I’ve been part of the Windows Vista testing program since the days it was still called Longhorn. I have to say, they’ve come a long way in that time (a what a long time it was!). All in all, Windows Vista seems to be a good step forward from Windows XP - although there are going to be a number of things that annoy the seasoned Windows user.

1) Wireless Networks - At the moment, there is no way to tell an adhoc network from an access point. This means it’s potentially easy to trick people into trying to associate with an adhoc network and not what they are actually wanting to connect to. This becomes more interesting if the same SSID is used between the AP and the attacker - as Vista will prefer the stronger signal - which may be either of the two networks.

2) Windows Sidebar - I am yet to find a good reason to use this. It’s slow, limited and steals screen real-estate without adding much usefulness. Indeed this would have been better implemented with something more like OSX’s Dashboard - however even an option just to hide the sidebar off the screen when the mouse is not near it would be a great improvement. Thankfully, it can be disabled easily.

3) The Start Menu search - This is one of my pet hates. After years of being used to pressing Win -> U -> U to shutdown the computer, this no longer works. If you press the Windows key then type ‘u’, you now end up searching the start menu, favourites (bookmarks) and web history. While this may not be a bad feature, it’s annoying when you’ve been using that key sequence for years!

4) User Account Control - Although I understand the reasons for Microsoft to make this move - making a more secure system by trying to separate system permissions from user permissions, the UAC pops up all over the place - from simple things like defragmenting your hard drive to changing font DPI. The worst part of this is that the UAC prompt is modal - meaning that you MUST pay attention to it when it comes up - you can’t just do something else and ignore the prompt.

There are a few more slightly annoying things, however in the whole, things seem to work ok. My test machine for Windows Vista is a 2 year old Dell Inspiron 8600 laptop with a 1.7Ghz Pentium M CPU, 1Gb of RAM and a Radeon 9600 video card. The performance rating is 3.5, however it’s still easily quick enough for everyday use - even when using the Aero theme.

After well over a year of research and trying to make Apple accountable for faulty firmware in some of their computers, I have finally given up. Apple still refuse to admit to any problem on these drives, and sadly I must devote time to other projects.

From the superdrive site:

Update 28/01/2007 02:47am (+11 GMT)

Well, it looks as though Apple won’t do anything about this problem. What I can advise however are a number of brands that do work accordingly - and why.

It seems that Apple only support media created by the CMC factory. Discs made by this factory (and banded as other labels) seem to work fine in the drive. CMC make the Verbatim and possibly LG, SHINTARO, TDK and some DATACELL discs.

This means in theory, any of these discs that happen to come from the CMC factory should work fine. Anything else, and you’ll get 2x burns.

Looks like Air Services Australia has updated their DAPs page with all the airport charts for Australian Airports. To reflect this, I’ve re-run my script to combine them all for us flight sim pilots who like to use them for procedural approaches and departures from airfields.

You can find them here.

Better late than never. I hope you all had a great Christmas and have a fun new year!

Christmas for me was a little different as I had a visit from one of my cousins from the UK on her way around Australia. There was much consumption of alcohol and a great time was had by all that night. Alas, with only the basic public holidays off this year, it’s a very busy time.

Work on the (until now) unmentioned project to trunk IP data between Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane is well underway and have already signed up our first 50Mbit customer. If you need data transport between Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, drop me a line for a quote.

Be safe, and I’ll see you all in 2007!

EDIT: Oh, and my good mate Andrew Cameron that I’ve known ever since high school is getting married on the 30th. Cheers to him! :)</p>

I gave in. I purchased a Mac Pro. Clocking in with 2 x Dual Core 2.66Ghz CPUs, 2Gb RAM and the 512Mb ATI X1900 video card, it’s one hell of a machine. The first boot it ever did took around 18 seconds - very quick. Of course, the first thing I had to do to it was throw in a second 160Gb SATA HDD and throw Windows XP on there (for those all important games). I must say that I’m quite impressed with bootcamp (which allows you to boot Windows on the Intel Macs). The one thing that does annoy me is that it doesn’t give me the menu so I can pick which OS I want to boot to on startup - something I miss from other boot loaders such as grub.

I do have some hassle with the Logitech LLC drivers causing the mac to hang on shutdown, and even making the mouse buttons not work (however I can still move the pointer), however these have been reported to Logitech and I’m sure will be fixed soon.

All in all, a grunty as hell machine, and very nice to play games on ;)