Well, yes I am biased. But…

5. Aggression
They don’t have any.  Not towards people, or to other dogs.  You let your dog off the lead and you think “will that dog hurt my dog”, not the other way round.  This is a breed characteristic, before you ask.

4. Weight loss
Exercise.  They love it.  As much as they can get.  And then a bit more.  Gotta be cheaper than a gym membership.  Feel that burn!

3. Rarity
Oh, you’ve got a giant panda, have you?  Show off, aren’t you!  Take it for a walk do you?  Well, there’s fewer of these puppies in the world than there are giant pandas - quite literally.

2. Sense of humour
See that photo up there?  Now your average dog would shake that hat off and lose the dirty towel in seconds.  Our dog, on the other hand, decided that this was the best joke ever, and lost no time in walking round the room showing everyone just how much fun this all was.

1. That nose
Nice bloodhound you’ve got there.  They can follow a trail that’s up to four hours old, you say.  Whoop de do.

Otterhounds can follow trails up to eight hours old.  That’s eight hours.  Eight.  Twice as much as that bloodhound.

Okay, they’re harder to train, but let’s say you run a search and rescue operation.  Four hours?  Or eight hours?

Yeah.

Next time I get lost in the mountains - I can has otterhounds?  kthxbai.

I’ve written about Any Video Converter before.  I’m glad to say there is now an option to select the priority.  The free version is very good, and the pro versions can encode for mobile phones and MP4 players as well.

Now as for Flock - I’m posting this within Flock, by the way - it now includes email support to allow you to access your Gmail or Yahoo! Mail account within Flock.  Combine that with the fact that - because it’s still based on the Firefox 2 core - the wonderfully useful Web Developer toolbar still works and you have a worthwhile product.

In fact, I’ve noticed that while I still have Firefox 3 beta on my system, I also have Flock on as well.  Firefox 2 and 3 render quite differently (as do IE6 and IE7, of course), so when doing any web developing it’s good to have the both open; especially useful as you can’t open 2 versions of Firefox at the same time.

Tags: AnyVideo Converter, Firefox, Flock, Googlemail, Yahoo! Mail

Looks a lot like the Syrian one, doesn’t it:

Except that’s an image from Wikipedia of a Swiss reactor.

Most nuclear reactors look much the same, because there aren’t that many solutions to the same problem. As Public Enemy once said - Don’t Believe The Hype.

Well, so here I am, trying to install PHP and MySQL so it works on IIS.

Except, of course, it doesn’t.  At all.  Or at least, not that I can work out.

And the solution?  A Linux installation under Virtual PC, of course, what else?

So, which distribution?

Well, I started on Slackware.  So off to the website and then - can’t get onto any of the mirrors.  BitTorrent time.  GetRight doesn’t like it, so µTorrent’s back.

I’d forgotten how well it works.  215K.  So many Windows applications like this would be about 10MB, take four or five minutes to load up and use twice the resources just to display the main page.

If you’ll remember, a while ago I had a bad experience with Windows Vista Service Pack 1, release candidate 1.

Well, it certainly seems that Microsoft did quite a bit of work following that release candidate.

Since SP1 isn’t yet available via Windows Update, so I had to go through the standalone installer route (I’ll tell you where to get them later).  But first let me give you a little bit of background as to why I decided to give it another go.

Vista was starting to run really slowly.  REALLY slowly.  In fact, nearly a month after removing the release candidate of SP1, it was again unusable.  Fortunately for me, I’d backed the machine up with Norton Ghost (disclaimer: that’s an affiliate link, before you ask), so my first job was to back everything up to my external drive.

I then got out the old trusty Windows 98 bootdisk and wiped all the partitions except my clunky Vista install.  I then created a 32GB FAT32 partition and copied the Ghost image files to that.  Then I rolled back to a Vista backup from January 2008 (well, I’m skipping a step - I went back to XP for 24 hours.  I’ll tell you why I decided not to stay that way at a later date).

The installers took a long while to download, and the installation took about an hour.  It was fairly straightforward: next, next, next, next, ok, I agree, etc.  And even though it said not to run anything during installation, it didn’t complain about Spider Solitaire

So what’s the outcome?

Not much has changed, except I have a solid computer again.  It does feel slightly faster - not much, I have to admit: the short time I spent back on XP felt faster for a while - but it does feel more reliable.

Most of the actual improvements - UEFI support, cryptographic improvements,

But file copy performance?  Seems a bit quicker, but then I usually use Directory Opus anyway, and I suspect some of those improvements will be in Windows Explorer.

As for the numerous minor tweaks made, and delays they’ve removed, I suspect they all go towards a psychological feeling things are working quicker - and they certainly seem to be to me - so it’s all good.

So the verdict?  No marks for RC1, but for the full release - I’d say seven out of ten.  Maybe it didn’t have all the performance improvements they were touting, but it’s worth the time and effort.

If you want to get hold of the standalone installers yourself, you can download the five-language standalone installer for 32-bit or 64-bit Vista (they’re 434MB and 726MB respectively, and cover English, French, German, Spanish and Japanese), or the all language version, again available in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions (these are 544MB and 873MB).  Alternatively, if you’ve got a lot of PCs in your firm that will need updating, you can get the installer discs - there’s a 544MB ISO image for 32-bit PCs, as well as a 1418MB DVD ISO for both 32 and 64 bit versions.