currybetdotnet Microsoft archive
Windows 7 overtakes Linux usage on guardian.co.uk in just 4 days
Windows 7 overtakes Linux usage on guardian.co.uk in just 4 daysOn the first Sunday after release, Windows 7 usage eclipses Linux for the first time.
Is 'Search online for "Act on CO2"' costing the taxpayer unnecessary pay-per-click money?
Tamlyn posted late last week after spotting that the Government's 'Act on CO2' campaign was asking people to search for the term rather than publishing a URL. It is a trend that Cabel Sasser noted is well established in Japan, where the fact that URLs have to be formatted in the Western alphabet is a significant marketing challenge. The trouble with the Government initiative is that once you announce that you are asking people to search for specific non-trademarked terms,...
Running Windows? Why you should always have a Linux live CD to hand
Earlier this year, through a bizarre chain of events and some admittedly gross stupidity, I allowed my Dell laptop running Windows XP to get absolutely riddled with nasty malware. After many hours wasted trying to fix it, it eventually prompted me to make the switch to using a Mac. After that, the Dell sat unwanted and unloved in the corner of our spare room. Until it was time to move, and I had to finally try to wrestle the precious...
Mumbai terrorist attacks show that search engines still can't get breaking news right
We are used to hearing that search engines are one of the primary routes that people find news on the net, but I've just been having a scout around the three major search engines as news of the terrorist attack in Mumbai unfolds, and I have to say that they are not performing very well. Google does have some news results inserted into the one word search for 'mumbai', but they are not in the top slot. Searching for 'india'...
Will last.fm ever ask for the last time?
I love last.fm. You love last.fm. Everybody loves last.fm. It is a cool poster child for the Web 2.0 generation, and the fact that they built their business model on avoiding paying streaming royalties in the UK as much as possible is neither here nor there to most people. But... ...installing the application on your Windows XP PC can be really sucky. The problem is that the Last.fm application seems to pay no attention to the account settings on the...
Trying out Silverlight - FAIL
I try and be platform neutral and agnostic as much as possible. This blog runs on a Debian Linux server from Bytemark, I work on a MacBook, my main PC is a Dell running Windows XP, and I get to play with the Linux-based Eee PC that my wife takes everywhere. My star sign is Libra and I like a balance in my OS experience. So I was fairly open-minded about trying out Microsoft's Silverlight. There has been some (inevitable...
The future of Excel - according to Doctor Who
Spoilers don't respect borders, and so even in Greece I know that tonight's Doctor Who sees the long awaited <SPOILER ALERT!>. It was nice to see something familiar in last week's episode too - although not the landscape of Midnight, which, thanks to the deadly Xtonic rays, had never been seen by human (or Time Lord) eyes before. No, what was reassuringly 21st century was the fact that however far into the future we are in the Whoniverse, it doesn't...
Newspaper "Site Search Smackdown": Round 6 - Google vs The Search Engine All-Stars
I've been running a series of Newspaper Site Search Engine Smackdowns to see which papers were able to index their own content faster than Google could. It turned out that the answer was not many, with only The Daily Express, Daily Mail and The Independent getting close to indexing news stories faster than Google's web search did. Although it is the dominant player in the market, Google is not the only search engine, so I also carried out the...
'Spyware!' or 'How I ditched Windows and learned to love the Mac'
I'm one of those people who have been happily running Windows on PCs since the early nineties, and have never had any problems with virus infections, adware, spyware, or other malicious programs. In fact, I'd quite got myself into the self-righteous position of thinking that anybody who did have problems clearly didn't know what they were doing with computers. So, it was somewhat dispiriting last month to discover that my laptop was riddled with a horrible infection. I know exactly...
Flickr users protest about Yahoo! takeover. Again.
The interweb's tubes have been buzzing that Flickr users are already in open revolt over Microsoft's offer to take-over Yahoo!, Flickr's parent company. Image by sebestyenistvan "A splinter faction of Flickr photo-sharing community members is threatening a symbolic 'mass suicide'" - Wired "I'm not cross and I'm not bitter - I'm just a little sad because I have a belief that things can be good/great without taking the obvious route". - grange85 "My fear is that over time they won't...
Greece cosies up to Microsoft
Bill Gates was in Athens yesterday, meeting Greek Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis. They were no doubt discussing the fact that a few days earlier the Greek Parliament ratified an agreement between the Greek State and Microsoft. Well, when I say the Greek Parliament ratified it, what I meant was that the Νέα Δημοκρατία party ratified it. All the opposition MPs universally opposed the deal - one even went as far as to call it 'colonial', whilst others claimed it was...
T-Mobile MMS addicted to Internet Explorer on the web
A friend sent me a picture message from the UK the other day. It originated from the T-Mobile network, and made its way across Europe to arrive on my non-MMS enabled Vodafone network phone in Greece. It appeared as a text message with a link and a password. I was very impressed with the whole cross-platform, cross-network, cross-national boundary operation. Until I got to the web bit of it course. The first thing that greeted me when I tried to...
Why doesn't the BBC iPlayer system tray icon use native Windows UI elements?
