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December 2006 - Posts

Sunday, December 31, 2006 8:50 PM

Happy new year.

I was going to call this a Pretty Good Year, which is the title of a peice by Tori Amos ("Well, still ... Pretty Good year" sounds like something you only say when things are anything but pretty good). But this has been. It's a year of new horizons -
Posted by jamesone | 0 Comments
Sunday, December 31, 2006 5:46 PM

CLIP and ForFiles my new favorite Vista tools

How many times when you've been writing a technical document have you had to copy the results of some command from a command prompt window ? When I was looking for some information about WINSAT for my earlier post, I some lists of new vista commands.
Posted by jamesone | 2 Comments
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Sunday, December 31, 2006 3:38 PM

Bootable USB keys

Since I raised the subject I've had a mail from a couple of people on the subject of making a bootable key. I described the steps making a USB key bootable using the Vista / Windows PE version of Diskpart. Here are the commands select disk 1 {or the number
Posted by jamesone | 2 Comments
Sunday, December 31, 2006 3:21 PM

Readyboost. Money well spent, but what's fast enough ?

There are a bunch smart ideas in Vista, and Readyboost seems to be a favorite with a lot of people: extend memory by using USB "key" / "Stick" "Thumb drive" (what are we meant to call these things). Of course since it can be pulled out at any time it
Posted by jamesone | 0 Comments
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Friday, December 29, 2006 2:12 PM

USB wasn't meant to be like this !

Jason is seems to be bugged by the same things as me... I got my new Pentax just before Christmas. I've owned three of their digital camera and each needs a specific USB cable - used on other cameras; the camera I take diving has a standard "Mini-B" and
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Friday, December 29, 2006 1:52 PM

A tale of two printers and a design error in UAC

I've said before, but not on this blog, that the worst bits of software I have on my XP-based home PC all came with devices.It's hardly surprising, when we buy software alone we only buy something satisfactory. We make buying decisions on the devices,
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Sunday, December 24, 2006 8:30 PM

Merry Christmas

One Christmas tradition which amuses me is the Norad Santa site. This year my daughter has been watching it. Of course the thing that caught my eye was that these days it is mash-up done with Windows live local ... If the US military can use it for this,
Posted by jamesone | 0 Comments
Monday, December 18, 2006 4:18 PM

In Poetic mood today.

When I was about 8 years old my mother hung a small poster of " Desiderata " in the kitchen. I love the text, even if I can't always follow the advice. Here's a snippet. As far as possible without surrender be on good terms with all persons. Speak your
Posted by jamesone | 1 Comments
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Thursday, December 14, 2006 9:18 AM

Phew: EVO Launch

I'm waiting to see the feedback from the audience, but the general feeling is Tuesdays event was a success. We had two servers "live" on stage and a third in reserve. These had 4 processing cores each, with 8 GB of memory and twin hard drives. The global
Posted by jamesone | 3 Comments
Monday, December 11, 2006 6:48 PM

Does your company discriminate against people with disabilities ?

This isn't a question about your employment practices. In recent years a lot of work has been done to make buildings usable by wheelchair users; but how many of the people you do with visit your office. I've known for some time that websites do a lousy
Posted by jamesone | 1 Comments
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Friday, December 08, 2006 8:24 PM

Exchange 2007 released

Since Eileen is on her way back from holiday, I'm going to steal her thunder and share what Jeff Raikes just told the whole of Microsoft. I’m very pleased to announce that the Exchange team has completed its development work on Microsoft Exchange Server
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Friday, December 08, 2006 7:56 PM

Overpriced and over here #2

Or what happens when you throw stones in a glass house. My post on over priced and over here attracted the following comment from Russ Pitcher. The same price disparity appears to exist with Windows Vista. For Vista Ultimate the US RRP seems to be $399,
Posted by jamesone | 0 Comments
Thursday, December 07, 2006 3:34 PM

Ah... the never-ending pool of Wii jokes

Am I just puerile, or is it a British obsession with bodily functions ? I don't know. Nor do I know if I should feel feel sorry for people at Nintendo over the name of their console, they seem to be playing up to it. The BBC reports Nintendo have advised
Posted by jamesone | 0 Comments
Thursday, December 07, 2006 2:34 PM

We're hiring !

Microsoft UK in general, but the IT pro evangelist team in particular. If you fancy my job (well not mine - I'm staying put thank you very much) then drop me a note. You can't do the job without a reasonable grasp of technology (or at least the ability
Posted by jamesone | 0 Comments
Thursday, December 07, 2006 12:11 PM

Over priced and over here

Here's a Pentax lens at big UK retailer. £629.99 ; and here it is at big US retailer $689.95, less a $100 rebate - net price $589.95. With the pound trading at $1.967, my sister in California can buy it for under £300. Stuff costs more in the UK than
Posted by jamesone | 4 Comments
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Tuesday, December 05, 2006 2:29 PM

Logoff and logon ... how do you want it ?

I came across this post by Joel Spolsky. The thrust is that the shutdown menu in Vista is too complex (hey, we changed things so you no longer have to click something labeled Start to shutdown). He says: ' You have to choose between nine, count them,
Posted by jamesone | 1 Comments
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Tuesday, December 05, 2006 11:19 AM

A little bit of history.

Jonathan over at the Office Word Team's blog discovered that we just had the 30th anniversary of Microsoft as a trade name. I saw the story of how he got permission to show Bill Gates' first business card - there are all sorts of rules about this material.
Posted by jamesone | 1 Comments
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Sunday, December 03, 2006 9:09 PM

On photographic resolution

Another one of my weekend posts about photography, and 2 or 3 times the length I'd have liked. Still, I have managed to get most of the key ideas about resolution into it. Photography is about more than the amount of recorded detail, but choice of subject,
Posted by jamesone | 2 Comments
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Friday, December 01, 2006 11:42 PM

The phone is dead #2

"If you hadn't fixed it to the desk it would be pushing up the daisies! It's rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible! This is an ex-business tool" I never deleted Darren Stange's post "My deskphone is stupid" from its RSS folder. Our desk
Posted by jamesone | 4 Comments
Friday, December 01, 2006 1:31 PM

The Phone is dead #1

Or "Le Phone est mort, vive le phone" I now have my 3rd C500. The first one got lost on a plane in May 2005, second bore the scars of a hard life, but died on it's charger last week. Although Orange got me #3 pretty quickly, switching phones isn't totally
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