I can't let a whole month go by without posting here... but I see that I have already. And I'm not going to cheat and retroactively post something on my birthday, or something like that. For what it's worth, we've almost been too busy to celebrate, what with trying to find a house that doesn't fall through for some reason or other, and working like crazy on, well, work stuff. I'm going to have to take a day off at some point just to catch up on sleep.

And speaking of Birthdays, thanks to J & A for the marvellous dinner and company at Celadon. I usually try to figure out something fun about my age, but this time I shall wimp out and say only that I believe it is the same as the number of unique shapes that can be formed out of 7 equal triangles of indentical size.

I have a new favorite programming font: Damieng's Envy Code R. 

My old favorite was Microsoft's Office 2007 Consolas, and my initial reaction to Envy Code R was that it wasn't as readable. But very quickly I decided I liked it more. It looks great with ClearType smoothing, it looks good at ridiculously small point sizes, and the O and 0 characters are distinct.

This is happening every time I click on Send/Receive in Microsoft Outlook:

Yes I have rebooted since I last had this happen. It is still happening. Am I expected to re-install Outlook now? Usually you can avoid this shit (and it is a travesty that I even have to use the word "usually" because this kind of unforgivable interaction is par for the course with MS) by installing the products in order of release, but Expression Web is a more recent product than Outlook 2003, and yes I installed Expression Web after Office 2003. So clearly you can't even depend on that strategy any more.

I guess I'll try the solution described here: Expression Web Ruminations.

It appears to have worked. Did I over-react? What should my expectation be?

26 June 2008: The fires in California have turned the sky around San Francisco Bay grey, and the sun pink.

I'm writing this post from inside of Firefox running on Ubuntu 8.04 on my Sony Vaio laptop. Let me give props to the Ubuntoi, because the install process was very smooth, and it detected my screen resolution first time (1280x800) and the networking/internet connectivity just worked. I can contrast this experience with the Windows XP Professional install I performed yesterday on the other partition, and let me tell you, it was all about 800x600 and no network until I had installed the Sony-specific drivers downloaded laboriously last week from support.sony.com.

But let's rewind and discuss some background: My laptop hard drive has been filling up and I was short on free space. So I went into a frenzy of backing up important personal files, uninstalling unused applications, defragging, etc, and after a while it really felt like time to perhaps reinstall the operating system from scratch.

Many people will criticize Windows and even call the need to periodically reinstall the OS the "Windows Tax". Let me say here and now that Windows XP has been running flawlessly on my laptop for a year and a half without blue-screening once. It went to sleep, hibernated, did everything a boy could want, and never complained. It has been great, and my urge to "clean house" had nothing to do with the OS performance.

The thing about Windows XP dropping out of the retail channel as of June 30 reminded me that I had no easy way to recover my laptop OS if something happened to the hard disk. Sony Laptops have a special, hidden partition that contains "system restore" information that, if you hold your tongue the right way on bootup (and press F10 or something), will reformat your main partition and put things back the way they were when I bought it. Coupla things wrong with that:

• It's Windows XP Media Center Edition, with multi-megabytage of extra stuff I don't want, not counting the shovelware stuff like AOL or whatever;
• What if the hard drive fails? 

I could have sent away for the (optional?!) set of System Restore CD's but chances are it would be Vista Home Premium version, *vomit*, (which actually would have come with the laptop when I bought it except that Vista *ahem* wasn't ready yet). Also, there was a utility on the harddrive that would create the System Restore CDs for me if I asked nicely and gave it a couple of blank CD-Rs to play with. So I did that.

Now, I was free to reclaim that unuseable space, if I repartioned the drive... and I'd be able to restore Windows from the CDs.But that would still leave me with Window MCE. And I've heard that Windows Server 2003 makes a really nice desktop OS... so perhaps this was a good opportunity to try it out?

Yeah, long story short: Windows Server 2003 is particular about the device drivers it talks to. By default, I had 1024x768 non-native LCD resolution,un-accellerated graphics, and no network connectivity. The afore-mentioned Sony drivers looked like they were going to work: first networking... success! Then video.... no go. And neither Sony nor Intel make Windows Server 2003 drivers for the hardware in my Vaio.And believe me, once I got the Ethernet driver loaded, I searched for them.

