Looks like Vista, still in Beta, is already getting the patching treatment from Microsoft, according to Techworld. Microsoft also seem to have neglected to inform the Beta using public that IE7 and the Windows kernel are subject to exploitation prior to recent patches.
I’m currently dual booting Vista and XP and at every boot I jump to the ‘Earlier Version Of Windows’ option. Has anyone actually fully adopted Vista as their OS?
Happy days for the photographers among us as Adobe have finally launched a Windows beta of Lightroom, previously only available on the Mac.
Lightroom and Aperture are designed to handle photographs taken in the “raw” formats available on higher-end digital cameras. Raw images preserve more detail because they’re pulled directly off a camera’s image sensor; some of that information is lost in typical cameras when they convert that data into more convenient JPEG files.
Although raw images can be better adjusted for exposure, color balance and other qualities, they bring a profusion of new options for the image-editing process. In effect, raw images must be “developed” into the more convenient formats before they can be used.
While I’m only recently getting used to shooting in RAW and its benefits, I’m looking forward to tackling this. Not a full replacement for Photoshop by any means but if it makes the mess on my hard drive any way tidier then I’m all for it!
Finally gave up well into the wee hours of the morning (well, at about 2:45am anyway) after a good poke through Vista. The diagnostics seemed ok, fired up a little issue with my graphics card (GeForce 6500) claiming that the drivers were causing Vista to load and run slowly.
Get back up this morning and do a little looking around and both NVIDIA and Creative have released drivers for Vista Beta 2 meaning the graphics card is no longer an issue, and the new Audigy card works like a charm.
This post? Blogged all the way from Flock. Very impressed with the integrated blogging feature. Slipping in the username and password for kenmc.com fires up all the blog categories, options to include tags, replace an existing post and more.
The odd little issue here and there with pop up boxes (password prompts, confirmations etc) disappearing behind the browser when they first hit your screen but other than that its like FireFox’s good looking sister…
Useful links for you if you need them…
Windows Vista x86 Beta 2 – ForceWare Release 85 (May 23, 2006)
Creative Worldwide: Support: Downloads: Drivers, firmware and software updates
Note: after the fact… get flock integration with Ultimate Tag Warrior for WordPress and you’re laughing…
technorati tags:flock, browser, software, vista, microsoft, windows+vista, creative, audigy+zs, nvidia, geforce+6500, forceware
Blogged with Flock
Lets see… 1:10am and I’ve finally cracked the whole Vista thing. Gave it a quick lash yesterday, by quick I mean about 4 hours. Bought a second HD during the week (another 200GB) so fired that into the machine, made a primary partition for Vista, installed thinking – ok, so far so good.
No chance.
Out goes any chance of booting XP after 90 minutes of formatting and installation. So I stay up into the wee hours, back the majority of my main HD up onto a portable drive and repartition about 100GB. Now, the install says it needs a primary partition (Vista) but I’ve just gotten away with a logical partition no problem – and it dual boots as well.
With a little bit of exploring done, I have to say I’m highly impressed with the overall interface. If they could release that as a direct addon for XP there wouldn’t be any need to change ;). It picked up my GeForce 6500 and installed a core driver for it which was nice. No problems in picking up my card reader drive bay, though it failed with the soundcard (yes, the Audigy came at long last and its damn nice too).
Time to see if the beta holds up the sound drivers as well as a few other peripheral bits and bobs. And whats this… I’m blogging in IE? Shudder the thought… where’s my Firefox!
(And if you’re wondering how to activate Vista… its hidden in the System options in Control Panel…)
Thats exactly how Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 stands… branded in Beta. Having not yet hit a strong public release, never mind the forthcoming release of Windows Vista RC1 (several months away yet no doubt), you can now pick yourself up the “hot new look for summer 06″…. a fully Yahoo! branded version of IE7b.
My only question is “Why?”.
Out of interest, has anyone tried the PubSub extension for Firefox? I installed it in the office on Thursday evening, shut down the machine, booted up on Friday and you think Firefox would work? No chance!
Several restarts, try safe mode, try reinstalling Firefox up to the latest version – still no go. Solution? Trawl through the Application Data\Mozilla\Default\Extension\Blah Blah Blah depths of the unknown when it comes to Mozilla’s folder naming structure, root out the plugin folder (sorting by date helps here to match up when you messed up) and removing that dodgy extension.
“If you have experienced problems with the sidebar after upgrading to Firefox 1.5, please download the latest version from the link above.”
It LOOKS like it works well with Firefox but after the effort I went through to get the browser back up and running I think I’ll pass… Pity too…
In between the football for the weekend I’ve set aside a little bit of time to flex the operating sytem muscles after picking up a copy of Partition Magic.
After downloading a copy of the latest Ubuntu release (700mb iso) and I’m currently in the process of picking up Windows Vista Beta 2. Having refused torrent downloads and cracked offers spread across the internet, it will be interesting to see how Vista shapes up. I know there’s issues with certain Adobe products but hopefully all goes well.
