With ove 8 Million downloads Mozilla officially own the Guiness World record for browser downloads in a singe 24 hour period. Firefox 3 is already a great browser, now it’s an official bona fide record breaker.

Dedication oh, oh, dedication oh, oh , dedication, that’s what you need.

If you want to be the best, soar above the rest.

Who-oh Dedication’s what you need

If you want to be a record breaker, yeah.

- from the theme tune that Roy Castle Sang at the end of the show

I got caught out by a very strange issue the other day. I posted a short entry about Bill Gates having a spot of bother with Windows. The entry I posted was copied out of an email I was composing to my brother in-law and this was my mistake. Of course I was using Outlook to compose the email, Outlook in this case is using word to compose the body of the email and add in the fancy rich text effects. What I did not realise was that when you copy and paste from word, you don’t just get the text but all the background XML and styling info as well.

Initially this might not sound too alarming, unfortunately when you paste that into Wordpress, without using the ‘paste from word’ option in the WSYWIG editor provided within Wordpress, the tags and style info becomes active.

The result of the cock-up was that over the weekend I has a blog with the ugliest colour scheme know to man (what you don’t like orange? ;0) All the links were blue, the default styling for most browsers, and IE refused to load the site at all :0(

Thankfully my pal Lummie did a quick search and found out what the problem was while I was trying to figure out how the frack I got all these crappy tags into my site without touching it.

Once the offending article was cleaned up, the universe was returned to it’s previous state and all is well.

There are several plugins available out there to help you clean up if you need to but I advise you either copy into notepad first then copy from there to ensure you don’t get the crud or use the paste from word function in Wordpress.

Technorati Tags: Wordpress, Paste from Word

…In response to complaints… From BT!?

I’m pretty sure that if you look at Broadband forums as well as many sites and blogs on the web, you’ll find many consumers who have complained about Virgin Media’s appalling service and the never ending changes to their ‘traffic shaping’ policy. maybe those complaints aren’t being made in the right way to the right people?

At least someone finally agreed that Virgin’s latest advertising campaign is a total crock of shit. The BBC is carrying a good article outlining the problems and corrections Virgin will have to make. There are a couple of interesting statements from a Virgin Media Spokesperson too.

One comment made me chuckle

“Our traffic management policy helps ensure the majority of customers receive the quality of service they expect from our fibre-optic broadband product by managing demand from the heaviest users at certain times of the day,”

Considering VM cap ALL users when they hit a download limit meaning

“Customers on its L 4Mbps package could download 60 songs and or two TV shows before reaching caps while those on the XL 20Mbps package could download 614 songs or nine TV shows before their speeds would be subject to caps”

I fail to see how anyone using Virgin Media’s Broadband service can be said to receive great value for money. Basically so long as you pay VM your money and don’t do anything at all with the service they are happy. Try using it and somehow you are breaking the rules and causing much upset in the universe so you must be restricted and policed. (using it would mean, emails with photo’s from family members, video’s shared with family members, Windows Updates, Buying Software online, Buying Games online, Playing online games…).

It’s like buying a car from a manufacturer and being told that you can only do 5 miles a day in it or you will be restricted to 1st gear for the next 50 miles then you get another 5 miles with the full 6 gears then… you get the picture.

It’s Complete Bollocks! If you can’t provide the service and are not prepared to invest in the infrastructure to guarantee the speeds and service at all times to all customers then you shouldn’t offer the damn service in the first place.

Let us not dwell on the negative though Virgin will soon be offering a blistering 50MB service (between 1 am and 1.10 am every day with a DL Limit of 5kb no doubt).

Technorati Tags: Virgin Media, Broadband Speeds

There’s a certain satisfaction in knowing that somehow, some place, someday even Bill Gates has hammered his desk in frustration brought on by a healthy dose of Windows. :0)

http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/archives/141821.asp

Well I finally have a running PC after a few days of pain and some sticky issues. I was going to take some build progess pictures but time and circumstances were against me and so there aren’t any.

