More glitches

I have a couple of Win95 programs, a decade old but never bettered, that Windows 7 refused to Install - surprising, as Vista hadn't quibbled. Maybe it's a 64-bit problem. Anyway I transferred the folders over and they ran fine, complete with previous settings since Win95 programmes store those in their own folders.

Webedit is a long lost HTML editor that has enough bells and whistles for me, and WS/FTP LE is the old freeware version of that transfer program.

Windows 7 arrives

My Vista machine never really recovered from its overheating problem and recently lost contact with its graphics card, defaulting to the onboard graphics. So, an early Yuletide prezzie - a brand new Windows 7 desktop, 64-bit OS, with a Radeon 5750.
Overall I'm happy - as promised it's all rather smoother than Vista. I'm slowly loading in stuff and so far the only program that didn't want to know was PGP, I needed the 64-bit version.

Hiccups:
(1) The speakers by default had inputs off, it took me a while to find out how to connect them to Line-in enabling me to use them for the TV.
(2) My Second Life TV isn't working. This seems to be a streaming glitch with Quicktime, I can see other streams in RL and SL and Liz can see it fine - she spotted a friend of hers being interviewed ("look look it's Amber!") and all I had was a blank screen.
(3) Not a single Blue Screen of Death so far! The graphics card has paniced and reset twice in SL, both times when I was working it hard, so I'm guessing at some minor OpenGL problem.
(4) Today, the screen blanked out. It turned out the HDMI cable had come loose, the 5700s only have HDMI output plus a rather grudging DVI socket which I haven't tried. Fortunately the HDTV has several HDMI inputs since I need another for the satellite box.

HDMI is fine with graphics, not so good with text but then the TV isn't optimised for that. Tweaking text size and Clear Type has made it readable.

Winterfell pictures

The Primgraph: Issue 8 - October 2009 has articles and pictures featuring my Second Life homeland, the Dark Victorian regions of Winterfell. The link is to the First Life online edition, though I read my copy sat on the bench in my castle garden.


Er, not in this weather though - a photo I took last winter. Brrr! Click on the pictures and they will appear full size. The next one is of Port Amaranthine and Uni Ninetails Disney castle:


And finally another wintery scene, the sky garden above the clouds:

Website Stats

I use Statcounter.com, an excellent free service. It records stats for the most recent 500 visitors, and thus provides a rolling snapshot of Internet user preferences.

Browsers
MSIE 55%
Firefox 30%
Safari 5%
Chrome 4%

MSIE is split between versions 6, 7 and 8. MSIE 6 is the bugbear of webpage designers due to its many faults that require workrounds, but it is now down to 11%.

Resolution
1280x1024 40%
Unknown 27%
1024x768 25%
1152x864 7%
800x600 1%

It now seems safe to regard 1024 as the lowest width that needs to be accommodated. 'Unknown' is surprisingly high, looking elsewhere it seems to be mostly variations on 1280 such as 1280x800.

Operating Systems
Windows XP 54%
Windows Vista 28%
Unknown 8%
Linux 4%

And that with new improved Windows 7 almost here is as high as Vista will go. It remains to be seen how long businesses will hang on to XP 'because it works' and remain unconvinced that upgrading would be a financial net gain.

Spot the religion

Another contest folks! This is a graph of audience reaction to the latest adverts on American television from - let's say a certain well known bona fide religion that isn't a cult. You have guess at which moment in the advert the name of the religion was first given.

24 hours in limbo

On Friday Mr Blue Screen overran my machine and I had to call in the repairman. Fortunately I got a good (though expensive!) one as it took several hours to get everything sorted. It turned out the CPU fan was not speeding up when it should have been, the CPU was overheating and that most likely killed some memory and corrupted Windows.

So it was full reinstall time, after which Vista got down to downloading 30 months worth of Updates while I reinstalled programs. It took 3 days for Service Pack 1 to arrive, presumably Microsoft sensibly had security updates at the front of the queue.
The only glitch so far was overwriting my Firefox Bookmarks (duh). The latest Nvidia drivers didn't work well with my budget never state of the art card, so I reverted to the previous set. Thunderbird made no objection to my copying over all its data files in a single block.

The only problem that threw me was that my router had reacted to all this by dropping its Download speed, causing Second Life all kinds of problems. Rebooting it forced it to renegotiate speeds.

Let there be light

This is really just an illustration of how the Internet just works.

Houses have light switches. But can Second Life houses have light switches? I'm in the dark about this (ha ha), but let's try 'remote light switch second life' in Google.

http://code.google.com/p/secondlifelivelyscripts/
Here's not only the code I need but also two YouTube clips with the author's Avatar demonstrating how to do it. So I can download the code, Cut&Paste it into a Script holder in Second Life, and there it is.

Oh. One alteration required - American light switches are upside down. Easily changed...