Another Day in the Antz Farm

Australia Daylight Saving ends 6 Apr 2008. Are your laptops, mobile phones and PCs ready for daylight saving changes?

Daylight saving ends on 6 April in NSW, ACT, VIC, TAS and SA, a week later than in previous years. It recommences on 5 October 2008.

All Windows Mobile, desktop and server systems need to be updated by 30 March to reflect these new dates and future events such as Outlook calendar entries and scheduled tasks need to be checked after updates are applied. Windows Mobile devices will require an update to ensure they continue to operate correctly.

A web site was has been launched to help everyone prepare for the changes. Visit http://www.microsoft.com.au/daylightsaving to learn more.

Windows Operation System Service Packs Progress Update

• Windows Vista Service Pack (SP) 1 Release Candidate (RC) 1* - Dec 07: Vista SP RC 1 will be avaliable to MSDN/ Technet subscribers.
• Windows Vista SP 1 RTM - Q1 2008
• Windows XP SP3* - Mid Nov 07

* Exisiting SP testers may receive these updates earlier.

Frank Arrigo has been interviewed for all sorts of topics - including Silverlight, Vista and evangelism . But CSharpzealot (Brian Madsen) could possibly wrotethe first personal interview of Frank. What makes this guy tick? How does this guy get in to office so early in the morning? What stuff does he add in his morning tea?

In absence of a proper wikipedia entry, I guess this interview is the next close thing we have to a doisser of this GREAT and GENUINE Microsoft Evangelist and people manager - Frank Arrigo.

- Image from Zolved

My wait is finally over! I can’t believe it took Apple such a long time to release iTunes 7.2, the first version of iTunes software that is fully supported on Windows Vista. I suffered so much inconsistent user experience, trying to synch or format my device with previous versions of iTunes with my PC. Since Dec 06, I basically left my shuffle basically on cold storage and my Zune (z-Berno) had been with me since then.

Now I reckon I’m going to give my shuffle another shot . But with only 1 GB and no FM receiver function, I think my usage is going to be pretty limited.

Btw, you don’t need to provide your email address to download the software. Beat the Q, just click on the “Download iTunes 7.2-Free” button straight away.

Related link
The Safely Remove Hardware feature and the Windows Explorer “Eject” command do not work correctly with an Apple iPod that is connected to a Windows Vista-based computer (Microsoft KB article)

The Windows Media Player Team together with support with the Mozilla Foundation had released a plugin to run Media Player on Firefox. So now I can continue to have my favourite streaming radio within the Firefox browser environment. This plugin supports both Windows XP (x86, x64) and Windows Vista (x86, x64)

Get it now: http://port25.technet.com/pages/windows-media-player-firefox-plugin-download.aspx 

A heads up for all who are running Windows Vista Beta 2, RC 1 or RC 2, please take note that these pre-release software will expire by 31 May 2007.

Kindly refer to http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/preview.mspx for your upgrade options.

Windows Vista is now a directly supported platform for XNA runtime with the release of XNA Games Studio Express Refresh 1.0. If you have been interested in games development and running Vista, now is the time to jump onboard the wagon.

Related links:

• Download XNA Games Studio Express Refresh 1.0
• Unleash Your Imagination With XNA Game Studio Express (MSDN Magazine)

If you have difficulties running Flash on Windows Vista on sites like youtube, I found a personal workaround.

1. Uninstall Flash player using the official Adobe Flash Player uninstaller.

2. Download the latest Flash Player and Active X control from the Adobe Flash Player Download Center.

Zeddy Iskandar, the Academic Developer Evangelist from Indonesia made a video demo of Vista voice recognition with a robot. See how he control the robot to move directions and perform simple arithmetic calculations. Check it out!

I received my new personal laptop today. The Asus A8Js model came with

- Intel Centrino Duo T200 2GHz
- 1 GB (I ordered an additional 1GB, altogether 2GB) RAM
- 120 GB HD
- nVida GeForece Go 770 with 512 MB
- 5 USB ports
- Achieved a score of 4.5 on the Windows Experience Index