Archive for January, 2004

I was just redoing one of my machines today and wondered again why there’s no product activation for Visual Studio.NET 2003? As I was popping in each MSDN DVD I had to provide PID’s for Windows XP, for Office 2003, for OneNote, for FrontPage, etc.

Pop in VS.NET and what’s this, not even a request for a PID, my my I wonder why that is? Surely one of Microsoft’s more expensive and powerful applications would at least ask for a PID and then require activation. But no, it doesn’t, it simply installs the best development environment available today.

I haven’t seen a retail box so I can’t say that it doesn’t actually ask for a PID at some point but I’ve never seen a copy installed that has asked for one let alone asked to be activated. I’ve still got my boxed copy of Visual Studio 6 sitting up in the closet and that copy doesn’t require a PID either (I checked again just to make sure). What’s with this?

My take is that it’s an evil mind control plot to get more developers onto Microsoft’s development platform. There’s plenty of releases of Ent. Arch. going around the net (yeah it’s 5 CD’s but nm). It’s like Microsoft is saying,

“yeah sure we’ll protect our IP and way of business but this time it’s okay, we want you to use this for free, you’ll create more stuff for Windows and indirectly make us money anyway. So here ya go you little script kiddy, have fun with this, learn to program the Microsoft way, you’ll love it, it sure as hell beats that pie in the sky Sun thingamabob mocha almond fudge Java stuff”.

“why thank you , I love you, I could kiss you. I promise I’ll never ever stray away from the true path to righteousness and enlightenment.”

Anyway, pardon the 4AM ramblings, but if Office and Windows has activation why doesn’t Visual Studio?

It looks like MSN now has an IE search toolbar in beta. Somehow I don’t think Google is too worried. They look like twins really, it’s almost uncanny. Just compare MSN’s toolbar page to Google’s toolbar page. Come on Microsoft, be original .

So I’ve compared the two for a little while now, Google’s toolbar gets the nod plain and simple MSN’s search is still just way too slow and doesn’t provide results like Google does. The other thing that stinks about MSN’s toolbar is that the pop-up blocker is limited to only 250 URL’s in the allow list and unlike Google’s toolbar it doesn’t let you hold down CTRL to temporarily allow pop-ups for a site.

Things I do like about the MSN toolbar. The Hotmail, Messenger, and News buttons. Messenger crashes a lot, the icon for Messenger in IE is Windows Messenger not MSN, I use MSN, so it’s nice to have that handy since I always have an IE window open. I log into Hotmail a lot as well so it’s nice to have a link directly to the home page so I can log into multiple accounts quicker. News goes to MSNBC which I read as much as Google’s News aggregate. The highlight feature is pretty cool too and seems to work well, only a few minor bugs so far. The last thing I like are the extra search options which let you search Encarta for definitions and check the encyclopedia, stocks and companies through MSN Money, shopping, movies, and the yellow and white pages.

Granted I use TweakUI to add in searches for this stuff directly into the address bar. I just type in “dic eschew” for a definition of eschew. Or “stck MSFT” for a stock quote on Microsoft. I’ve got all sorts of those set up, I can look up recipes, drinks, MSDN, acronyms, the list goes on and on.

So the end result. I like both toolbars, MSN’s seems promising. Ideally I’d like to combine the two. Hopefully Longhorn’s IE will work well enough to neither toolbar will be necessary.

Okay so at first I wanted to become #1 for Galan Bridgman on Google. I’ve given that up, I’m not even on the first page now. I was #5 which wasn’t bad considering I only mentioned his name twice before. I’ve got a new goal now. I want to be #1 for Corey, just Corey. I’ve got at least the first 3 results for Gouker and the first page for Corey Gouker (big surprise there) but I’m still only #10 for Corey. I was #34 then 23, 21, then 13, now #10. Only just noticed this week, I do only check this every two weeks or so, I’m not really that obsessed over it and because my Google toolbar doesn’t seem to like me right now it’s not displaying PageRank at all. It was a couple weeks ago, I did notice a PageRank of 6 when I looked.

Anyway, I’ve got a couple people to surpass before I can claim I’m #1 for Corey on Google. I’ve got Corey Harris a blues musician at #1, he’s actually quite good.

Coming in at #2 there’s Corey Feldman, we all know and love him from Goonies, he’s done some albums too apparently, I haven’t heard of them so that’s no consequence to me. Other than being in Tales From The Crypt: Bordello Of Blood and playing Donatello in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I have no bad feelings about trying to knock him down in Google. Heck, he’s even got a pic with Hugh Heffner, nice going man! Corey Wolfe places third, he’s an artist who specializes in Illustration.

Fourth place is Corey Haim, best known for the 1987 film the Lost Boys and being an “80s teenage heartthrob”. One Canadians.ca site said “It seem that the 80s teen scene was ruled by guys named Corey, or perhaps it was the magnitude of it’s two Coreys, Haim, and Feldman, that made it seem that way.” Please, Mom, Dad, don’t tell me I was named Corey because of the prevalence of these two in the 80s?!

So now we’ve got another musician, Corey Hart, though he’s in a totally different genre than Harris he’s nowhere near as good imho. Hmm, I’m noticing a pattern here with these Corey’s. I’ll get to that in a minute .

