The Wii Fit is actually brilliant. Not just the device itself but the activities that come with it, many of which do not use the step. My favourite is free jogging where you put the controller in your pocket then just run on the spot and start running around the island. But I already know the island so I’m hoping they will come up with new scenery packs.
Put simply, Wii Fit Rocks!
This is one of those, ‘Why couldn’t they get it right’ issues where the Service Pack for .NET Framework fails to install and us ISVs are left picking up the pieces. Microsoft have released a KB article 951950 ( http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-gb;951950 ) and a tool, the snappily named ’Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Registration Correction Tool’ http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=0BA6038C-061E-4B4A-9BE9-96A323701260
This has been a bug bear of mine for ages now, why there is no version control in .NET Framework. Lets not forget this was a technology designed to alleviate DLL version hell. But you try and find out what versions, sp’s and hotfixes are installed and you will be left wondering.
Somehow MS need to get a grip of this situation and have some sort of common and comprehensive way of querying whats installed on a target machine, its ISV hell. This is further compounded by the fact that the framework doesn’t gracefully handle version deficiencies. If a call you make from your app is missing in the version of the Framework the user has installed it doesn’t ask nicely if you would like the latest version downloaded and installed it just throws an exception that your app has to handle. Very unfriendly and inconvenient for the ISV and user.
The whole .NET Framework deployment scenario needs looking at again from a deployment perspective and prevent us ISV’s having to code around the deficiencies it was supposed to cure.
Your reputation in a box? We guarantee it. Every Time!
So goes the motto of CityLink, well I’ve had more of this than I can take recently. Poor delivery service used to be the domain of parcelfarce, but CityLink (no funny name change) have recently snatched that prize. The problem seems to be that CityLink have got quite popular and don’t have enough drivers or vans to meet demand. This means that the drivers are forced to meet their quotas by ‘carding’ (v). This is the practice of pretending to have made an attempt to deliver and finding no-one home leaving a courtesy card saying they had called.
Now this practice is abused where the delivery is not even attempted but rather just ‘carded’. This allows the driver to get home on time and not have to do all of his deliveries. This has happened 3 times to me in the last month. Each time it appears that it has been a temporary driver who has carded me. The regular driver even asked me last week if the stuff he was redelivering had been ghost ‘carded’.
Actually CityLink are pretty good in normal circumstances, they just can’t handle the load. Today I was waiting for my urgent delivery and was ‘carded’ at 09:10 strange because thats exactly when DHL were here. Clearly none of us saw the invisible CityLink van turn up. Obviously he must have passed through a trans dimensional shift in the time continuum which is at the end of my drive and entered a parallel universe.
Ironically Ebuyer had upgraded me to a pre-12 delivery (without my knowledge) which further compounded the problem. The more tight the deadline, the more likely you will be ‘carded’. I spoke to the customer support staff who were very helpfull and they have offered to redeliver tomorrow pre-10am … warning Will Robinson, warning! Unfortunately I’m even more likely to get carded. When I enquired why he couldn’t do it today on the pickup phase I was shamefully told that he was ‘too busy, and wouldn’t even finish the remaining deliveries he had to do”… whoops, so no wonder I was carded.
We’ll see what happens tomorrow …
Today is another really good example of why 25% of my time is (and has always been) wasted fixing IT problems that I shouldn’t have to. I just got an HP C7280 All In One Printer (£199 from PCWorld) which is a wireless printer/scanner/copier/Fax.
So first I unpacked it, and uncharacteristically, read the Start Here guide. Except when I got to point 3 it diverged from reality. Supposedly I could choose my language from the menu on the built-in display. What the display actually said was 12345. So what do i do now, I pressed 1,2,3,4,5 but to no avail. I turned the printer on and off a few times. Stubbornly the message never changed. I checked the documents for any mention of this problem but no luck.
Finally, after some searching through the HP support site I found this solution;
Basically that little proceedure resets the printer back to defualt setting. But, I shouldn’t have to do that! Its brand new, it should work out of the box. A non-IT literate person would have returned the printer as faulty.
At least its working now….
I received my Windows 2008 Server Resource kit today, but it was somewhat more ‘compact’ that I was led to believe. The mockups showed a box about 2 foot long and purporting to have 6600+ pages in 6 books, but in reality it was a slimmer 8 inches (20cm) and had about 4000 pages in 6 books. Apparently the rest of the pages are there on the CDROM, but they never made it to print. This is quite disappointing for a publication costing $249. A quick skim through the volumes reveals a wide range of gaps in the content I would have expected, certainly not up to the standard of the Windows 2000 Resource kit. So be warned!
It contains
Look at whats left of LH’s McLaren after a 200mph collision in Bahrain. But he walked away. Surely roadcars should have at least optional full safety harnesses ?
I don’t think so!
BillG made reference to a newer version this week at the IADB’s annual meeting. When asked about a new version of Windows he said “That’ll be sometime in the next year or so that we’ll have a new version.” He added: “I’m super-enthused about what it will do in lots of ways.”
I don’t think this is really a new version of Windows, more likely a Vista SP2 release that has a marketing programme associated with it or maybe he meant a beta would start in a year. I can’t see anyway it will not be Vista based. The pain of upgrading all our development from XP to Vista took a good 3 years from the first beta to release. There isnt enough time to develop, test and release a completely refreshed OS in that time, especially one with new features to be super excited about. There has been much talk of MinWin or components for Windows 7, again this is unlikely in any significant way as so much of the current OS is interlinked and cross dependent.
The W7M1 builds floating about now are just Vista with minor changes so far. Things would need to be a lot more advanced to have a release in a year.
But, could there be a secret project? I have long suggested to people in MS that a new parallel OS project should be started based on VM technology. This would be a highly secure mini-loader which could then load guest Windows OS partitions. These guest partitions could run specific applications or a new desktop. This would allow backward compatibility whilst allowing new desktop UI experience to be available. This would ease the migration to new types of application which are deployed separately to the UI experience. This is all possible because of Multicore and Hyper-V technology which permits this kind of segmentation. This will allow Microsoft to break free of the past architecture whilst retaining compatibility.
Fret no more! its The Rumble Strips - Girls and Boys in Love.
