The Cheezy Blog

One of the Microsoft techs who works on the Windows Search systems has written a neat little app called Start++.

The app gives customisable aliases he calls “startlets” to the windows search dialog, so typing “w microsoft” will take you to the Wikipedia page for Microsoft, “g silly string” will fire up your default browser and perform a Google search for silly string.

Very neat stuff.

Update 02nd June 2007 - Link updated to reflect the new Start++ site.

Just picked up this neat little tip to disable hibernation in windows vista, remove the sleep button from the start menu and delete the overly large hiberfil.sys file from your hard drive.

powercfg -h off

Run from the command prompt (type cmd into the search bar or go to start > programs > accessories > command prompt).

The powercfg command can be used for querying the state of various hardware devices too, which is rather useful.

You of course do all of this at your own risk.

It appears that Windows Vista has finally been finished and sent to manufacturing, with a release date set for Jan 30th.

With the recent announcement that Bill Gates will no longer be hands-on at Microsoft, I’m reminded of a recent article regarding Windows Vista over at winsupersite.com. The article describes the Windows Development section of Microsoft as the last vestiges of the “Bad old Microsoft,” with Bill Gates being very much the heart of the problem.

Does this mean then that if Bill had stepped back a few years ago, before development on Vista started, we would now have all the features we were promised, such as Avalon, WinFS and so on? I guess we’ll never know, but hopefully now he has taken this step away from the keyboard as it were, we shall see a bit more progress within the Windows Development section towards embracing some of the newer concepts in software design. Rather than just throwing out the same old tired material with a shiny new front end.

I was playing around in iTunes today, adding album artwork to my songs, when I accidentally added the full-sized scan of a CD cover to an album (a 4MB JPEG) instead of the resized version. Now I wasn’t 100% sure where iTunes kept the images, a quick investigation showed no sign of them anywhere within ~/Music/iTunes nor anywhere in ~/Pictures, a quick google left me somewhat shocked.

It turns out iTunes doesn’t store the images seperately at all, rather it embeds it in the song itself, this is a valid part of the ID3 standard apparently, but it leads to huge songs, slow access and more importantly a WORLD of duplication. I would have expected it to store the images in the album’s directory, at least for albums that have been organised by iTunes itself, and maybe the option to scan a directory for images to use in the same directory as files being added from outside the iTunes music folder structure. This is the system used by most other music players, and avoids issues of duplication, saves space and is faster to use!