Anyone considering installing either OS I would seriously suggest partitioning your HD, if not for practical hardware reasons, then at least to keep your sanity if you decide to overwrite your existing copy of XP or Linux release.
If you’re interested, pop along to this address at Microsoft, fill out a registration form to pick up your license key and sit back as you wait for a 3GB ISO to download, at which stage you’ll be wanting a DVD burner, or something useful like Alcohol 120% or Daemon Tools to mount the ISO as a virtual CD drive.
They’ve already taken on board Writely as an online word processor and now Google are launching Google Spreadsheets right out of Google Labs – with support for both XLS and CSV files, and again, its another free service. Had been talking in the office last week about how it would be a great way to save on licensing or massive license fees – just do the whole lot online. If they keep going at this rate I wouldn’t be surprised by it either!
Why, oh why, would you take away the ability to support PDFs across Microsoft applications? Its just become to much to bear… seemingly….
Its not actually available yet, but it will be on Wednesday morning… Windows Media Player 11 is about to hit the net (link live on May 17th) in a new wave of Microsoft releases, and after some serious ass-whipping of late by iTunes, Microsoft now says “No More”. (via)
With all the comings and goings of various media players – iTunes, WinAMP, Sonique etc. I’ve always returned to Windows Media Player. Does exactly what I want to do, play music, no real frills required (though there’s a huge store of plugins for it), hooks up to various streams for me and its simple to use. Now its about to get an upgrade.
MP11 itself will “act as a repository for all your music, video, and images”, something which iTunes isn’t capable of doing at the moment. The interface seems to be one of the biggest overhauls, with the chance to navigate your entire music collection by artwork with improved artwork functionality over past versions of MP. Syncing with portable players (of which I don’t use the Apple variety) has also improved so thats something to look forward to I guess!
Anyway, the above link goes live on Wednesday morning or you can get an indepth review here from ABC. If you can’t wait, there’s already torrents floating around of the preview-beta release. You’ve got to pass the Geniune test mind you…
You’ve got to hand it to the Russians, when it comes to music on the net, its bloody cheap! With the iTunes store not exactly available in Ireland until recently (at least not when I had started out in college), some of us went MP3 shopping in Russia through the likes of MP3Search and AllOfMP3 which allows downloads for 10c / 2c p/mb respectively.
Anyway, AllOfMP3 have now released a desktop client, allTunes (via Techcrunch), which allows users to login to AllOfMP3 via their desktop, browse the store, and download their albums at the same cost – a full album working out around $1.50 give or take. Personally I think its great. Digitial downloads shouldn’t be too expensive, otherwise you’d simply go out and buy the CD (including case, quality printing, store charge, markup, vat etc.). Its real jewel in the crown is the back catalog of out of print albums (I picked up Kerbdog’s 1994 release, out of print about 10 years) and its massive selection of international music.
Worth a shot I reckon…
Via BBC…. It seems that we won’t be getting an update to Windows until at least January 2007 as the new breaks this morning of another delay to delivery of Windows Vista – unless you’re a business customer that is.
There will be a corportate edition of the new version of Windows available likely around Thanksgiving weekend in the US with the remaining versions set to ship in the new year (Enterprise, Home Basic, Home Premium, Ultimate and Starter).
Only thinking yesterday as well its nearly 5 years since Internet Explorer had an update, it should be 6 by the time Windows ships, way too big a gap in my mind for any piece of software – never mind Windows itself. Still… the interconnectivity with the XBOX 360 should be fun…
Update: This news article makes more sense for business – they’re not bothered as more major corporations wouldn’t roll out Vista until 07 anyway. It does mean though that Microsoft are going to potentially miss the home computer market for Christmas, possibly the biggest selling time of the year for home computers.
Just a little update post on this one. Reading Rob’s blog (Controlled By Remote) at lunchtime, he’s since downloaded and posted his notes on Firefox 2.0a with some screens as well…
Nice one Rob…
Unannounced to the world but whispered around blogging circles yesterday, Firefox 2.0a has been released onto the web. Have yet to try it, but if you’re up for a copy, here’s the links…
Firefox 2.0a Windows Version
Firefox 2.0a for Macintosh
Firefox 2.0a for Linux
Keep in mind it’s likely to be a bit buggy, but if you’ve tried it out, let me know….
So I got to try Songbird last night, and while it looked great on the outside I’ll admit that I was disappointed at first use. Robbie’s been having problems with his installation and had to source additional dll files he didn’t have which didn’t come with the package at the time (the source code has since been published).
