Christian Aid Humber Bridge Cross

Today we walked across the Humber Bridge for money. The money wasn’t for us, it was for the Christian Aid appeal that has organised these sponsored crossings for several years. We’ve done the walk many times. The first time, with very young kids and a pushchair we managed to cross the bridge four times. Since then the weather has been nowhere near as good, but today it was bright and just a bit blustery so we managed to get over the bridge and back again.  Of course I took the big camera and the wide lens.

That windmill used to be used to grind chalk.

Obligatory tower shot.

Office 2010 Now on MSDN

If you are lucky enough to have an MSDN subscription you can now head over there and download Office 2010 Professional Plus. This gives you Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher,  Access, InfoPath and a bunch of SharePoint goodies as well. There are two versions, for 32 bit and 64 bit installations.

If you want to use the 64 bit one you will have to uninstall all the previous 32 bit versions of Office 2007, including any compatibility tools and viewers, but the installer talks you through this and tells you what to do. It looks like the 64 bit version is well worth the effort, it loads in a trice and seems a bit more snappy than the 32 bit one.

Once the programs get running they look very snazzy too. Outlook found all my previous details and just works a treat. There are some nice improvements that I’m finding as I use the programs. The mini “Start” button has been replaced by a File tab on the menus (which makes sense) and the way you modify styles in Word hasn’t changed (which is just as well, as I only found out how to do that in Word 2007 last week).

For me the big news is the SharePoint integration and the group working options which look very interesting.

Iron Man 2 Movie Review

Went to see Iron Man 2 last week. Take one spoonful of Fantastic Four light heartedness and add two spoonfuls of Spiderman angst. Throw in a bar of soap and a bunch of high grade special effects and you are done.

The movie wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t that great either. The first one seemed to have more of a plot than this one, which had a whole saggy lump in the middle where our hero has an “end-life crisis”. I can’t fault the acting, Robert Downey JR is very watchable in the title role, but I would really have liked a little bit more than one robot fighting another robot (or bunch of robots). If you like superhero films you won’t be disappointed, but I don’t think you’ll be that overwhelmed either.

Farewell Jake

I got some bad news over the weekend. Jake has passed away. He came to see us way back in 2005 and I grabbed a snap of him which has turned up in my XNA books and lots of talks and demos I’ve done. He was the nicest dog I’ve ever met.

Running Windows 7 64 Bit on a Macbook Pro I didn’t know was old..

I’ve had so much success with 64 bit Windows 7 on my new Dell Laptop I thought I’d put it on my MacBook Pro. I got this around 2 and a half years ago and it has been quite reliable, only needing a new power supply, battery and system board so far. Thank heavens for AppleCare.

But I digress. I bought a new hard disk and got number one son to fit it. Then we installed OS X and fired up BootCamp which is the Apple program to partition the drive and put Windows on it. At the appointed time I put my Windows 7 64 bit distribution disk in the machine to begin the install. And I got a very strange error message, as if the disk was stuck at a menu I hadn’t seen before.

Turns out that the Windows 7 64 bit DVD uses a format that doesn’t work on old (i.e. made more than 18 months ago) Macs. After a bit of searching I found my way to a web site that explained how to make a new DVD that worked OK.  The command I used (with my not-working DVD in drive d:) is this one:

oscdimg.exe -n -m -bd:\boot\etfsboot.com d:\ c:\windows7x64.iso

The oscdimg program is provided by Microsoft for making disk images. Once it had finished I then had an image on drive C:  which I could burn to make a working disk. I still have it. I’m going to put it somewhere safe.

Anyhoo, that got Windows 64 bit working on my machine and then I hit a second snag. The machine is so old that Apple don’t provide a version of BootCamp for it. This means that I couldn’t do the automated install of all the Apple and other drivers to make it work properly. The good news is that I’ve got all the important bits working without it and I’m sure I can live without the light up keyboard. From a performance point of view everything is fine, and I can now use all of the 4Gbytes of memory the machine has inside.  If you have an older Mac I’d definitely recommend the move to 64 bit.