Paul Smith's Blog

Have just been throwing my must-have applications onto my Windows 7 system and came across a nice surprise. There's a new build of WorldWide Telescope available. Here's the official blurb for those who haven't already tried it out: Immerse yourself in a seamless beautiful environment. WorldWide Telescope (WWT) enables your computer to function as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from the best ground and space-based telescopes in the world. Experience narrated guided tours from astronomers and educators featuring interesting places in the sky...

It's nice to see the New York Times continuing to publish nonsense, this time from John Markoff: Microsoft Introduces Windows 7, Ending Vista Brand The Vista brand? Here's a tip, Windows is the brand, Vista is the version of Windows. Alternative headline: Microsoft introduce new version of Windows, and gives it a new name. Microsoft introduced what it said would be a slimmer and more responsive version of its Windows operating system on Tuesday, while unceremoniously dropping the brand name Vista for the new product....

Couple of screenshots from the PDC build of Windows 7: New calculator, obviously but check out the Taskbar. Now Quick Launch has been merged with the rest of the Taskbar. Hovering over these icons will show all windows that are open with that particular application. Best of all, it will also show individual tabs within applications so if you've got 20 websites open in Internet Explorer you can jump to a tab from the Taskbar....

Question: These UAC prompts are annoying, can I get rid of them somehow? Answer: Disable UAC. WRONG. If any so called "expert" gives you this advice, ignore it. If you don't like the prompts you should put UAC into silent mode, it should never, ever under any circumstances be disabled by normal computer users. Microsoft exposing the ability to disable UAC in the UI came quite late in development, as late as one of the release candidates if my memory serves me, much to my disappointment....

I recently came across somebody posting on the Microsoft support groups who had problems with one of his input devices misbehaving. It seems one of the things this person tried to do to resolve this issue was to purchase a registry cleaning application. I won't name the specific one here. The registry is a part of your computer where Windows and other applications typically store their settings. It is essentially a database, and it is critical to the functioning of your computer....

The following article is from the October issue of the Yeovil CLP newsletter, due to how rapidly the situation is developing I've decided to publish it here too. The current situation we see in the financial system is no accident. For years we were told that the invisible hand of the free market will sort out the difficulties that market economies face. We see short term profits and bonuses put before long term stability as a result....

I came across Wakoopa few months ago, but never got round to using it. Well today I installed it on both my desktop and my Tablet PC. It's an application which shares the applications you use either publicly or with a list of friends by posting the applications, and how much you use them onto their website. You can see what I'm using here. The application installed on the system is very lightweight....

It seems that Mr Naughton is a tad upset about the media coverage Microsoft has been getting lately, a few articles over the last week or so have directly quoted Steve Ballmer because of his recent trip to the UK. Heaven forbid. Ballmer was in town last week, graciously granting audiences and genially talking through his hat. Yet his every word was reverentially chronicled. The BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones reported Ballmer's metaphorical comparison of Microsoft (annual revenues, $60bn; 90,000 staff) as 'David' in comparison to Google's 'Goliath' (annual revenues $20bn; 19,000 staff)....

HTC have been pretty busy over the last few months with the Touch Diamond and Touch Pro, over the last week they filled in the low and medium-ends of the market by updating last year's Touch models with a TouchFLO 2D interface, now dubbed Touch Viva and Touch 3G. More impressively they've released another high-end device to stand with the Touch Diamond and Touch Pro. Called the Touch HD (no the screen isn't HD, and no they shouldn't call it HD)....

I've just been routing around the dark depths of my file system, and came across this gem from back in the olden days. The newbies who think the internet is the web probably won't get most of this. Regardless, here it is. July 18 - I just tried to connect to America Online. I've heard it is the best online service I can get. They even included a free disk! I'd better hold onto it incase they don't ever send me anther one!...