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Okay, so many of my colleagues are away on holiday at the moment, and that can make getting everyone into one room to show them a presentation difficult.

Unfortunately, I wanted to show some of out Sales and pre-sales guys some of the ’standard’ customisations to search that I was working on last month. I could do screenshots and Powerpoint - but it’s slower to create, and not as easy to see as a video.

Well, I’d heard of Camtasia, and it transpires they’ve a 30 day free, so I thought I’d give it a go. Well, it is very good. Clearly, there is a lot to the program - much more than I’ve used - but I was able to get a video recorded showing my stuff in an hour. Not bad when the film itself is 20 minutes long!

It has some really neat features, too, like zooming and panning to where you’ve clicked, so that if you’ve only got a small video resolution you can still see the important bits on an activity at 100% zoom.

What I would say is that the documentation and introductory videos do seem to gently suggest that planning what you’re going to demonstrate might be useful - and they’re right. I’d say from my short experience that planning what you’re going to do is essential. As is a decent mike - my seemed to struggle a bit.

Anyway, would I pay $300 for it? Well, for the company, yes, it’s a snap. It isn’t something that a ‘home’ user is likely to pay that for, but for business quality screen recordings, I wouldn’t look any further.

I’ve just upgraded to WordPress 2.5 - my blog was complaining that I should upgrade - and it feels rather like a downgrade.

I can deal with the fact that the Admin UI isn’t as good as it was - although the Dashboard has improved - but authoring posts has got worse:

• Uploading an image - didn’t work out of the box. I had to install a plugin to make that work. Now it reports that the upload failed, though it succeeded.
• Image thumbnailing is not as good - my thumbnails keep getting their left and right edges cut off.
• Creating links in the WYSIWYG text editor just shows me a blank box - I have to switch to edit HTML view and put them in there.

Come on chaps, this isn’t release ready - you shouldn’t have been advising users to upgrade yet. Everyone, steer clear until these issues are fixed. Perhaps it would be a lot easier to not use Flash, eh?

I didn’t realise this, but Visual Studio allows you to see comments beginning TODO, HACK and UNDONE in the task list pane. That’s really quite neat, though it’s unfortunate that the list only contains items for files that are currently op open in the IDE. You can also add your own ‘tokens’ via the Options > Task List dialog. Vish has a pretty good summary. It’s just a shame that the task list isn’t for all files, irrespective of whether they’re open or not. Still, a neat feature that I didn’t know about.

A note for myself, ‘cos I get really annoyed about Explorer opening at the ‘My Documents’ folder - you can set the default path to the machines root by changing Explorer’s menu shortcut to:

%SystemRoot%\explorer.exe /n, /e, /select, C:\

I found this advice here. And if you’re wondering why I’d want this - I have a laptop for business stuff, and a desktop for Virtual Machines only. Now I just have to figure out how to work across the two machines…

A really neat tip by Andrew Woodward - Vista contains a screen capture tool - type ‘Snip’ into the Start Menu’s search box…

I got a new laptop, and it came with Vista. To be honest, I didn’t really want Vista, but it’s being pushed in a big way - XP laptops are pretty rare already. (What I REALLY wanted was a Linux laptop, but that’s another matter).

Unfortunately, on firing up the machine and connecting it to my wireless hub, it could only see parts of the web. With my work laptop, sat right next to it, I could see any site that I tried to look at, but my new Vista laptop couldn’t - it couldn’t find microsoft sites, McAfee, Mozilla.com, cNet.com, etc.. But it could find google (and other sites) right away.

So, I tried pinging these sites - and got a response. But I couldn’t ever get a web page back. Curious.

I’ve seen this before, so I tried changing the MTU (Maximum Transfer Unit) settings for my machine - only to discover that they’ve moved in Vista. So, I found a little application to change the settings. I restarted, and it continued to not work.

Curious. So I took my laptop to work, and tried the problem sites there. Over my work connection, I could see whatever sites I wanted to. This upped it to Curious and Frustrating - it was some sort of inter-relationship between Vista, and my connection at home.

Thus, I contacted Belkin support. They took a wee while over replying, but I received a response, the guts of which is below:

To get the issue resolved, we suggest you to change the MTU on the Vista computer.The first method to set the MTU is using DrTCP (http://www.dslreports/drtcp). You will need to run DrTCP as Administrator (right click the executable and select `Run as administrator`), otherwise it will not work. The other tricky thing is that the names of the network interface are shown a bit cryptic - see the screenshot - but you should be able to identify them. As usual, enter the MTU value, click Save and click Exit. After making the change, you will need to reboot the PC.

When the PC has rebooted, you can check if the MTU is set correctly by going to a command prompt and issuing the command: netsh interface ipv4 show interfaces, which you can abbreviate to netsh int ip show int, as the screenshot shows. This will list all the network interfaces with their MTU`s in a readable way. (In case you were wondering, the MTU shown for the Loopback interface is a dummy value of 2^32-1 - or 32 binary 1`s).

