Boomerang Settings

I've just about got Vista how I want it. Every now and then I do something which means I have to load or configure another program I used to use, but most of the time I can putter along and get things done. And I rather like my new workplace. Except for one thing.

Settings that I've changed keep reverting back to their previous values. I'm using a network storage device which is based on a Linux processor and uses SAMBA, so I have to modify a Local Security Policy to make it work. I can make the change fine, and the drive works fine for a while. Then the setting flips back to the original value. Similarly, to get Outlook to log on to our Exchange server I've had to add a registry key. Which keeps vanishing.

The only thing I can think of is that the system thinks it is under attack, and puts things back to their safe values. I've had a cursory dig around but nothing out there tells me how to fix it. Very strange.

Recipe for Pain

1. Take one Toshiba M400 laptop running Windows XP Service Pack 2.
2. Carefully image the M400 disk using Paragon Drive Backup 6.0 onto two separate external disks.
3. Carefully copy all the document files onto further external disks, so that you have plenty of copies of all the important stuff.
4. Install Windows Vista onto Toshiba M400, wiping hard disk in process.
5. Remember some crucial files that are not in the document directories you copied onto external drives, but hey, I've got a drive image backup so no problem.
6. Fail to find the Paragon Drive Image program CD.

New Year at Hornsea

First, a happy new year to both my readers. At Chateau Miles, we have been know to celebrate the arrival of a new calendar by heading off to the seaside at Hornsea. Today the weather looked reasonable, and so we set out. On the way there it seemed like a bad idea, in that we drove along underneath some very nasty looking clouds and the odd smattering of rain.

But when we got to the coast it was wonderful. It was very blustery, but this really seemed to blow out the cobwebs at the start of the year. It was also pretty busy, and one or two valiant souls had actually gone for a paddle. I'd taken the big camera, and so I took a bunch of snaps.

New Year seaside

Arcadia

Lights

Viva Pinata

I am weak. Very weak. Show me a sale with two XBOX 360 video games for 60 quid and I'm pretty much bound to buy a couple. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, I can resist pretty much anything but temptation. I ended up buying Test Drive Unlimited, a game which lets you tear up and down great chunks of Hawaii in a fast car, and Viva Pinata, a gardening game. Number one wife noted wryly that the only time that I will actually do any gardening is inside a computer, and this seems to be the case.

In the game you create a nice garden in the hope that wandering pinata will come and live there, breed, eat each other, and form a living ecosystem. Pinata are animated versions of those things that kids at posh birthday parties in Mexican restaurants smash open to get out toys and sweets and there seem to be an unlimited number of these which can crawl, burrow, fly, swim and so on.

The game is aimed firmly at children, so I reckoned I would be able to cope. And so it seemed when I started. A friendly girl with a voice able to convey more enthusiasm than a very enthusiastic thing tells you what to do in awed terms, and introduces you to your toolkit noting that "If you hit your pinata with the shovel they may become ill". So let's play nicely out there kids.

Anyhoo, a lot happens in a very short time. Within an hour I had my version of a green and pleasant land running nicely and a few different varieties of pinata living side by side, eating, breeding and throwing fireballs at each other. And it looks very pretty. The clock spins in accelerated real time and the sun and moon wax and wane very effectively.

And I realised one more thing that differentiates me from youngsters (and probably lots of grown ups as well). I think that, once they have picked up the control system, kids would now have the patience and determination to try making different pinata, plant different seeds, build new types of garden, put their own drawings on their own breeds and do all the other things which make the game so much fun. But I couldn't be bothered. I turned the joypad over to number one son, who has more of an appetite for this kind of thing and wandered off to do some proper work. In a trice he had added a whole bunch of trees and species that would have taken me ages to sort out.

I think the snag is that at my age if I'm going to spend any amount of time in a learning curve I like to think that I'm going to get something concrete out of it at the end, and a pretty new pinata just doesn't cut it for me. For me the game is just too much like gardening, in that it requires effort and thought, and I'd rather put those into something else, like messing around with computers (which is probably how I really enjoy myself).

However, if you are looking for a game to play with your kids which is bright, colourful and creates a living environment with genuine causes and effects and unlimited scope for experimentation and cooperation, then you should take a look.

A Dangerous Obsession

If you think about it, you really shouldn't let people with an obsessive nature anywhere near computers. When I was much younger I knew a chap called John. Actually, now I am older I still know a chap called John, but it is a different John, and not important right now. Anyhoo, John had one of the first microcomputers, a Nascom. It had a 25 lines of 40 characters display. And 8 KBytes of RAM. And he could write Basic programs on it and store them on a cassette tape. What power. I was dead jealous. One Monday he came in to work looking even more haggard and disheveled than ever, which for John was saying something. We asked him if he had enjoyed a pleasant weekend.

 "Not really" he replied "I wanted to see the robots feet and it took ages to get it to work".

Turns out that the Nascom had a display character set which contained graphical images, including little robots. Snag was that these were not displayed completely, because the screen hardware skipped some lines when it drew the raster. The feet were missed off. For John this was a bad thing. So he spent an entire weekend rewiring the hardware so that all the scan lines were drawn. And he could see his robots feet. We thought this was silly, and could hardly see the difference extra pixels made.

I was reminded of this during my attempts to get Vista Aero Glass to work on my Toshiba M200 this weekend. For those that don't know, Glass gives you a funky effect around each window, so you can sort of see through to the one beneath it. This adds very little to the usability of your computer, but it is very cute, particularly if you understand how fiendishly hard it is to draw this kind of thing. And my rather elderly Tosh machine can just about do it. But only if you download a special driver, customise the initialisation file and then throw in a registry hack. And it only sort of works, in that every now and then it runs out of display memory and drops back to boring old opaque window edges.

But getting glass on my desktop became very important to me, and I spent far too much time trying and failing to make it work. Finally I had a glass display running and I showed number one wife the finished result.

"I can't see the difference" she said.