Oh Microsoft what are you doing these days? I’m trying to defend you, I’m trying really hard. I do all I can to stave off the Mac Attck that’s going on in my office. Of our 5 partners 4 of them own Mac’s. And they all like them. A lot. You know what they don’t like, Vista

They tell me “but my Mac never crashes and boots in a flash”. I can only counter with “your Mac can’t do X or Y and Vista does” (please don’t start a flame war over that, I’m trying to be general here). They grunt at me and sulk away, unhappy that not only are they right where they started but that their IT guy has to tell them this is just how it is. That really sucks for me now doesn’t it? Yet I defend you still. Sure there are a lot of great things about Vista, but there really is no killer application that demands it. I moved us to Vista very quickly so we could all play with the “latest and greatest”. Could it be that after a year it’s biting us in the ass?

Lately I’ve patiently waited for Vista Service Pack 1. This is currently in beta testing and while I’m curious to see how it will be I’ve avoided the temptation to get an early copy. Beta service packs generally aren’t a fun thing to play with. Then this morning I see an article with tests showing that XP is almost 3 times as fast as Vista running the latest beta service packs. Three times. Then Jason emails me the article, obviously pointing out to me that “look, see I told you Vista is fucking slow”. You know what, he’s right. Microsoft what are you doing? You’re making me look stupid, that’s what. Look, I understand that Vista is a much richer experience and therefore is going to require some additional overhead. We’ve had that sort of thing with every Windows release. But XP IS THREE TIMES FASTER?!? I also know these are the beta service packs so for now I’m going to give you a final benefit of the doubt. But you’re really going to have to pull it together and pull it together very quickly!

So please, please don’t make me look any worse. Make life easier for me. Me, one of your biggest supporters. Don’t make me move to OS X or Linux. I won’t. I can’t. But I just might have to…

Some say that he was once a scarecrow, and that his favorite meal is wood dipped in brake fluid. All we know is that he’s called the Stig.

Some say, hes a woman, others say he is a man, we are pretty sure its the latter, but we do know, he’s The Stig.

Some say he perches on rooftops at night and turns into stone, others say he sleeps in a graveyard. What we do know, is he’s called the Stig.

Some say hes more machine than man and that he eats children for dinner, all we know is he’s called the Stig

Some say his teeth are made of carbon fibre, others say he has no neck, all we know is he’s called the Stig.

Some say his earwax tastes like turkish delight, all we know is he’s called the Stig.

Some say he used to be a rocking horse, and that his liver is made of reinforced tin. All we know is that he’s called The Stig.

Some say he can change gear with his tongue, and his hair is made of gravy, all we know is hes called the Stig.

Some say his skin is slippery as a dolphin’s, others say he has no eyelids. All we know is he’s called the Stig.

Some say he can hide in the shadows of an engine, while being hidden in the shadows of tires. While being white with a hint of black, we know him as The Stig.

Some say that he has a fetish for electric fans. Others say his blood mainly consists of the volatile alkali metal caesium. All we know is, he’s called the Stig.

Some say he never sleeps and that his eyes are glued open, all we know is hes called the Stig.

Some say he shot 2Pac, others say he killed Kurt Cobain, all we know is, he’s called The Stig.

Some say he likes castrol GTX on his french fries, others say he is incapable of distinguishing the difference between the colors red and green. All we know is he’s called the Stig.

Some say he doesn’t see normally, he just sees green numbers scrolling down the front of his face. All we know is that he’s called The Stig.

Some say the ancient Greek’s worshiped him, and he has only a single eye. What we do know is that he’s called the Stig.

Some say he is the love child of a tomahawk jet fighter and a 80’s prostitute, but all we know is he is the Stig.

Some say hes blind and drives on sense, Some say hes not human, all we do know is hes called the Stig.

Some say he eats Citreon 2CV’s for breakfast, others say he really does listen to some shocking music, but alas all we truly know is that he is The Stig.

Some say he once had a third hand sticking out of his belly button, others say he’s married to a sasquatch. All we know is that he’s called the Stig.

Some say he uses diesel like we use gravy, and that his arsehole is like twin exhaust pipes. What we do know is that he’s called the Stig.

Some say that all his thinking functions are carried out by his toes, and his head holds a giant stereo. All we know is, he’s called the Stig.

Some say he can fly, others say he has no toes, all we know is, he’s called The Stig.

Some say he’s scared of diesel engines, and hell spat him back out. All’s we know is he’s called the Stig.

Some say he can drive from the passenger side, others say he has no hands and he telepathically drives the cars. All we know is that he’s called the Stig.

Some say his laugh sounds like a broken accordion, others say he can fly using his ears. All we know is, he’s called the Stig.

Some say that he has no face and that his hands are superconductive…. all we know is, he’s called The Stig.

Is it just me or is everyone else annoyed with the amount of “add-on” software that is embedded in commercial software these days. Just about every time I install something I get asked “Install the Ask toolbar?” “Install the Google toolbar?” “Weather.com desktop?” – on and on. If I wanted these tools I would have installed them myself!

This doesn’t bother me nearly as much with freeware or open source software. These guys are giving their stuff away and for each user that does fall victim install it they get a little kick back. Having written open source software before I think this is a great way for these guys to make a little cash on the side. Where it really REALLY bothers me is with software I’ve paid for. Most recently Nero 7 Ultra (there are many examples). I paid $100 for this software (which does work very well) and I have to say “no, don’t install the Ask toolbar” and “No, don’t install Weather desktop” (the default choice is to install them). So I already paid for this software but they are still trying to squeeze every last dime out of me?!?! Too bad it really is my favorite burning software or I’d be kicking it to the digital curb.