To summarise, my PC failed to do anything useful shortly after plugging a USB device into the back, I then went through an ‘I can’t afford it but I need to upgrade’ moment and bought a full rebuild kit for £280. I was forced to change the mobo as I figured that had blown and it was Socket 939 with DDR ram and an AGP GFX card.

So all the new kit arrives, gets fitted and wired up, all cables inserted in the correct orifices and turn on. At this point I was expecting a nice shiny BIOS post screen, but instead I got the exact same symptoms I had previously.

So unplug all cables except monitor - nothing, unplug al HDD’s - nothing. Damn at this point I figured that the new Jeantech Storm 700W PSU I have is the culprit.

PSU swapped, and plugged in all wired up and…… Nothing :0( at this point I’m crying. Last thing I considered was unplugging the RAM as I expected a beep of some sort to come from the speaker on the mainboard (yup I do have one, I plugged it in myself). So RAM removed turn on and…… BEEEEEEEP!

Crap, bad memory? Plug chip into Slot 1 - and machine starts, Plug another into Slot 2 - machine starts, Slot 3 - OK, Slot 4 - no boot. Remove first 3 chips place the last ‘offending chip into slot 1 - machine boots.

So bad mainboard. At this point I’ve nothing left to do but figure on swapping the mainboard. So I continued with repairing windows so it would boot and as part of my auto rebuild mode I updated the BIOS - bit of a silly thing to do if I’m swapping the mainboard but hey at this point I’m tired, have wiped the wrong drive during partition maintenence (luckily only an extra storage drive) and I’m tired.

So windows spent the night updating it’s patches again and during a reboot I decided to verify the issue with Slot 4 and note the exact symptoms so I can rant at some poor schmuck at the store. So plug chip 4 into slot 4 and….. machine boots 80;

It figures that a Bios update fixed something and it figures i just spent 3 days trying to get a machine running when there was a really simple fix waiting there to be discovered by the intrepid explorer.

So I’m Back up and running again, busy re-activating Photoshop because My hardware changed - wasn’t expecting that. And I have also managed to run 3DMark06 and got a score of 7189. the actual results are here if you are interested in the detail.Technorati Tags: Cheap PC Upgrade

This weekend sees the next round of character updates for TF2. this Time the Pyro gets a small makeover and a tone of neat achievements to get your teeth into. The Pyro’s flame thrower has been slightly modded so it now has an alt fire option that will repel nearby ordnance and opponents when used. the idea behind this is that you set the unlucky victim alight then blast them with a shot of compressed air using the alt fire option thus enabling the nible legged gimp suited freak of a pyro that you are, to escape forthwith ;0)

As with the medic class there are 36 new achievements which will unlock new weapons when you reach the 12, 24 and 36 milestones.

2 New community maps are also included in this update and there’s another freeplay weekend so if you don’t already have TF2 in your game collection, you can download and play for free all weekend. Oh, as if that weren’t enough, theres a new TF2 blog too over at teamfortress.com

The Full details and some nice shiny pics are here, and I’ve included the new meet the sniper video below.

Have fun and maybe I’ll see you on a server, if you get fragged by StaticVenom <TWM> that’s me ;0)

Team Fortress 2 “Meet the Sniper” Trailer (HD)Technorati Tags: TF2, Team Fortress 2, Pyro

Looks like the Firefox download day may have produced a record after all. We’ll know in a week or so once the download logs have been purged and cleaned but the current stats are that over 8 million downloads occurred in the 24 hours allotted, and the count is currently at over 11 million so people are still downloading.

