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If you’re upgrading from Beta 1 or a CTP to Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2005 have a look at Aaron’s cleanup tool.

I haven’t tried it yet - still waiting for Beta 2 to download!

I take it all back! My Dell Inspiron XPS was
shipped today and is scheduled for delivery tomorrow! As an added bonus,
my copy of World of Warcraft was also shipped today.
Ah well, there goes the weekend…

I’m reluctant to fork out monthly subscriptions, but with
Xbox Live! I can say I get value
for money. It’s not that expensive (I actually pay
annually, but bear with me) and although I go for a couple of months at a time
without playing it’s still a cheap night in when I do.

So, I was surprised to find myself looking for a copy of
World of Warcraft. It’s a lot of
money (£8.99) to pay each month to play a single game. However, I’m a big fan of
Diablo II - I’ve probably spent
more time playing that then any other game - and so the prospect of
Blizzard turning their expertise to a MMO
game is an exciting one. I can’t not give it a go, now can I?

Apparently I can. Due to overwhelming popularity you can’t buy it as I
write this, not in Eurpoe, anyway. It’s hard to believe, but copies are being
rationed out, hopefully so that servers can be upgraded to handle the demand.
Apparently the next
rollout is this Friday, 15th April. I have mine on order, so hopefully I’ll
be in sometime next week!

We all do it. I noticed a couple of things in Add/Remove Programs which
I didn’t recognise and uninstalled them. They must have been old freeware bits
I’d installed ages ago and forgotten about, or worse, spyware…

…Or so I thought. I was clearly using one of them on a regular basis, as
now I can’t run Visual Studio 2005! Ah well, all part of the Beta experience…

The question is - is it worth reinstalling it now, or shall I wait for my new
laptop?

I’ve tried using the MSDN newsgroups in the past and, frankly, in this day
and age it’s a real pain. I have to remind myself how to use Outlook Express and
have a really hard time finding what I’m looking for. Any post I make is
accompanied by a feeling of guilt - have I looked hard enough to see if my
question has already been answered? Is this the right newsgroup? Then I have to
remember to revisit later to check for answers.

Well, it looks like those days are coming to an end, as
MSDN is
opening web-based forums! One thing that Jim didn’t mention in his post is
that the forum content will be searchable from our web-crawling search engine
friends (such as Google), so we won’t even have to remember to visit them! Any
relevant topics in the forums will appear alongside the other search results.
Fantastic.

I have a new toy on the way - a

Dell Inspiron XPS Gen 2 with lots of extra toppings. Yum. Delivery isn’t
quite as quick as Dominos, though, and my
delivery date is fluctuating between 16th and 18th of April. I’m not sure they
give you your money back if it takes more than 30 minutes, either.

Maybe I won’t finish Half-Life 2
just yet…

Update: How about 30 days? My estimated delivery date has shot up to the 9th of June, which would be a whopping 64 days from order to delivery!
:jawdrop:

To amuse myself while waiting I’m building a graph showing how the number of days to the estimated delivery date changes over time. I’ll post it later, when it’s got a bit more data in it.

Update: Here’s the graph. Click for the full size version, and if it looks out of date check that you’re not looking at an old, cached version. Here’s hoping that 64 days was a “blip!”

By some weird coincidence, my last three sets of speakers have been made by
Mission. I currently have a
Mission
FS2-AV system consisting of 5 NXT flat
panel speakers and a subwoofer. I used these with my
Sony STR-DB940
receiver until that packed up in the new year, and now they’re plugged into a

Yamaha DSP-AX750SE (which I’m really pleased with - it sounds noticeably
better than the Sony).

Anyway, last week one of the speakers stopped working. My system is way out
of warranty, so I sent a speculative email to Mission customer support and on
Monday morning a replacement speaker module arrived, completely free of charge.
Can’t say fairer than that! I suspect the FS2 series is discontinued (it seems
to have been superseded by the FS1 series, oddly) and they probably have a few
odds and ends to get rid of, but it’s still fantastic customer service.
Nice one! After this experience maybe it’ll be 4-in-a-row for Mission.

In my spare time (well, the small amount of it I have when my eyes don’t want
to close) I’ve been working on a slideshow/screensaver application for
Flickr. I love Flickr. It’s
great. For my money, a screen saver is the ideal way to keep an eye on your
photos past and present. There are screensavers out there but I’ve not found one
that cuts the mustard as far as I’m concerned.

My approach is to use Direct3D to smoothly animate photos on and off in
various ways, and to do that nice slow, gentle panning that really gives a
slideshow that polished look. I also have plans to allow very flexible
selections of photos to be displayed by combining photos from multiple queries
in interesting ways.
This bit will be extensible, too.

I’ve a bit of D3D experience so I started with a DirectX SDK sample application and I’m slowly bending it
to my will. It’s all slowly coming back to
me. So far it displays one photo at a time with no animation, and there’s a
"Next Photo" button which when pressed causes the next photo to be retrieved.
Unfortunately, Flickr seems to return an error in the somewhat inconvenient form
of a GIF image more often than not, but at
least it doesn’t crash, unlike some Flickr screensavers I could mention!

Anyway, it’s open source and available (in its very, very early pre-alpha
form with only the above functionality)
here on SourceForge.
Currently only source code is available (via CVS), and you need a recent .NET
2.0 CTP to build it. I’ll start making releases when Beta 2 of the .NET
Framework 2.0 is made publicly available -
there’s no
"go live" license yet.

One thing I stumbled across recently deserves more than a mention in
my del.icio.us links:
NASA World Wind.

This is quite
simply stunning. If you haven’t tried it, and you’ve a PC with fairly
beefy 3D graphics support and a broadband ‘net connection then you should
definitely give it a go. Even more so if you (or someone in your family) is
studying geography, and kids love it!

Update: How about getting the satellite images from Google Maps in there? They’re quite good, too.

Another update: OK, maybe not!

I have no real excuse (other than apathy on my part), but my blog postings
are getting a little bit too infrequent. Here come a few in rapid succession,
like that’ll make up for it.

(I just know something else will crop up now I’ve typed that!)

Update - Sure enough, literally within one second of clicking the
submit button the doorbell rang and my son had fallen off his bike. There were
tears and a little bit of blood, but he’s OK now. Remind me not to tempt fate
like that again.