Paul Smith's Blog

I installed Windows Vista 5744 on my Tablet PC the other day, before I had a chance to install Toshiba's utilities to make the screen automatically rotate I went over to the Control Panel to change the orientation to portrait mode. Now to do this I was looking for the Mobility Center, which has all the mobile controls for brightness, rotation and so on. But I couldn't find it. After another few seconds, there it was hiding down the bottom, after all it's called Windows Mobility Center....

As many of you are aware IE will only make two simultaneous connections to a server. This is down to the RFC standards to try and prevent servers getting hammered. In recent years however other browsers have ignored this standard and raised their limit. But if you want to change it within IE it's also possible here's how. Fire up regedit and browse to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings Create two new DWORDs called:...

Microsoft have released the long-awaited Internet Explorer 7. I'll do a review/guide on the changes for the Windows Resource at some point in the not too distant future. Until then here are the download locations: IE7 Final For Windows XP 32-Bit. IE7 Final For Windows Server 2003 32-Bit. IE7 Final for Windows XP/Server 2003 64-Bit. IE7 Final for Windows Server 2003 Itanium. More information, including a tour of the new features can be found on the IE7 website....

From the Guardian: The death toll among Iraqis as a result of the US-led invasion has now reached an estimated 655,000, a study in the Lancet medical journal reports today. The figure for the number of deaths attributable to the conflict - which amounts to around 2.5% of the population - is at odds with figures cited by the US and UK governments and will cause a storm, but the Lancet says the work, from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, has been examined and validated by four separate independent experts who all urged publication....

We can add dinosaur meat to the menu at last. We've only got a small amount, so the bidding starts at £10 million. On a more serious note, scientists have discovered tissue fragments from a 70 million year old Tyrannosaurus rex. When paleontologists find fossilized dinosaur bones during a dig, they usually do everything in their power to protect them, using tools like toothbrushes to carefully unearth the bones without inflicting any damage....

Yes I'm back, been a bit busy lately with helping Catherine move into university, ok I say help; I didn't really help at all. Then having the house ripped up for a new gas boiler the following week, and finally this week building a new computer. Anyway back to the regular blogging routine. I'll start off with Internet Explorer 7. This follows up on a previous post about Firefox's anti-phishing filter being next to useless (false sense of security - again)....

The Russian Duma (parliament) came to the only obvious course of action and voted against allowing Madonna to be launched into space, idiot Duma member Alexei Mitrofanov, put forward the idea of booking her a $20 million seat on a launch on Soyuz in 2008. The only acceptable courses of action would be 1) blowing the rocket up with her onboard, 2) depressurizing the space craft while in orbit 3) throwing her in jail for being retarded....

Catherine ^_^ said to me a couple of days ago that her e-mail wasn't working, turns out the POP service had fallen over, restarting the service didn't do the trick so I rebooted the server. Problem solved. I had dismissed it as being linked with the amount of traffic my blog has had over some recent posts about Apple and left it at that. But then it happened yesterday too, which did strike me as being weird, the blog got about double the traffic it usually gets - which shouldn't be enough to bring down a service....

Here's an image of the International Space Station, if Atlantis wasn't delayed it would of been falling alongside the ISS at the time of this photo. But on the plus side it means I've got a good reference to measure any gain in brightness from adding the new components to the space station. In theory it will be easy to track progress over the next 4 years or so with the station finally be about 7 times brighter than it is at the moment, around magnitude -4 compared with -1 today....

Ed Bott mentions what one of the /. admins said concerning IE support on the new discussion forums. IE doesn’t work (patches welcome, but since only a quarter of you use it, it’s not a huge priority) This is exactly the sort of double standards that really bug me. People like this, I know perhaps not this guy specifically, but the general Slashdot crowd for nearly a decade complained at web developers for only supporting Internet Explorer....