Microsoft Musings

What? But I thought Windows Vista was installed?

My blog’s URL has changed yet again. The new url is blog.kirb.us, please update your bookmarks and feeds. For now the old url is being automatically redirected to the new one, however since kirb.com is currently in the process of being sold, this may not continue for ever.

Its been over two years ago that I cautiously started my own business endeavor called Kirbtech. At the time, I opted to put up a one page website with just an overview of the various services that Kirbtech offered. Unfortunately that one page has been up for 2+ years!! Well, I’m pleased to announce we’ve finally launched a new version of www.kirbtech.com. Its still a work in progress, and I have more ideas to implement yet. The good folks at insightdesignworks.com were responsible for the initial design, although I’ve been heavily tweaking it since. So check it out, and let me know your critiques, comments, and ideas!

On our trip to Oregon a couple weeks ago, I noticed two flight info computers at the Boise Airport that were in need of some technical support and/or a Vista upgrade.

Note: This is my first attempt at using Wordpress’ new photo gallery feature. If you have difficulties viewing this, the full size photos are over here.

There’s been a number of changes on this blog the last while.

• My blog now resides at blog.kirb.us. I always disliked the fact that my old blog url had a capital letter in it, and when I figured out that it wouldn’t be that hard to move the blog I decided to go with a new sub-domain.
• There is a new theme. For some reason I always get tired of a theme after awhile so I change it.
• I’ve upgraded to Wordpress 2.5 RC1. And its just plain awesome. Lots of cool new features, and a whole lot more responsive.
• My photos now reside at photos.witmers.net.

I just downloaded and installed Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1. One of my favorite features is how IE 8.0 highlights the domain that you are currently browsing. You can view an example in screenshot #5. One big negative at this point however is that a lot of web sites don’t display properly unless you have the Emulate IE7 mode turned on. For example, G-mail and Google Reader have some display issues. You can read more on this issue here. In time this problem should disappear.

Check out these screenshots:

      Microsoft has finally released the much anticipated Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista. Although its not “publicly” available for download from Microsoft yet, it can be found online at various other places. I’ve installed the service pack on both a desktop and a laptop now and I’m well pleased with it. Its worth installing simply for the annoying “slow file copy” bug fix which is included. Hurray!! Of course, there is a whole lot of other fixes included as well.

Check out these screenshots.

Read more…

As I mentioned before, I upgraded my Blog to the latest version of Wordpress, which includes a new feature called tagging*. I also noticed they had a cool utility to convert your categories to tags, which I proceeded to do. Big mistake. Not only did it convert all my categories into tags, it removed the categories, and categorized all my posts with the default category. And I couldn’t find an undo feature anywhere**. Hmm… now what? So what I did for now is added the following lines to my .htaccess file.

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule /category/ http://blog.kirb.us [R]

So now what happens is that when someone accesses one of my now non-existant categories it redirects them to the home page instead of giving them a Not Found page. Ideally it should redirect them to the tag instead, but I couldn’t figure out how to make that work. If anyone knows how to do that, let me know.

*Tagging is not a new idea, in fact it has become hugely popular. This is just the first time Wordpress includes it by default.
**You say its called backups? What’s that?

UPDATE: I’m now getting an error “mod_rewrite: maximum number of internal redirects reached” I’m not sure if its related to this change or not, but I have disabled it in the meantime.

I just upgraded this blog to Wordpress 2.3 and upgraded a bunch of plugins. My theme wasn’t compatible with the new version of Wordpress therefore I have a ugly temporary one up until I find one that I like. I know, you are thinking that… “this blog is always under construction, and why doesn’t this idiot just leave good enough alone?” Ummm… you have a point.