Woohoo, good for Feldman he comes in again at sixth. Obviously a bigger heartthrob than Haim. Seventh place is this go named Nahmman or something, his site is filled with drug information. Then we’ve got Mr. Teenage Georgia 2000, Corey Mote, a body builder. 9th place goes to a violinist Corey Cerovsek, I can’t find any links to his music on the Geocities hosted site so I won’t bother.

I wonder how hard it’ll be to make it to number one? How about this, if you’ve got a site and you’re reading this, just pop in a little link somewhere to this page, I bet that’ll help (consider this a subliminal message). So that pattern… It seems that 8 out of 10 of these guys are all artists, maybe that’s my true direction as well? A graphic designer / GUI maker by day and a casual programmer by night? Heck if you combine the first 9 of them you’ve probably got every girls dream! LMAO! Hopefully that says something for me too. The other thing I noticed was 6 of them had last names that started with letters close to G. H being used 3 times and F twice for Feldman. Maybe there’s something with this, then again NOT.

After I combine the plethora of sites I have maybe then I’ll get to #1, plus with the subliminal messages and your help of course maybe I’ll stay there, LOL . Thanks!

Yes, that’s right, after years of being online I think I’ve finally got the vision right for my site. So here’s my very first drawing for the new design, yes it’s a total rip off of WindowsMedia.com and WMPlugins.com but it was my first drawing brainstorm. When I was working on my last site design I ended up doing 6 drawings in total and the first and the last looked nothing alike. I usually like to check out all the sites at Cool Home Pages for some general ideas and then go back to the drawing board and see what of mine works and what doesn’t. In any case it’ll probably be a good month before I even get the time to work up all the graphics for the thing and get a template for each section of the site done.

Hopefully once I get going I can get back into the groove with my blog too, I haven’t been a very good writer later when it comes to posting. Looking at January at left I can see only 3 days in bold, compare that to November or December last year. Soon, I promise to getting back to posting every day.

I really hope to meet someone who took part in design the latest incarnation of Microsoft keyboards and give them a piece of my mind at the next MVP summit. I have the Wireless Optical Desktop Pro which is absolutely hands down the best keyboard and mouse money can buy. The sex appeal on these two input devices is unmatched by any other keyboard or mouse.

For years I was anxiously awaiting the day I could pick up a desktop set that was wireless, had a natural keyboard, and most importantly had style by being black. Heck they even did one better by having clear keys, save the F keys and the multimedia keys, that’s my only gripe about the keyboards looks. The mouse is just gorgeous, the fluid scroll wheel (name © Jonathan Kay) feels amazing. Overall the ergonomics of both devices is remarkable.

But all is not well in the land of Microsoft Keyboard products. All of the new generation keyboards (not including the Natural Elite or Internet keyboard) have these extra functions for all the function keys. Like F4 is new, F5 is open, and F6 is close, etc. In order to make these work while still maintaining the original function of the function keys they created the F-Lock key. That’s fine and dandy but they made a serious flaw in the way it works. Every time your system reboots the F-Lock key loses its state, it’s sort of like the Number Lock key except the BIOS allows you to take care of that one. In any case this little F-Lock key and the extra uses for the function keys create a problem when booting to machines that boot really quickly.

I’ve got a Dell Dimension 4600C Media Center Edition here that boots up extremely fast. Right now it’s plugged into a LCD but if I plug in a CRT the system will get past the POST screener so quickly the CRT hasn’t even warmed up and displayed a picture yet. I timed the entire boot up process on a clean install and it’s pretty spiffy. The at 2.47 we’re past the POST screen, 18.36 and we’re at the Welcome screen, 26.65 and we’ve got a fully loaded Desktop. I’ve only been using this keyboard for a week so when I tried booting to the systems boot menu with F12 it took a minute for me to remember the F-Lock key. Once I remembered it took 5 tries before I could turn on the F-Lock key and hit F12 to actually pull the Boot Menu up. You have to have pretty quick reflexes to hit both keys and get it to work in under 2.5 seconds.

So this is where the problem arises. Since the F-Lock key gets reset after every reboot you have to turn it back on every time the system boots. There is no reason for the extra functions of the function keys to work outside of Windows so why bother messing up things until then? Surely it would’ve been more intelligent to let the function keys maintain their original purpose and instead of the current set up reverse things so that with the F-Lock on the extra functions would be turned on. If it was done this way, then Windows/IntelliType could’ve turned on the F-Lock and users would be able to change a setting in Windows whether they wanted it on or off by default. Now I won’t be surprised if they had some reason for doing things the way they did but it could’ve been much much more thought out.

While I’m talking about the lock keys, another minor annoyance is the fact that the status lights for these keys aren’t located on the keyboard with the Wireless line of keyboards. My guess is that they did it for power saving purposes or something. But the problem here is that like many people I got the Wireless package to keep my desk just a tad cleaner so I’ve hidden the transmitter down and behind my monitor. If I want to see the status of the of the Caps, Number, or F lock I can’t just glance down at the keyboard, I have to look at the transmitter which is slightly hidden or I have to use IntelliType. I guess this isn’t that big of a deal but something that takes getting used to. Of course one would normally realize the status of the locks when they started typing in CAPS or moving left and right instead of typing 46.

I wonder if some sort of update could possibly fix the way the F-Lock key functions…