As if Windows sniffed out my intentions, it refused to boot this morning. Only 1 day after I thought I’d give the Linux platform a proper go.

So now I’m running SUSE 9.3 which installed from the DVD a burned a few days ago fairly easy.

I’ve cheated somewhat though – I’m using a friendly KDE inteface for all my woes. And YaST is doing most of the configuration.

Which really should be how it is.

My first trouble was getting onto the internet. I like my work PC to have a manual IP address on my network for remote access purposes. In Windows, all the IP settings that I need are in a single friendly tab. YaST sees them dotted around in 3 different menus.

Not incredibly intuitive to begin with. And there have been other issues, but it’s almost midnight and I have another computer to build before tomorrow. I’d better get cracking.

The Google sidebar happened to allow me to drop into the following blog:
Armed and Dangerous » Blog Archive » Site theme no longer completely sucks.

Gripping title, isn’t it?

The crux of it is that all designers are morons because it’s sometimes preferable to use fixed width styles.

Really?

I think there’s a time and a place for fixed width styles. In fact, I’m proud of the paper-layout style that the Centaur Systems website has.

On the flip-side, the Imhotep theme that bloggingIT is using had to be modified to make the margins smaller. Although, the values were percentages, and not fixed-width as it first appeared.

Nine-times out of ten, wasted space is pretty awful – but I personally use a 1600 x 1200 resolution, and I couldn’t bear to use my browser in full screen mode. Why call them windows if you’re just going to full the screen?

There’s one thing that Eric Raymond get wrong. That is that the user should have the right to alter anything in a design. If that’s so, why bother with design at all? Good design has all the elements that are needed for 99.9% of users – and the designer then has the right to allow / restrict as much changes as necessary. If that means fixing the width of a web page

– so be it.

I see that MS Office 2003 Service Pack 2 is now available for download through Microsoft Update.

I’m actually impressed with how well Microsoft Update appears to work. When I got home from work today, there was an update icon in my tray with Service Pack 2 ready to install.

Although, every cloud has a silver lining, and every bin has a bin liner.

Although the installation is fine, the update process lets itself down by having to restart once the installation is complete.

Bah!

As for the service pack, no new features seem to have been introduced. Although if you do want it, a list of changes is available for download.

Now I’d better go and reboot my PC…

A classic example of online forms and the trickery involved at the PC Pro magazine awards.

Spot the last-minute change?
No doubt that by the time you get to the third category, most people will not be reading the fine print. It seems quite coincidental that the last two advertising methods happen to be the most direct.

Changing the default user profile is not a particularly daunting task. In fact, my experiences show that in Windows 2000, XP and 2003, it’s a relatively painless experience.

• Logged in as a local administrator, create a new user account.
• Log out and log in as that user.
• Log back in as an administrator.
• Enable Show hidden files and folders
• Go to the documents and settings folder on the system drive, and into the newly created user profile.
• Copy the ntuser.dat file to the Default User folder, overwriting the existing profile.

That’s it! Of course, you can use the Microsoft friendly method instead if your OS supports it.

I’ve read a disturbing blog today while trying to find something totally different on the internet. The PhysOrg.com Science Technology Blog
has an article outlining that the next Palm Treo will be running a Windows mobile platform rather than the traditional Palm OS.

A joint venture between the two no less.

So what does that mean for the Palm OS? Who knows. As a Palm T3 owner, I’ve found the Palm OS to be fast and slick. The interface was designed with the intention of being used in your palm, not by following Windows UI guidelines.

Let’s just hope the Palm OS will continue in some form.