But the crashing hit my machine as well, not with the editing of track names mind you – I didn’t get that far. I’ve got a sizeable music collection at home. I’ve converted my whole CD collection and have stocked up over 10K tracks on my machine and Songbird must have been looking at me saying “eh….. go way outta that, I’m not counting those”, when scanning my music folder for tracks. 4 seperate occasions it simply breaks down…
The site, which was down most of yesterday has now resurfaced and is packed with all the details on it. First look for me wasn’t fantastic by any means but with the software still version 0.1, there’s a long way to go yet so I’ll be patient.
I’ve been waiting for this for quite a while and delighted that Techcrunch could tell me that Songbird has launched – how did that one slip by me? The site is down at the moment but you can download Songbird by clicking here.
What is it? At the core, its a media player built on the Firefox engine with an interface not unlike iTunes and is being released for Windows, Mac and Linux – the above version is for Windows, the rest will follow soon enough.
Songbird plays the Web. Songbird may view Web pages as playlists of MP3s. Soon, Web page authors may publish playlists and transfer MP3s into Songbird in support of digital music stores like eMusic, music subscription services like Yahoo! Music Unlimited, virtual jamming services like Ninjam, playlist sharing services like WebJay and more
Being based on the Mozilla/Firefox engine, its going to be open to user extensions so we might see this evolve as much as Firefox has. Off to try it this evening – yet another new web toy for Ken to play with….
Although Internet Explorer was only due to be unveiled during the first quarter of 2006, a build of the new browser and several screenshots has leaked online.
The link to the code of the IE7 build (version 5299) was posted on the Windows tech forum JCXP.net on Friday. I managed to get myself a copy of it before it was removed and was sorely tempted to give it a test. Although Microsoft took down the link, techies around the world managed to get their hands on the build, which can be downloaded as an 11MB file in .rar format.
Furthermore the patch which allows the IE7 build to run with cracked copies of Windows had been downloaded over 12 000 times by yesterday morning. So there’s either only 12,000 cracked copies of Windows in the world, or 12,000 people that are interested in running a copy of Internet Explorer 7.
Has anybody else landed a copy of IE7… or is anyone even interested at this point? Given that it doesn’t have the open source backing of the Firefox community, and is likely to consume your CPU usage with 18 dozen instances of IEXPLORE running for every new tab you open up, will IE7 geniuinely be worth the wait? If I was taking an eye to this whole “leak”, which I am, I wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft leaked the build themselves to see how many people would take it up and talk it up. Makes perfect sense seen as there was the whole “leaked documents” story late last year.
Ok, so the news might be a week old but in reading ZDNet today I just got wind that Tablane is no longer in beta and they’ve got a fully. Emmet Connolly reviewed the Irish browser which is based on IE back in November for Web 2.0 Ireland and a few people I know have tested it, so testing some content for the CMS today I was disappointed to find that the browser just wouldn’t cooperate. Opening up my DeviantART homepage right away I was confronted with browser errors, I just don’t like seeing errors, one of the joys of using Firefox so far… 🙂 Of course that’s small money in comparison to what it’s being touted to do.
I’m not slating the browser right away at all, just thought the error was weird and I’ll give it a good bash on home turf (out of the office) now that its out of beta release. I just hope that for this to succeed that it doesn’t have to rely forever on Internet Explorer. I am interested in the concept of tailoring the browser for user specific audiences, such as an eBay browser or an Amazon browser. Some nice features touted to me on first look but I’ll let you know what I think when it gets going.
Mozilla’s Thunderbird has hit the net today with version 1.5 of its popular free email client. I used Thunderbird for about six months as my mail client and was pretty pleased with it to be honest, though in saying that, I still haven’t used it in six months given my use of Microsoft Outlook in work. Might just be tempted to give it a test drive.
From CNET…
“Thunderbird enhances the overall e-mail experience, adding antiphishing capabilities to help keep people safer, while also integrating and simplifying access to new technologies, such as RSS,” Christopher Beard, Mozilla’s vice president of products, said in a statement.
Thunderbird 1.5 also aims to bolster its RSS support by letting people receive feed updates as e-mail messages. People can now access podcasts through a dialog box, which is tied to an application such as a Web browser or audio player.
Browsing over at NewScientist earlier today, I came across an interesting article, being music minded I guess it “struck a chord” with me – come on, you know you like the cheesy joke! 😉
Anyway, a new technology in the workd could let your computer recommend new music you might like based on an acoustic analysis of the tunes it already knows you enjoy. By analysing the characteristics of a song – like timbre, rhythm, tempo and chord changes – then comparing it to a database of a million songs, the software can recommend similar pieces of music, and even rank them by characteristics, like their key or dance-ability.
If you’re familiar with WinAMP (which I use in the office…. ah Club 977!) you might have heard of the MusicMagic Mix plugin (which generates playlists for you based on the similarities between a particular song and your entire music collection), I’m guessing it will be something along those lines – which is pretty genius in my opinion. If your iPod could predict what mood you were in and suggest music based on that…. now that’s something I’d pay to have!