Month: July 2006

Categories
technology

Search Files for text

Why or why is the the Windows Search for “a word or a phrase in the file:” so absolutely useless? Many times I’ve searched for a word or a piece of text that I’ve directly copied and pasted from a file that the search tool located within the directories I’m searching and got…
no answers. It’s a tool that gives the user absolutely no confidence in it’s capabilities at all. You’d think that it was feasible to get this tool to work after all these years. Especially now they have a content indexing service but no… it must be impossible…

Categories
humour

What I thought of Portugal during the World Cup

How many Portuguese footballers does it take to change a lightbulb?
Answer: A full squad of 20 plus their manager

  • Five to simultaneously roll around on the ground clutching various body parts, at different ends of the pitch
  • One to flick his hair, a lot
  • One to have a legitmate grievance with lightbulbs which is ignored by the referee because his teammates are such tossers.
  • One to step over the bulb…and again… and again…
  • Four to gather around the referee trying to get the bulb sent off
  • One to wink and blow kisses at the referee after he got the bulb sent off
  • One lightbulb wizard to do… absolutely nothing really…
  • One designated bulb changer who disappears everytime the bulb comes near him
  • One to hit the ground right before he makes contact with the bulb
  • Three players who can’t change a bulb but who can definitely take a penalty
  • One fat manager to throw a tantrum about the new FIFA regulation bulb
  • & one veteran winger to change the bulb as none of his teammates know how
Categories
technology

Reg. hack

Excellent article from the Reg about MS’s Windows Genuine Advantage programme. A few things mentioned that I wasn’t aware of (shame on me). WGA collects a lot more information than you think, uses some questionable identifiers to determine the legitimacy of your system (including the harddrive serial number. Therefore if you need to replace the harddrive in your machine WGA will flag you as a pirate. In summary MS is making it more difficult to update a computer OS that they’ve sold you in full knowledge that it has KNOWN security issues unless you enroll in a scheme whereby they gather information about your computer that COULD be used to identify you later on. Quel surprise?

Categories
technology

Oops, there goes my second life

Is it just me or does the Linden Script Language and Second Life in general remind them of the Oop! company and programming tool in Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs book? It’s just a thought but having had a look at second life I’m impressed by it’s technology and capability but it’s still a bit “geeky”. Interacting with virtual life objects using an OO scripting language is wonderful in theory but it needs some good UI building tools I suppose. Still, this digital microcosm is hugely successful at the moment with an economy alledgedly worth millions of dollars. Let’s not think about the liquidity issues just yet.

Second_Life.png