Paul Smith's Blog

Longtime readers will know I am a huge fan of WorldWide Telescope. To put it mildly, WorldWide Telescope is the best astronomy program ever. If I had this when I was a kid I would never turn it off, it would autostart with the computer and I would be constantly looking at everything. Anyway as you may recall a Silverlight based web version of WorldWide Telescope was released last year. It wasn't as well featured as the Windows client, nor anywhere near as fast....

There's a lot of confusion going on out there. Increasingly it's more and more about issues related to DirectX. So much so that now I'm writing an update to the article I wrote almost 3 years ago now. That article advised people to install the latest DirectX end-user runtime if they encountered errors like d3dx9.dll is missing or not installed. The confusion seems to stem from people running Windows Vista or Windows 7 and seeing that they have DirectX 10 or 11 installed, by way of the DirectX Diagnostic Tool....

I've been looking forward to Silent Hunter 5 for a while now as regular readers will know I am a bit of a submarine fan. Playing number 2 and 3 to death, for those wondering Silent Hunter 4 was set in the Pacific and in my opinion nothing could be more boring :-) Silent Number 5 when it was first announced was looking fantastic. However a few months ago it was announced there would only be one submarine, a Type VII....

So the Pope is at it again. By being at it I of course refer only to spreading the word of his god. The Pope has faced a backlash after urging Catholic bishops in England and Wales to fight the UK's Equality Bill with "missionary zeal". Pope Benedict XVI said the legislation "violates natural law". What has the Pope so worked up in the new Equalities Bill? Well in short one of the key aims is to extend discrimination protection into private clubs and associations....

The 1023 event took place yesterday. In short a few hundred skeptics went outside about half a dozen Boots stores in the UK and "overdosed" on homeopathic pills by each downing a whole bottle. They did this in order to demonstrate there's nothing in homeopathic pills other than water and sometimes sugar and to emphasise that they have no effect. It managed to get some coverage on the BBC which is nice, although obviously the BBC didn't do a very good job reporting it....

So I've managed to sit down and use Apple's attempted copy of a Tablet PC for half an hour or so. Dubbed the iPad, the model number on the back reads TC1100, with a manufacturing date in 2003. Hmmm weird. Moving along. So what have we got in this machine? It comes with a 1Ghz processor (ouch Catherine's HTC HD2 mobile phone has a 1Ghz processor) and sports a 4:3 (no widescreen in this day and age, not good for media watching) that has a resolution of 1024x768....

So a new Zune update has just come down, it adds welcome support for Windows 7 libraries. Awesome. Now it behaves like it should, like Windows Media Player and Windows Media Center. You should have a single library for music that can span multiple locations and computers. No longer will the Zune want to put its music in Music\Zune, but rather it'll use the default folder that the Music Library specifies, and best of all no matter what application I use, Media Player or Zune I'll see the exact same content....

So Internet Explorer has been the media's main victim this past week. With stories about how it is completely unsecure. Of course having a vulnerability isn't a good thing, but why is this getting so much attention, especially considering it's not even being used to target individuals? Well I suppose the media have to knock Microsoft, it's about the only thing they can do when it comes to Microsoft so this will have to do....

The BBC have a headline that reads "German government warns against using MS Explorer". Well that's no problem, as I've never even heard of an MS Explorer. Of course what they're really going on about is Internet Explorer, and how version 6 was used to compromise Google's systems. find an alternative browser to Internet Explorer to protect security. Who knows what "protect security" actually means. Perhaps they mean protect their systems, or improve their security....

Until yesterday I had never bothered really checking out the Zune, the actual device wasn't available in the UK. The marketplace obviously wouldn't work in the UK, not that I'd probably buy anything from there I do prefer my CD-quality sound. But one thing about the Zune had always interested me, the social aspect of it, and the recent rumours of a Zune client being available for Windows Mobile has made it far more interesting, and removed a lot of the potential lock-in aspects, like only syncing protected tracks to Zune devices....