Windows 7 was released as a public download on Monday. I downloaded yesterday, and am now testing on my tower system. A clean installation was a breeze and had finished within 30 to 45 minutes. This is much faster than a standard clean install of Vista. The user interface of Win7 hasn’t had much tweaking since Vista, with the main new feature being the updated taskbar. I can’t decide whether this lack of UI change is indicative of how the final product will look, or whether Microsoft are keeping the new design under their hats for a big flourish at launch time.

The BBC recently (14–16 March) repeatedly ran a show, 5 times in total, under the “click” banner on the BBC News channel highlighting the dangers of the so-called “botnet”. Excerpts from the show are here, here and finally here. What they did is paid some malware hackers for access to their botnet, and then recorded what they did with it. Two experiments they ran were sending of spam emails to specially set up email accounts, and a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on a security company’s (PrevX) backup site (after gaining permission to do so).

Well, would you believe that Adobe have created an application which will connect to your blog using the XMLRPC system of WordPress? Nor did I, until I spotted a blog entry from someone using an earlier version. The entry itself just mentions the cryptic phrase: At the moment, I’m using Contribute, which seems to be the easiest tool for this particular task Jared Rypka-Hauer A quick Google search reveals that the only “Contribute” of any worth is from Adobe.

I thought I’d post a revelation I’ve had while designing my brother’s site (as was briefly mentioned in my previous post). HTML and CSS based designs are actually more versatile than I originally thought. I’ve long been aware that you can use media="print" and media="screen" to separate out differing CSS rules for print media. However, I didn’t know just how useful this can be.. Take links, for e.g: in print media a piece of blue underlined text is pretty useless, as you cannot determine where the link originally pointed, only that a link existed.

I was reading through the Ten Most Violated Homepage Design Guidelines by Jakob Nielsen and one item struck my eyes as being important for the WordPress designers, along with designers of other CMS systems such as Joomla!, to take stock of. Namely “10. Don’t include an active link to the homepage on the homepage”. It is very common for people to use the default widgets that come with WordPress for listing links to their pages and important articles.

… and Shttr? (is that last one ‘shitter’?) https://www.youtube.com/embed/BeLZCy-_m3s The above video definitely does well at parodying the whole thing with Internet crazes. It seems that once one person comes up with a good idea suddenly everyone and his dog wants to get in on the action. What nobody seems to have twigged with twitter, though, is that they still haven’t come up with a viable business model to shore up the hemorrhaging of cash.