Getting Home
I live at the red dot on the left and work at the red dot on the right.
What a great journey home I have to look forward to. If it wasn’t for the occasional day home working I’d go nuts.
Choosing an MP3 player
My other half has decided she wants an mp3 player. Shame she didn’t tell me before Christmas, it would have made a very easy present. Oh well never mind.
She has about £150 quid to spend so the iPod Nano would seem the obvious choice, but with a maximum of 4gb storage I’m sure she’ll fill it up pretty quick. I’m also worried about the stories of scratched fascias.
After a bit of searching I spotted a discounted Sony NW-HD3 so we’ve ordered that instead, this has 20gb of storage and a much better battery life. If it turns out to be shite we can always send it back and get the Nano instead.
I’ve never had an MP3 player myself but the contract on my mobile expires in early January so I’m planning on trying one of the new Sony Ericsson Walkman phones. Either the w800 or w900 failing that I’ll probably get the k750i .
To cars what Concorde was for planes
If you watched Top Gear last week you’ll have seen the frankly amazing Bugatti Veyron. Basically it’s the fastest production road car in the world. The W-16 engine produces a staggering 1,001 horsepower and has a top speed of 250+ mph (400+ kph). It can reach zero-to-60 in three seconds and zero-to-180 in 14 seconds.
On the minus side it’ll empty it’s 100 litre fuel tank in around 12 minutes and costs nearly a million quid. Top Gear say
VW are losing money on every one they sell. But thank goodness, in this day and age that someone is prepared to create something, not just to make money, but because they want to see if they can…The point is that it is to cars what Concorde was for planes. Something that will be recorded in the history books as a feat of human endeavour.
I tend to agree.
VMware player
Looks like VMWare have released a free version of their Virtual Machine software. You could think of VMWare Player as the equivalent of Acrobat Reader but for Virtual Machines. The website says
VMware Player is free software that enables PC users to easily run any virtual machine on a Windows or Linux PC. VMware Player runs virtual machines created by VMware Workstation, GSX Server or ESX Server and also supports Microsoft virtual machines and Symantec LiveState Recovery disk formats.
Sounds good, it’ll certainly be useful for developers and testers at work.
SharePoint CSS
I’ve been spending some time improving our SharePoint portal server. One of the first improvements I’ve made is to add Talis branding to the Portal. It’s been quite a painful process. Microsoft recommend that you do not make any changes directly to the aspx pages and advise against using FrontPage extensions as they cannot guarantee that changes will be preserved following the installation of any hotfixes, service packs or upgrades.
I therefore restricted the changes to just the images and CSS. The CSS files are stored in c:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\60\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\1033\STYLES. The files that I needed to change were as follows;
- sps.css used by SharePoint Portal Server
- ows.css used by SharePoint Services
- owspers.css used by SharePoint MySite
Each style sheet contained more than 1500 lines of CSS, non of which were commented. I would have been lost without the Style Sheet Class Reference Tables from MSDN.
Anyway, the below screen shots show a little of what I’ve been able to do.
Before: 
After: 