So please commercial software developers stop this shit and stop it now. Remember we already paid for your software, we knew what we wanted when we bought it. Stop with the add-ons already, you’re not a car dealer!

Recently I thought the media had gone completely insane, well apparently I was wrong. While that was pretty ridiculous to me I think this is much worse.

During tonight’s CNN/Youtube debate (where voters can submit video questions to Youtube) CNN is adding a new “feature” – they are going to display a graph on screen showing the reactions of the in studio audience in real-time. At first I thought this sounded cool, or at least my inner-geek did. How neat to get the real-time feedback in a cool and visual way. My inner-geek was quickly quieted by my inner wanna-be-smart-guy who realized how stupid this is. Not only does the media spin just about everything now they are actively flavoring our opinions of candidates as we listen to what they say. This is just insane – isn’t the point of these debates for us to make up our own minds? Do we really need the collective opinion of a bunch of strangers? I’m not really a conspiracy theorist but what’s keeping CNN in check and making sure the numbers they are putting up are accurate. I’m hoping someone but this is just way too much for me.

So I’ll be skipping this debate, I’d much rather make up my own mind…

One of the great things in Windows Vista (yes there are a few) is the new imaging format that Microsoft introduced, and with that the imaging tool imagex.exe. In short this tool allows you to boot from a special WinPE boot disk to both capture the image and to deploy it to new machines. I won’t go into the details of creating these disks or images, but rather how to use these tools to deploy a Vista image to a MacBook Pro running Leopard and Bootcamp.

First you’ll use the Bootcamp utility in Leopard to create the partition for Vista. I chose a 32GB partition as Vista isn’t going to be the primary OS on this box. After creating the partition reboot using your WinPE disk (I created a DVD that held WinPE and the actual image file – WinPE doesn’t have the network drivers for the MacBook Pro so no loading over the network). Once you get booted into WinPE you’ll need to reformat the drive as NTFS (but don’t change ANYTHING else). You can do this with diskpart:

——————–
(at a command prompt inside WinPE)
diskpart
select disk 0
select partition 3
format fs=ntfs quick
exit
——————–

Once you’re done there you’re now ready to blow the image onto the machine. The general syntax for this is:

——————–
imagex /apply IMAGENAME.wim 1 c:
——————–

For my image it took about 12 minutes to install and be ready to go. When it’s done you’ll need to eject the CD/DVD. To do this as the machine is booting (just as you see the gray Apple screen) press and hold the mouse button until it ejects. Once it ejects you’ll probably boot back into Leopard. Once in Leopard go to System Preferences – Start Up Disk, choose your Windows install and reboot. But there is now a new issue…

For some reason when the image loads it won’t be bootable. So we’ll need an original Vista DVD to fix this. Boot from the Vista DVD and once you get to the installer (after choosing your language) choose Repair my Computer. On my box when I did this it never listed any Vista installs to repair, don’t worry about this it should still work. Once you get to the repair options choose Fix Startup Problems (or something like that). This will run for a few minutes letting you know that it might have fixed things (and hopefully it did). Power down and as you boot back up be sure to press the mouse button again to eject the DVD. You should now boot into Vista for the first time (depending on your image this should be the Vista startup environment). Complete your Vista install as normal (remember the Leopard DVD has the Vista drivers on it so don’t forget to install those).

So I now have Brad’s MacBook Pro happily dual booting between Leopard and my Vista Business image. A huge time saver for me now that I don’t have to manually install Vista and all his apps. Next up, getting Parallels and/or VMWare Fusion to open the Bootcamp partition so I can use the same Vista install inside Leopard, hope that’s easier than this was…

Maybe at first you thought “why would you want to turn off auto updates, they keep my computer safe”, well while that sounds all well and good (and is good if you’re a “home” user) for business users auto update can really suck. Let me explain.

Windows Vista’s version of auto update can kill you. Well, not literally but it can cost you a ton of work if you’re not careful. See Vista’s auto update will force a reboot on you, not asking first (it’ll warn you slightly) and just quickly say “fuck you, I’m going to close what you’re working on and reboot right now”. No last chance to stop it, no big warning that flashes “danger, danger, reboot coming and you can’t stop me!”. In short it can really suck and cost you tons of time in lost data. I can’t count the number of times I’ve come back to a Vista box that rebooted itself closing and not saving lots of work that I had open. Sure I should be better about saving my stuff as I go (and I am) but mostly it’s just a pain in the ass. This gets much much worse when the patches fail. Recently there was an update that failed on all our Vista boxes (not sure why just yet) causing them to reboot over and over trying to install the patch. Install, reboot, fail, reboot, wait, try again, reboot, fail, reboot – on and on. And as slow as Vista reboots this costs lots of lost productivity (and can be extremely frustrating).

So what to do? Well the simplest thing is to turn this crap off all together, but you’ll also want to purge any updates that are waiting in the wings to install themselves. I’ve written a little script for this, all you need to do is paste this into a command prompt and you’ll be all set.

——————-
NET STOP WUAUSERV
del /f /s /q C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution
sc config WUAUSERV start= disabled
——————-

That will stop Windows Update, clear out all pending updates, then set the auto update service to disabled. You don’t want to do this on a home machine unless you have to, you really do want to be getting those updates to be sure your safe. But on a business machine where stability comes first I think this is an important change to make. Just be sure if you do turn off the auto updates that you’re (or someone is) checking regularly to be sure you’re as up to date as possible.