You can also set the MTU using the command line, for that purpose open the command prompt as administrator (right click it and select `Run as administrator`), and issue the command: netsh int ip set interface “9″ mtu=1400, where the 9 is the number of the interface for the previous screenshot (be sure to include the quotes) and you can change the MTU to any value desired. The change is effective immediately but will not survive a reboot. To make it permanent, repeat the command and append “store=persistent” to it: netsh int ip set interface “9″ mtu=1400 store=persistent.

If you only run the last command and not the one without the store= option, you`ll need to reboot for the new MTU to take effect.

To test if the MTU is effective, ping the router with the -f and -l options: the maximum size of the ping packet should be 28 less than the MTU. In this example ping 192.168.2.1 -f -l 1372 should give a reply, ping 192.168.2.1 -f -l 1373 should give the message that fragmentation is needed but the DF flag is set.

“Okay”, I thought, “I’ve tried the MTU settings and that didn’t work. But I’ll try their way anyway”. I used the DrTCP application, followed their instructions - and the problem continued. Arse. Finally, as a last gasp, I used the command line instructions they’d also given and success! The MTU setting changes worked this time, although why they didn’t when I’d changed them both times before is a mystery.

Of course, by this time I’d gotten so annoyed with it all that I’d tried a reinstall of Vista, so I’ll have to reinstall all of the stuff it came with. This isn’t as daft as it might seem - I’ve had a similar problem to this before, but it turned out that it was a problem applying Windows 2000 SP4, and that I had to reinstall the service pack to fix it.

Oh well, I prefer a clean system anyway.

Anyway, kudos to Belkin UK tech support. I was impressed.

So, I’ve had two power supplies blow on me in the last 6 months, for different things. My wireless router died, and my home laptop’s power died a couple of days ago.

This strikes me as very wrong. It’s not like they had to do anything complicated - they’re just transformers. The technology has been understood for a long time. I mean, batteries are one thing, but transformers?

The complication then comes that there are dozens of almost identical connectors, and finding out what connector you had is hard work.

So, couldn’t electronics companies build better power supplies? With fewer ’standard’ connectors (and none of this proprietry bollocks like some laptop manufacturers use - there’s no need)? And perhaps some system of colour coding, or at least documentation of what the connector is? Would that be too much to ask?

Dear Microsoft,

Please fix the Microsoft Passport, or the applications that use it, ‘cos it never works when I try to use it. In fact, it is the most unreliable, useless heap of crap I’ve ever had to use to try to login to a website - and I’ve seen some that are pretty rubbish - but at least they didn’t, in effect, say ‘Site Closed’ all the time.

While you’re at it, please find the monkey who came up with the idea of the Microsoft Passport, and fire them. From a cannon. Into a lake of piranhas. Angry ones.

Fix it or ditch it, I don’t care, just let me at the content I need to do my job.

If a pub always says ‘We’re closed’, I stop going to it.

Yes. Simply. I tried today to find out how to mount my Windows partition on startup of Ubuntu. I looked it up - finding ubuntuguide.org en route - and had it sorted in 5 minutes.

When was the last time I looked up something like that about Windows and go an answer that quick? Um, never…

So, on a whim I decided to have a bit of a look at Ubuntu Linux. Boy did I get a surprise

Previously when I’ve had a look at linux distros, I’ve had some problems. My home PC is a fairly antique laptop, with AMD powersaving built in, and an even older PCMCIA wireless network card. What that meant in the past was 1)No wireless network, and 2) a blisteringly hot CPU as it didn’t throttle back when there was nothing going on. That made Mandrake Linux, for me, interesting but not usable.

Ubuntu - well, it picked up the wireless quite happily. I’m writing this on it. And the CPU is running cool - it is truly excellent. I downloaded the ‘live’ CD (bootable CD that loads Ubuntu), and it was painless.

Very Impressed. I shall be making my machine dual boot - there are some applications I don’t want to do without - but this is a VERY usable system. And who’d have thought that a faintly brown colour could look so good - why is Windows so grey?

Anyway, it gives me pause for thought - Sharepoint and all those things I’m being trained up in aside, what does Windows give me that Ubuntu doesn’t? Open office gives me a word processor. I can browse the web. I have email. Yup, it’s a no brainer - as a home user, I’m a convert. I’ll keep using Windows for now - like I say, I have a number of applications I just don’t want to leave yet - but long term, I think I’ll move away. ‘Course I’m stuck with it for work - that’s their problem.

Anyway, Ubuntu - good enough for a

Comments from my old blog:

You know you’re really making me think about it too - I have an old laptop at home that *might* work too.

By Jonathan at 16:48:32 Thursday 11th May 2006