Well, it's been mostly iPlayer this and iPlayer that around here recently, and today is no different - and this time I have a bit of a user experience gripe. The iPlayer library software does something that really annoys me on Windows machines - not taking advantage fully of the common native UI elements. One of the reasons that any OS like Windows or a Mac OS has a standard set of UI elements is so that they can...
BBCi Toolbar for Internet Explorer - 2002 style
One of the things that has interested me in recently putting together OpenSearch plugins and Google Toolbar custom buttons for BBC and newspaper related searches, is the change in the nature of web development they represent over the last few years. I've been able to make all of these, with no official permission, in just a few hours, by stringing some XML together into a bunch of text files. They all seem to work fine so far. By contrast, one...
'Cancel' just doesn't seem to mean 'Cancel' for iTunes 7.2 on Windows
I've mentioned before that I haven't exactly been seeing eye-to-eye with iTunes 7.2 on my PC. It keeps getting upset and sparking Windows error dialogue messages if I run it without my iPod attached first, and won't quit without warning me every single time that iSproggler is using the iTunes scripting interface, am I sure I want to quit? More seriously though, I don't like the way that Apple do not follow the standard Windows OS conventions with some of...
The curse of annoying Windows XP speech bubble system alert pop-ups
Whenever I write complaining about some aspect of Microsoft's Windows OS, I usually get a couple of people pointing out that I should use something a bit more Linux-y. I have tried out a couple of flavours of Linux desktop, but so far I haven't found anything that does the trick for me. More importantly, the ubiquity of Windows in the business world means I'm pretty much stuck with it in order to do my work. Which doesn't stop me...
Free the BBC from the same old tired DRM debate
I was pointed via Wonderland yesterday at the Free The BBC site, where a petition is gathering against the BBC's proposed use of DRM in the upcoming iPlayer application. And of course, a quick look shows that this has sparked the same tired circular arguments on the backstage.bbc.co.uk mailing list. One person has been arguing that DRM is a bad thing because their sister accidentally wiped clean their iPod, whilst someone else is claiming the only basis for the BBC's...
Too many statistics? The National Statistics site runs out of memory
Whilst I was doing the research over the last few weeks for my articles about the Biased BBC blog, I came across quite a few usability and technical gremlins on the web. (Not least of which was the Haloscan comments system used by Biased BBC itself. Mirroring the "technical difficulties" it is claimed often mysteriously affect BBC Have Your Say debates if the tide of comments isn't going in the direction the BBC's 'bias' would prefer, I found that...
The depressing DRM debates on the BBC's backstage.bbc.co.uk mailing list
Since the announcement that the BBC's iPlayer would contain elements of Microsoft's DRM, and that any forthcoming versions for the Apple or Linux OS would also need to incoporate some type of DRM, a debate has been raging on the backstage.bbc.co.uk mailing list. Opinion is broadly split into two camps. There are those who understand that in order to facilitate any kind of on demand service, the BBC needs to protect the interests of the rights-owners involved in making...
The software used to access the BBC homepage: Beta software, edge products and conclusions - part 6
This is page 6 of a 6 page article - 1 2 3 4 5 6 Download a print version of this article Beta Software and Edge Products I was surprised to see quite a small penetration of the current beta software. With both Vista and IE7 out in the wild I expected to see a reasonable amount of use. Perhaps they just don't just have the buzz around them that open source does? IE7 has 0.04% browser share...
The software used to access the BBC homepage: Browser share - part 5
The software used to access the BBC homepage: Browser share - part 4
The software used to access the BBC homepage: Windows, Mac, Linux and legacy OS share - part 3
The software used to access the BBC homepage: Operating systems - part 2
The software used to access the BBC homepage
10 Out Of 100 Sample UK Websites Fail To Work Properly With Firefox
Dell and McAfee Require Internet Explorer 5.x or higher
English Heritage forced redirect for Firefox users
Microsoft Research Paper on software re-design
Marc Smith from Microsoft Research at the BBC
Yahoo! and MSN both tweaking their search
When lack of standards compliance makes the news
"I hate Macs" says salesperson
Amazing MSN Messenger marketing co-incidence
MSN will protect your children
MSN ditches chat - Gillian Kent urges everybody to adopt Instant Messenger
Microsoft using MSNBOT to build its own search engine
Bizarre search terms on MSN - and BBCi
A third of FTSE 100 websites tied to Microsoft browsers
UK conservative in its search taste
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"Journalism in the digital age"
I'll be appearing on a panel with Sarah Hartley and Iain Hepburn at the Edinburgh International Science Festival on Sunday April 11th. More details...
Posts of the moment
Day of the Triffids
If everyone suddenly went blind, how long would the Internet survive, and could you still publish news on it?
With professionals of this quality, who needs 'citizen journalist' enemies?
It is hard to argue that ethics and quality set the 'professional journalist' apart from the amateur blogger, if the 'professional' keeps publishing articles so wrong that they have to be deleted.
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- Working at the BBC (2000 - 2005)
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Contact: martin dot belam at currybet dot net. © Martin Belam where appropriate.
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