easy but it is not and for one reason alone…

Most of the mobile blogging clients are based around the blogging host having an XML-RPC API, which gives developers a standard to write code for. Blogger however do not, they have the new GData API (Googles contribution)

Blogger do offer a couple of services which can help, I can email my blog entries to an address and they appear here, the problem with this method is you cannot upload pictures or add tags. Then there is the new MMS service, simply send a MMS to blogger, this also doesnt interest me because you have to then log in and ‘claim’ the MMS as being your own.

Whilst I’m sure there will be clients becoming available; currently (as far as I’m aware) there isn’t.

Its a tool which would certainly make my live easier at the moment and if you know of such a tool, please let me know.

Well if that’s the case, then why are more and more RSS feeds only supplying us with a sentence or two then requiring that we visit the website in order to get the rest of the information?

I can only presume the vendors of such feeds are trying to drive traffic to their websites, why else would they defy the whole reason for a great technology like RSS?

Its quite frustrating, I have a great RSS reader on my new v1415 smartphone and 90% of the feeds I subscribe to when refreshed contain all the content as intended, however there are few which do not. In order to get the rest of the information I subscribed to I am required to visit the originators website which on a smartphone, even with wifi is not ideal and again is completely besides the point of RSS.

I’ve emailed several of the feed providers and have not yet received any responses, when I do, you will be the first to know.