Paul Smith's Blog

Yes this thing just won't go away will it. Crippling the user experience to keep companies that are mostly a waste of space like Opera (although their mobile browsers are capable and fairly successful) in business is unacceptable. We've seen this before, when the Java VM was unbundled from Windows it caused pain, not just to a few people but hundreds of millions who were forced to go to Sun's website and dig around and find the Java runtime - sure that was slightly different to this - but the end result is the same the user experience is reduced and millions of hours are wasted....

Daniel_K has released an updated driver package for the Audigy and X-Fi Soundblasters. The one key fix I've come across is CMSS now works on the Audigy 2 ZS. Update for RC: These are what I'm using at the moment with my Audigy 2 ZS with the 7100 release candidate build: Forum post. Rapidshare download. Filefront download. MD5 hash: 16BEC9D7C047EF46DDA4F40AF1D47B1C. Older drivers: Audigy forum post. RapidShare download. MegaUpload download. If you're downloading from elsewhere here's the MD5 hash: 66DA82FC18E49F3B32172A61BEDD0164....

As some of you may remember I touched upon one of the comments left on the Boston Globe's HST advent calendar last month. Some of the comments however I found quite disturbing, and some were just plain out whacky. Here's one of the more moderate ones: So beautiful, so complex, there are physical interactions to numerous to count every second in the universe and yet it holds together, in balance, exploding here, imploding there....

Today I informed the General Committee of the Yeovil Labour Party that I would likely be moving outside of the Yeovil constituency to Guildford once Catherine finishes university later this year. As I do not think it would be practical for me to fight an election with a two and a half hour train journey in the way I decided to step down so the constituency could select somebody else to carry on....

I've been getting truck loads of e-mail on which drivers I'm using with my Audigy 2 ZS on Windows 7. To try and stem the tide here's the quick findings: 1) The Audigy 2 ZS drivers that Windows installs from Windows Update for both 32-bit and 64-bit occasionally produce garbled audio. These are dated 2006 and are probably identical to the original Windows Vista release. 2) Newer drivers resolve this, or at least it hasn't happened in the last week I've been using these drivers....

The IAU designated 2009 the year of astronomy. So this year I'll be trying to post more astronomy related goodness. With tools like the WorldWide Telescope the astronomical community can really try and spark people's curiosity about the universe around them. And hell maybe we could try and make a dent against the seemingly unstoppable encroachment of light pollution while we're at it, the skies should be for everyone to enjoy, regardless of if you live in a remote village in India or central London....

I've been following HST advent images the Boston Globe have been running over the last month, and reading the comments along the way. I was shocked at the amount of nonsense attributing the universe to a supernatural deity of some kind, around half of what was posted was along these lines. I’m tempted to bring out the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and preach to all how the universe was touched by his noodly appendage....

It's not every day we encounter such brilliance, I think everyone should take the time to read these words of wisdom from Richard Branson. Hospitals are there to cure people - they are not to kill people. Incredible. How on Earth did we manage to get along before this guy came along and shared his intellect with us? He accuses politicians of tinkering with infection controls in hospitals, largely in relation to strains of staphylococcus aureus that have become resistant to a large group of antibiotics, while he himself is doing the same tinkering suggesting all hospital staff be screened for MRSA....

The new build of Windows Live Essentials beta has been released, this is part of the Wave 3 rollout. Quick thoughts... Windows Live Messenger has had a large overhaul since 8.5. It is much better looking and intergrated better with the web services now. Windows Live Mail has reached the point where I would recommend people to use this over Outlook Express or Windows Mail, it looks clean and is faster than the Wave 2 release....

Update: For the Audigy 2 ZS people with garbled sound I was having the same issue, I noticed the Creative driver is pretty old dated 2006. Since installing the 'Daniel_K' drivers he did for Vista I've not had anymore issues. Update 2: Quick run through on what drivers I'm using and where I got them. Update 3: New release, fix issues with CMSS that older drivers had. Update 4: Resolving lower than normal volume compared to Windows XP and Windows Vista....