Microsoft® Silverlight^TM is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web.

Silverlight is the new Microsoft media plugin promising an all new online experience. Having used this technology it seems very powerful but I am yet to see it do something that could not be created using Flash. Admittedly the Silverlight technology looks really good and works seamlessly certainly more professional than flash but only time will tell whether it will be adopted as a standard.

To checkout and test Silverlight yourself goto www.silverlight.net

More from me on Silverlight soon!

I’d love to hear your views!

A 

*LONG POST WARNING*

Ok so I am back in Vista now having done a total rebuild of the system. I know, I can hear it now, you are all saying “did he not have a backup?”  I did have a backup, but it was from the day that I installed Vista with just the basic operating system. In XP, I would do an incremental backup every night using Norton Ghost and in all honesty, am a really strong supporter of backing things up on a daily basis. The problem I had was that Symantec had has not yet released a version of Ghost that works with Vista. Thus I had not been backing up my data (more fool me). Anyway I now have Acronis True Image 10 installed and Symantec have lost a customer. I used to use thier anti-virus software, now I use Trend Micro’s and now I use NO Symantec products, I reckon there is a trend being set there too, a lot of people I know have moved away from Symantec products. Who else has moved away from Norton and Symantec products? Drop me an e-mail I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Anyway back to the whole Vista issue. So it all went a bit “Pete Tong” on Wednesday afternoon, my current setup means that I have to use my desktop to share in internet to my flatmates via my WiFi. I know this isn’t ideal but it’s just the way it has to be done at the moment. In Vista I had had no problems at all with internet connection sharing (ICS), it worked well and the data transmission was faster than in XP for some reason . On Tuesday afternoon Will, one of my flatmates came to say the internet wasn’t working, so I repaired both the lan connection to the internet and the Wifi connection to the Access Point. Both reported normal operation for me from my PC so when that did not fix the issue we restarted the access point. Still the internet remained in a non working state. So I switched off ICS in Vista then switched it back on again. That was where the problems occurred, as I clicked apply the OS froze completely, the mouse did not respond, ctrl-alt-delete was ineffective and all in all it was dead as a door nail. There was hard drive activity but nothing else worked. I waited 5 minutes to see if it would spring back into life but there was no signs of that happening (by that point the HD activity had stopped) so I hit the reset button on the machine. It rebooted fine logged me back into Vista then when I tried to turn ICS back on I got an error message “An Unknown error has occurred” and most helpfully the error code was “(null)” I then got a blue screen of death (BSOD) and the machine reset itself. At this point I was not the happiest bunny in the herd. I rebooted once again and got the same error code, this time though no BSOD. I checked the event viewer to see what caused the previous BSOD and there was no entry at all, nothing to indicate anything was wrong. Then for the second time I am struck with a BSOD. As I had my thesis due in on the Friday I did not have the time available to mess around trying to fix a slowly dying OS, so I booted into my XP installation and things (including ICS) were fine.

So Friday arrived and my thesis was handed in, time to check on Vista. I booted back in and almost instantly got a BSOD and again another 2 times at random points I was reset automatically while in the system. So I gave up trying and backed up all my essential data and plonked in the Vista disc. 1hr 23 mins later and Vista was back up and running in it’s basic form and ICS was working perfectly again. I then spent Friday night and Saturday morning putting all the software back on. It’s fine now and I’ve had no problems at all! I can only assume that when I reset the machine it was still accessing files and they became corrupt in some way!?! I guess the moral of the story is “Always backup and be careful with the reset button in Vista”.

Has anyone else had issues like this? I’d love to hear, contact details are in the sidebar.

A   

So I was taking a break from writing my thesis this evening and decided to give the ole broadband connection a test. I knew it was fast but was interested to see exactly how fast! This was the result:

Yip 10Mbs that is the beauty of having fiber to my home (well flat). Only one flaw in this speed overdose and that is cost. A whopping £40 a month!! Yeah I am a sucker for all things fast!

Oh well back to work!

A

Made me Laugh!

So Google has decided to drop the Froogle (prononuced frugal) brand from their portfolio. It still exists but is now “Google Product Search”. The explination of why this has been done is here.  

Personally I liked froogle and ok it did not convey what it did but did Google when it started? No it didn’t but now everyone says “ooh I’ll Google that”. Oh well!

A