Sunday, February 25, 2007 2:20:30 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

It's Sunday and I'm at work.

This in itself is not unusual, I quite often go into the office at the weekend to work on my own projects. It's a quiet location with a nice stereo system and coffee machine which make it 'not so quiet'.

This Sunday however, is different. Tomorrow the product I've been helping get into shape since leaving University last June finally goes out. DriveWorks 6 SP0.0 is about to be released to the masses and boy that is exciting.

We actually finished the product on Friday, but in order for it to go out tomorrow the installers need finalising, start menu shortcuts, executable names and paths, help needs linking in and final logos for the Installshield project need throwing in. (Ok, I admit I have one or two tasks in the actual product that need ploughing through, but I've known about them for a week now and just haven't gotten around to doing anything about them!).

I'm happy to give up my Sunday to do this - as my own projects have hit that brick wall where I can't seem to gather any motivation to push into them. Having spent the entirety of yesterday walking in circles and getting nothing done, sinking into a frustrated depression over this seeming incredibly likely - it's nice to have some goals and targets given to me to work with.

Therapy by work - it's the future.

Friday, February 09, 2007 3:25:28 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

I've formatted and installed Windows XP after several months of using Vista RTM.

Vista is stunningly beautiful. It works like a charm and all those lovely features it has to make life easier are brilliant, such as the easy networking and search features.

But, third party support with regards to software and drivers is abysmal, and even once the driver manufacturors released their RTM drivers performance and stability were quite frankly, still shocking.

Hell, Visual Studio 2005 - despite having a recent service pack applied still has many, many issues that I haven't been able to get around - particularly with the ASP.NET development server.

Things came to an annoying end a couple of days ago when I tried installing a TV Tuner I'd bought off the intarweb. Vista decided that instead of installing the drivers for that, it would 'forget' that my DVD drive existed. Since installing the official sound drivers for my laptop I've also found it impossible to use my microphone - seriously limiting my ability to talk to people on Skype.

I've been putting up with driver issues since installing it, but this is my second install of Vista and its back to crawling along and not being that enjoyable to use. I've also had my credential cache corrupt itself making me unable to log into my laptop until I walked to work so I could be on the same network as the domain controller.

I hope that it gets sorted out, and that the following few months will improve matters - but Microsoft's hope that gamers will somehow be buying Vista because it brings greater performance is a joke. Maybe in a few years once new games are all using DX10 and new hardware means that the performance degredation from running DX9 games under Vista is unnnoticeable, but for now - Vista is for those people who don't mind putting up with what should really still be classified as beta software. 

Thursday, February 08, 2007 6:03:34 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

I just spent the last hour on Second Life with Karsten, Shirley and a host of other academics from around the globe.

It was an interesting experience, assessing Second Life as a tool for assisting with e-learning - or at least I think that was the aim of the experiment.

The goal was to team people up and for each team to go hide a cube of a certain colour. I was teamed up with Beth Kanter and a guy called Juan/John.

I don't think any of us were experienced with Second Life and I was surprised at how fast everybody picked it up. Organising the teams to go and do things was difficult - but no more difficult than trying to organise a collaborative exercise online in any other fashion.

I dressed for the occasion in a somewhat different manner than everybody else, who seemed content looking like themselves/ordinary. I should be easy to spot in the photos, being that I'm big, multi-coloured and have eyes which are completely detached from the rest of me.

Waiting for everybody to arrive

Ooh, this looks like a good hiding spot

Probably a bit too obvious...

Ah, perhaps here is better

Aha, found Orange's box!