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So the court case about Windows Media player rolls on, albeit that it’s somewhat obsolete. The court case, not the software. More on it in a minute…

Microsoft contend that customers don’t want a media player free version of Windows. They’ve not sold a copy. This isn’t, perhaps, surprising. I’d have bought one, except none were actually available to consumers. Also, given the choice between the two versions, just with or without Media player, for the same price, well, people will choose with. Even if they don’t want it.

It’s like, given the choice of a burger with a gherkin, or searching all over the place for a burger without a gherkin, most people will accept the easy to find burger, and TAKE OUT THE GHERKIN. Much the same has happened here - except that people can’t take the gherkin out as Microsoft have tied it to the OS. Again. Internet Explorer - ring any bell? And that worked, didn’t it? Read more »

So, one of my colleagues set up Sharepoint to index some external blogs. Just as a bit of an experiment, and maybe a way of capturing people’s (possibly, though not normally) temporary blog postings.

Well, the server dutifully set off to index the Internet. Yeah, not a few blogs but the whole enchillada. Unsurprisingly, when I went to the machine, it was reporting ‘Low Disk Space’. A brief search showed up some ma-hooo-sive (i.e. large) index files.

“Right”, I thought as I looked at a report saying ‘0 bytes free’, “I’ll clear the indexes”

Wrong. I went to the search administration pages, and tried to reset the indexes. I got no response - no error, nothing. My browser just showed the ‘page loading’ bar. No page ever loaded.

So I set the blogs path to be excluded, and tried to run a full index - again, no result.

In the end, the only answer I found was (get this), deleting the index file by hand. Then you can do exciting things like, I dunno, reset the indexes or run a full reindex. It appears that having the disc full prevented Sharepoint from being able to do anything with the indexes. Which was fun, as they were filling the disc.

So, lately at work we’ve started dealing more with Microsoft products, so I sort of think I should blog about them, if only to remind myself of the things I’ve discovered - like yesterday and my efforts with Sharepoint. Anyway, that’s for another posting.

It sort of goes against the grain to talk about Microsoft stuff, but some of the things I’ve been working with lately - Sharepoint, Biztalk, Content Management Server - are actually pretty good. Okay, so they tie you to MS SQL-Server, IIS, IE, Visual Studio (uck), Windows, Office, and the kitchen sink, but in terms of what they give users, they’re neat products actually. Sharepoint - well, it’s not a master of anything, but it’s pretty good at many things. CMS, well, it did what it said on the tin. Biztalk - silly name, but a good idea.

If they could just unbundle the browser, web server, database and IDE, that’d be great.

You can’t control the space between a bullet point on a list-item, and the text that follows it. That’s a real pain - I was trying to put bullets into a narrow column. Controlling the indent was, well, tricky too.

Why is CSS unable to style obvious things like this? I mean, radio buttons? Checkboxes? Grrr…

Comments from my old blog:

Workaround = ditch the standard bullet, create an image, place it left top, use some left padding.

By Rew at 02:18:37 Thursday 4th May 2006

Hey Rew,

Yeah, considered that, but it was too complicated - I was driving this through Microsoft Content Management Server - the users have access to ‘unordered lists’, but asking them to just use images would have been a bit too much.

Plus, it would make site-wide changes impossible.

By Andy at 13:43:27 Friday 5th May 2006

Tags: CSS