No Vista before SP

Apparently I’m not the only one thinking this way about Vista. Though it looks awful pretty, and if I bought a PC with it installed I’d probably have a hard time convincing myself to buy another XP license just so I didn’t have to use Vista for a few months! On the flip side, I would definitely consider holding off a hardware purchase that included a Vista license for a few more months, knowing a Service Pack is imminent.

Of course, if they’d got it right from the start, I’d be running Vista already… as it stands, I’m not too likely to drop $200 on something that runs slower than XP, supports less hardware, has arguably-worse power management, and makes the occasionally excruciating UI mistake (most notable is the automatic replacement of the “sleep” button with “install updates and shutdown” where updates are available). Really, the main reason I’d switch is to have consistent UI between Office 2007 and the rest of the system (instead of the presently absurd Vista-ish (but not actually Vista) UI available on XP), newer hardware (insofar as XP isn’t available), and a paid-for upgrade path… I’d rather fork out my money now and trust that another 3 service packs are coming, rather than pay full price for an OS and then pay full price again, and again. I acknowledge this is partially a psychological thing stemming from my opposition for paying for point-releases, but even so… many of the alleged ‘upgrades’ in OS X are thoroughly trivial.

Ringle?

Oh, someone please stop these people. Even my Sony Ericsson (yes, half owned by a notoriously evil record label) ships with software to rip CDs into non-DRM’d MP3s that function just fine as ringtones. What startling level of idiocy causes someone to think that bundling more software on CDs is a remotely good idea I cannot fathom, but clearly one of the brains in a record company came up with this gem. It doesn’t really affect me on account of pretty much never buying CD singles, but even so… yuck.

If this ever finds its way onto real CDs (i.e. albums), I may just cry. I probably spend in the vicinity of AU$60-75 a month on new albums, which is likely more revenue than you’d get if I bought things online… and I reckon a good half the reason I do that (aside from knowing what DRM is and why I don’t want it on my music) is for the packaging and associated retail experience. Most recent purchases include Gotye’s Mixed Blood, MoS Australia’s Electro House Sessions (it’s completely different from the global MoS release of the same name), Bob Sinclar’s Soundz of Freedom, and the super duper excellent soundtrack to Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.

I have ripped each and every track from them all as WMA Lossless. I wouldn’t have bought… about three of the four… if it wasn’t for retail CD stores.

Peekaboo IE7

I haven’t had to do any real CSS hacking in IE7 just yet, but was nonetheless surprised to discover that that Peekaboo bug is still hanging around. Thankfully the old faithful height:1%; still instantly resolves it, but… wow. Still lingering after so long?!

DNS oops

I may have forgotten to setup joahua.com to point to the new web server when I moved josh.st across. My bad. I changed it over a day or two ago (I forget when actually) and now the old addresses work. I will probably get lots more search engine love accordingly as all those old links that stopped working start functioning again. Something else that would probably get search engine love is posting new content, but it’s so easy to get lazy and not bother. Sigh. At any rate, after bothering to post some stuff my Adsense revenue actually did something this week for the first time in months. And I’m pretty sure none of the regulars even click the ads, so there we go! Don’t quite know how that happened, but… cool.

The magic 1st-cheque mark is approaching kind of like a curve approaches a line it never touches. I seem to recall this is something to do with Limits, but actually never even studied Calculus at all and know that has something to do with it… I seem to recall functions made sense only because I already understood them in the context of programming random stuff… maybe Adsense can teach me maths!

ReCAPTCHA

This is a pretty awesome CAPTCHA project. It’s moderately accessible and useful for the CAPTCHA provider. It uses a confirmed keyword in conjunction with an unknown one in order to discover more about the second keyword and provide better humanness verification. That’s as non-technical an explanation as I think I can wrangle! If you’re worried about spam/need human authentication, check this service out.