Paul Smith's Blog

A few years ago, the Firefox fanboys were arguing for Internet Explorer to drop its own Trident rendering engine, and adopt Firefox's Gecko engine. More recently people have argued for Internet Explorer to use Webkit. Looking at these results, shouldn't we be asking Firefox and Chrome to use Trident? Well no, but it's the thought that counts. As we can see above the Platform Preview of Internet Explorer 9 passed all 192 of the tests co-developed with the W3C, no other browsers came close....

This week's news of Google transitioning away from Windows to Linux or Mac OS has spread its way across the internet, Google cite security reasons for the move. But is that the only reason behind it? The answer is no. First up, we're talking about Google; of course they would rather run their own in-house stuff. Primarily Linux, they use that as the basis of Android and Chrome OS, their servers run Linux....

As I've got a few hours to kill I'd thought I'll install the new Windows Phone Development Tools that were released in April and play about with them a bit. Let's just say it is going to take a wee bit longer than I thought. Urgh.

There are several cases where end-users might want to disable Internet Explorer 8's InPrivate Browsing mode. There isn't an easy way to do this however, but it can be done. If you're using Windows Vista/7 Business/Professional or up you can use the Group Policy Editor. To begin, type gpedit.msc in Start Search and press enter. You'll then want to navigate your way to: Local Computer Policy > Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Internet Explorer > InPrivate...

Time to buy a new Dell, this time for my parents, whose clunky old laptop from early 2002 has finally been put to rest (I've been arguing for its destruction for some time). As per usual I'm given a budget (£300-£400 this time) and given the task of deciding what to go for. I managed to get an extra £30 out of them in order to ensure it had a decent graphics adapter - they might not care about graphics now, but they won't be saying that when they need the extra power....

Looks like the Sun, and no doubt other right-wing press owned by Murdoch or otherwise are up to their old tricks. The E-mail:From: (removed) Sent: 27 April 2010 11:15 To: (removed) Subject: request from Jenna Sloan, The Sun If you have relevant information for the media professional concerned please click this link to reply: jenna.sloan@the-sun.co.uk Request deadline: Thursday 29 April, 2010, 4:00 pm Contact me by e-mail at jenna.sloan@the-sun.co.uk My request: I’m looking for a teacher and a nurse to be case studies in The Sun next week....

I'm going to be posting about some of the software I use on my HTC HD2, there are a lot of Windows Mobile games out there, but what really works well on the HD2? Hopefully this will give you some ideas. Out are games like Wolf3D and Doom, games I've been playing on Windows Mobile phones for 6 or 7 years, they're just not fun trying to control with the on-screen controls....

In some rather good news, it seems Microsoft have backed the Web Open Font Format (WOFF). Previously Microsoft have supported Embedded OpenType (EOT), which they developed back in the 1990s, and was supported by Internet Explorer 4 onwards, although no other web browsers bothered implementing it. However back in those days adding an extra 100KB download was a heavy price to pay for embedding fonts into a website, and so it wasn't widely used....

The Tories would like you to believe that a planned National Insurance increase of 1% for workers earning more than £20,000 a year will cause job losses. They haven't actually gone on to say anything specific about it. In the computer industry there's a little saying we have, FUD it stands for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. Essentially the Tories are guilty of spreading FUD. They're trying to scare people into thinking this will lead to mass unemployment....

Those trying to record on systems with 4GB or more of RAM with an Audigy 2 ZS, possibly X-Fi and other models too, have probably come across the problem with distortion, noise, or choppy sound (like talking through a fan). This affects the microphone, line-in and also 'what u hear', important for capturing audio that is currently being played. The trouble stems from Creative's drivers not being entirely 64-bit compatible, Creative have no date for any fix to be implemented, and haven't even announced if they're working on any such fix....