Looks like someone already found a security issue and there are a couple of bugs I’ve noticed and have been informed about. But, as is the mozilla way, we shall have an update for those in a week or so if not sooner :0)

The BBC website has a short article on the day’s success and SpreadFirefox has the current count and distribution map.Technorati Tags: Firefox 3, Download Day, World Record

The Firefox 3 record download attempt seems to be going well there are over 5 million downloads already and there’s still plenty of time left.  The download day finishes at 18:00 BST today so if you havent downloaded yet then get yourself over to SpreadFirefox download it and then you can select the Flaunt it link on the right panel to get yourself a nice custom certificate to brag about it ;0)

If you use Firefox in any shape or form you’ll be interested in Firefox 3. Due to be released today FF3 improves mightily on FF2 especially in speed.

To mark the occasion there’s a world record attempt for the most downloads in a single day.

So as well as getting yourself a superb new browser update you can help make history too. The link on the image below will get you to the site for more information and a sign up page.

I suppose everyone has those days where everything seems to go right then like a pack of cards it all falls apart. I just managed to get a whole weekend like that. All started well on Saturday with a nice day out to see a friend at his medieval weekend, complete with battle re-enactment and bird of prey display. The weather was superb and I enjoyed a full session with my new camera. Then Sunday seemed to take a major nosedive.

I was working away happily on my main office P.C. and decided to try adding some files to an external usb drive that is plugged into my NAS drive, for some reason I was unable to add a new folder to the drive so I ejected it nicely from the NAS and plugged it int the back of the main P.C. POP! now all USB devices are lifeless - Keyboard, mouse… all dead, monitor shut off due to no signal being received and I’m left baffled.

All the fans spin up the drives all fire up theres power going to the Mainboard but no response at all, not even a bios. Obviously something nasty happened somewhere either just at the same time I plugged in the USB drive or as a consequence of plugging it in.

Either way I’m left P.C.-less at the moment. Fortunately my laptop is helping to pick up some of the pieces.

So now I need to repair the damage, my main course of action would normally be to replace the mainboard and move on. Unfortunately the mainboard is a socket 939 board so i’m screwed!
It also had AGP for the Graphics and despite only just upgrading to a nice shiny X1950 Pro, it’s AGP and that’s a problem. The memory is DDR as well so that’s a count of 3 that leaves me stuck.

My only recourse, at a time when I need to spend money on my car is to buy as cheap as possible without completely ruling myself out of any future upgrades, or worse, getting cheap crap components that will fail in a year like this mainboard has.

Despite wanting to splash the cash, I’ve done the right thing and been stingy enough with the cash. Hopefully I will be up and running again tomorrow night.

Being a fan of ATI and AMD (despite their current shortcomings in the quad core department), and knowing I can’t stretch to quad core I opted to stick with dual core and had to move up to AM2.

I was lucky enough to find a mainboard coming in at £52 that is AM2 and AM2+ compatible and when AMD offload their Phenom stock I will be able to slap another couple of cores in later on for a few quid less than they are currently selling for. This baby has the new AMD 780G chipset on it which includes the ATI 3200 embeded gfx which gets awesome 3DMark06 scores AND the new Hybrid Graphics technology which means you get a psuedo SLI type effect when you plug in a PCIe x16 card.

I’ve opted to slap in an ATI 3850 Pro from Sapphire which will give me decent graphics performance on a budget with the ability to crossfire. Matching this to the chipset means I don’t have to worry about conflicts and I can take advantage of the Hybrid Graphics functionality to boost things a bit. The 3850 comes close to the 8800’s in most reviews I’ve seen so not bat for a shade less than £100.

4GB of DDRII from OCZ

An AMD 64 X2 4800+

Then a couple of cables and a new DVD burner running off SATA as the mainboard has a single IDE connector and I’ve got 2 drives I need to connect.

This configuration is not going to break and speed limits or win any awards for high powered gaming rig, but, I should get impressive performance on a shoestring. My budget celing was £300 and I came in at £280.

This is an upgrade I could have done without right now but I think i’ve been savvy enough with my cash to buy decent performance and some form of upgrade capabilityon a very tight budget.

When I get it all running I’ll post a 3DMark06 score and some pics of the build in progress. Fingers crossed that all goes well.