Jack’s Site

I made a Windows Sidebar gadget a while ago, and everyone who has it says it keeps ‘flashing’, I’ve tried to fix this many times but I don’t see the flashing, so its a little hard to fix, I think I’m going to have to rewrite it..

I’ve been using MSN / Windows Live Messenger for years and I’ve always loved it.

But since I used WLM 8.5 Beta I have started to dislike it, the main reason being it didn’t work right, every time someone sent me a message the damn thing crashed.

 I know it was a beta version but still - why release it when it crashes all the time? Shouldn’t they fix that before asking people to test it?, So I removed it and put 8.1 back on.

But today I thought I would try 8.5 as its now ’stable’, When I first tried it I liked the new interface but now I don’t seem to like it that much anymore, and the first time someone sent me a message the Windows border went all black - I’m guessing its because I have the window borders turned off, but still that shouldn’t have happened and made me think about going back to 8.1 - again.

When I was talking to someone and I was looking at the chat and contact windows again, I just kept remembering WLM crashing back when I had the beta installed, it was starting to annoy me, I just had to go back to 8.1, I’m not sure what I will do when they drop support for my favorite version, I guess I’ll just have to get used to the new interface or use something like Trillian.

I almost forgot to blog this, I was using Internet Explorer the other day and after clicking a link like I do in any other browser the damn thing crashed on me.

This goes to show how unstable Internet Explorer is, if clicking a link on a webpage can crash IE I wonder what downloading a file can do, would it crash the harddrive?

Now I remember why I stopped using it and switched to Firefox, which I have been using since it was in Beta.

Let me start off with saying the first time I tried Ubuntu which was Ubuntu 4.10 “Warty” I didn’t like it very much, then a few versions later I tried it again, I thought it was better but still wouldn’t use it.

But at version 7.04 I just had to say I like it, Although I was and still am using Vista, so that doesn’t really count, then 7.10 came out so I downloaded it and tried it and I ran into problems downloading packages I wanted, at first I said this isn’t very good, but the next day I thought I’d give it another try.

This time I was able to download and install the packages I wanted, so I hooked it up to my 24″ Widescreen LCD, got a nice wallpaper and enabled the desktop effects, now almost every if not all Windows users would love to have something similar to Compiz, and as a Windows user I absolutely loved it, even though I had played with it on version 7.04 and Fedora, I liked it more this time around.

Also as a Windows user and I’m sure there are many others like me out there, I have to admit if and only if I didn’t play games and use programs that were made for Windows only, I would use Ubuntu, and I’m not joking around here, I swear to god(and I hardly believe in that) I would use Ubuntu, honest.

When you think about it, Microsoft takes its time developing its operating system, and when people start to complain and move to other operating systems they start to rush and drop vital features, thus turning their next version of Windows into a piece of junk, for those with Vista you know what I mean, for those who haven’t used Vista, try using Windows ME with a nice shiny interface.

On the other hand, Ubuntu releases are merely months apart, and each update makes it much, much better than the last version, get more people to sell PC’s with Ubuntu or another Linux distro on them and I bet more people will switch to Linux.

The only thing holding people back is that not all the good programs like Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Flash that people love are made for Linux, and the fact that not one kick-ass game has been made for Linux, Of course I’m speaking about Battlefield 2142, Half-Life 2 & episodes, and many many others.

Judging how the launch of Vista was, the next release of Windows will probably boost the count of Linux users even more than Vista, unless Microsoft perform a miracle and actually develop a usable and more stable operating system, or do what the guys in Antitrust did.

Well, before I end this post I’d like to write this down as I just thought of a great idea for those with multiple computers like me,
Get your 2nd best computer, backup every bit of data on it and install Ubuntu, then set it up as if it were you main PC and use the Windows box whenever you need it, Just like I’m planning on doing.

I’ll finish off with a screenshot of my Ubuntu desktop.

WLM 8.5 Beta 2 is a joke, before I installed it I used the previous beta version, and had no problems whatsoever,
After installing Beta 2 I sign in and almost immediately the whole things locks up, I was only able to send and receive a couple of messages before it happened.

After I restart WLM the same things happens, For now I’ve moved back to the latest stable version, but if the next beta doesn’t fix the problem, I’ll be trying Trillian…