No biggie. Back to tried and trusted Windows XP - Professional this time, not the MC edition. I booted up on my Norton Partition Magic 8.0 CD to re-format C: ready for the next attempt, and discovered that, somehow, it recognised Windows Server was there and refused to run! Really! It said "Partition Magic is not supported on Windows Server. Press any key to reboot" or words to that effect. And here I was thinking that I was booting on the CD in order to take the installed OS out of the equation...

To the rescue: my Ubuntu 8.04 Live CD. This is a great tool. Booting on the Live CD puts you into a Linux desktop, and System->Administration->Partition Editor, and you're there. It can reformat a partition with NTFS despite the fact that you're running Linux. I think that was when I noticed that Linux got the screen resolution and network connectivity working without breaking a sweat...

Ok. So I decided now was a good time to give Linux (or to be precise, the Ubuntu distribution of Linux) a fair shake, and used the partiion editor to create three partions on the 100GB hard disk: 47GB for Windows, 47 GB for Linux, and 4 GB left over for Linux swap space. (It's easy to overlook this until too late. Fortunately, the Ubunu install gently reminds you to do it - but I'm getting ahead of myself.)

Rebooting on the Windows XP Professional CD followed, and the Sony drivers all installed cleanly, leaving me with a much less cluttered environment than when I first started using the Vaio. I got web browsing and email working, then said "What the heck" and rebooted on the Ubuntu Live CD, this time selecting the Install option.

Which prety much brings us up-to-date. I have configured Evolution for email and so far it seems to work. Obviously web browsing is working. I have no idea what my IP address is... so what are the next steps?

• Finding out what the linux-equivalent to IPCONFIG /ALL is;
• Getting me some Microsoft TrueType font goodness (the default fonts in Ubuntu are ok, but not great);
• Seeing if I can get Wireless networking to function;
• Sleeping? Hibernating? Power Management?
• How do I take a screenshot?
• Can I see my LinkStation 250 attached network storage? (That's where my backups are)

The File Types tab has been removed from Folder Options. This feature was available from Windows 95 up to Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.

The File Types tab allowed users to change the file associations for various types of files. It allowed configuring which application would open when a user clicked on a certain type of file, or allowed manually defining a new file extension, defining/editing custom secondary actions, showing extensions only for specific file types, or customizing the file icon. While there is a more simplified option to change the file associations, called Default Programs in the Windows Vista Control Panel, this option only allows users to change the default action that occurs when they double click a file. It does not allow users to choose which application would load if the user were to right click on a file and then choose a secondary option such as Edit.

The Open With dialog box in Windows Vista also uses the corresponding Default Programs API which limits only one registered application to be set as the default program. It is also not possible to navigate/jump to a particular extension using the alphanumeric keys on a keyboard; scrolling is required.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_removed_in_Windows_Vista#Windows_Shell

So that empty nest we noticed when we moved in 6 months ago is now occupied. We think she is the mate of the little guy with the red plumage. Interestingly, we haven't seen much of him lately. Perhaps he's done a runner. Anyway, Mrs Bird is always there, looking out at us, or sitting on the edge of the nest with her arse in the air and her head down in the bottom of the nest arranging things. Perhaps she is turning her eggs.

This is pretty cool. I took it with the built-in camera on the Nokia cell phone, at around 1:30pm, during a quick walk after lunch:

The cell phone camera doesn't capture colours accurately; is pretty low resolution; and has this halo effect that you can't really avoid. But the results can be quite good! I suppose it helps to be in a picturesque location. You wouldn't know from the picture that it was very bright sunlight and 92 degrees. It all looks very tranquil and mild.

Thanks to the trial version of Synful Orchestra, which I am currently evaluating, Here is a version of the Fugue from The God Program (a work in progress), arranged for "String Quartet":

Fugue (arranged for string quartet) (mp3):

There are 5 days remaining in my trial period and I'm still debating whether it is worth the money. Would it kick off a surge of musical inspiration? It might. That would be worth something.

With careful tweaking of MIDI data, Synful Orchestra is capable of landing pretty much in the uncanny valley of emulated instruments. It's good - but it is not going to fool anyone and they might back away from the sound, saying "something doesn't quite sound right here but I'm not sure what".

This little guy shows up in the morning and evening and sings for about 10 minutes before flying off somewhere. He's very regular in his schedule. So far we have not indentified him.

I took this picture (one of 12, the only one that had him in focus) through the slats of our window blinds.

Normally he faces towards the house and we can see his glorious red-orange waist-coat.

He's about 4 inches tall.