Net­Meet­ing video is still unbeaten. Try­ing to video con­fer­ence with a guy in Mel­bourne today, MSN was on the cards but sucked even in a LAN envi­ron­ment, Skype was tried and looked awe­some fullscreen and in a LAN envi­ron­ment, but bombed out pretty badly for web-cam sup­port at the Mel­bourne end and in terms of band­width — you can’t even scale the video! — and Net­Meet­ing was great in terms of reli­a­bil­ity and decent qual­ity over both LAN and Inter­net con­nec­tions (and yes, it let you scale. Last update, 1996. Or when­ver. A while ago!).

Unfor­tu­nately, Net­Meet­ing is too dif­fi­cult to use, and one end (or both ends… our end I’m 99% sure is work­ing fine as I write this) had rout­ing dif­fi­cul­ties because, obvi­ously, Net­Meet­ing doesn’t use some crappy cen­tral direc­tory server unless you select the “Microsoft, please steal my infor­ma­tion” check­box. Which, unlike the lat­est MSN Mes­sen­ger install, isn’t ticked by default.

PC soft­ware mak­ers suck. Ear­lier this week I… had an encounter with Tori’s lap­top, fea­tur­ing no less than 188 indi­vid­ual spec­imins of spy­ware: A new record for me. I started try­ing to dis-infect but even­tu­ally pro­nounced it vaguely beyond repair. The spy­ware was such that it was block­ing sock­ets for all appli­ca­tions EXCEPT I.E. (pre­sum­ably because it can con­trol Inter­net Explorer infi­nitely bet­ter than it can any­thing else – more than a cou­ple of sites were blocked, too), so I couldn’t even update the anti-spyware def­i­n­i­tions. It’d also bro­ken Win­dows Update. Yar, this be re-install ter­ri­tory. Caused, prob­a­bly in no small part, by “ticked by default” junk.

Tags: crappy central directory server, Internet connections, Internet Explorer, LAN, Melbourne, microsoft, MSN Messenger, software makers, video conferencing, web-cam support, Windows