This internal, promotional video has leaked its way out to the rest of the world and it's almost as shoddy as the operating system it's poking fun at. Microsoft's official word on the matter is:

"This video was developed by us as a way to poke fun at ourselves a bit. We thought folks internally would get a kick out of not taking themselves so seriously all the time.

"As a result, this little gem came to life and has caused quite a few laughs in our hallways. It is no way a serious attempt at marketing Windows to external audiences and was developed for internal consumption only."

In my eyes though, it's poking fun at all the poor souls who have paid for Vista's development, afterall if you'd managed to acquire enough money from Vista licences to have the time, money and resources to make a video like this, soley as a bit of a laugh at supposedly your own expense, wouldn't you be laughing all the way to the bank?

The video can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPv8PPl7ANU

I've chosen to buy Seagate hard drives over other brands for a long time, they've always been extremely reliable and very quiet in comparison to drives from other manufacturers with similar specs. However, I finally had one die on me last week. I checked its SMART attributes and found that it had been powered on for just short of 9000 hours (about 375 days). I had bought the drive about three and a half years ago and thought that this was fairly reasonable.

I was just starting to look for a new drive, when i remembered that Seagate drives come with 5 year warranties. I went to their site and found all I had to do was enter the drive's serial number to check my warranty was still valid, I did so, and it told me the drive was covered until 2010, i then filled in my details and they issued me with an RMA request, all I then had to do was package it up and ship it off to the address they gave me. A week later, and I now have a new drive!

Better yet, the one that broke was a 200GB drive, it's replacement is 250GB. I had started buying Western Digital drives very recently after Seagate purchased Maxtor which was the one brand of hard drives I went out of my way to completely avoid after having endless trouble with them. I thought as Seagate had bought Maxtor, they might well still be producing Maxtor hard drives and just labelling them Seagate, but if they're going to continue offering 5 year warranties on them, with a returns process as efficient as this one has been, then I don't think I care... so long as the drives don't die too spectacularly, i.e. take all my data with them...

I have recently started studying at the University of York and am living in their halls of residence. In order to use the free network connection, you have to be able to use 802.1x authentication. It turns out that Ubuntu, Mac OS X, Windows XP and Windows Vista all make a terrible job of this when it comes to WIRED connections. I should know as in my house of 10 people all of these operating systems are being used and I have ended up having to fix each of them... usually several times <glares at vista>.

Anyway, I have now produced a .deb file so that other Ubuntu users will be able to connect painlessly to the NAS here at the University of York, whether in halls, or connecting whilst on campus at one of the many wired connection points. It should already be very easy to connect via wireless whilst on campus, though I haven't actually tested this yet.

The deb can be found in the "debs" category in the download section of this site. If anyone has any problems with it please let me know so I can modify it accordingly!

I haven't tested this with any other university/802.1x secured networks, but if they use the same settings as the one here at York then there's no reason it shouldn't work for those too. Just remember to remove "@york.ac.uk" from the default username.

Anyway, the usual # key on a British keyboard is located just to the left of the carriage return key and to the right of the @ key. There is however, no # symbol present anywhere on a British Mac keyboard. The solution it turns out is to press alt+3

The # symbol is located above the 3 (i.e. shift+3) on a U.S. keyboard, both standard and Mac I believe.