Windows 7 Troubleshooting Wizard is not a myth

I know this sounds crazy.   The network troubleshooting wizard actually works.

So I was on a designer’s machine and she was really having trouble with her wireless card – it’s reporting an IP Address conflict.

We figured that a simple:

ipconfig /release
ipconfig /renew

Should do the trick, but it was skipping the wireless adapter.  Confused – we stumbled across the wizard and clicked “Windows Network Diagnostics”.

To our amazement it asks us if we want it to fix the network for us. 

Behold!

Also explained why it wasn’t working before.

Apple iPhone drivers are pos

Exhibit A: Windows Explorer looking at the pictures in my iPhone. 

Notice that almost ALL of them are upside down, this happens very often when I take pictures sideways.  At a glance – you probably think (and I as well) ah you must have held your camera upside down.

But stop for a second.  When I view the pictures in iPhone, it always know which way is UP.  Imagine if you were trying to look at your pictures in your iPhone and they were upside down…  You’d try to flip the phone… but then iPhone will flip the pictures upside down again!  The whole Pictures library will be unusable.  People would get upset!

That means the iPhone knows intrinsically which way is UP, for each picture.

So WTF is it doing when it shows the picture through their drivers on Windows Explorer?

My educated guess and conclusion really is just this:

Apple don’t care if you use an application that’s outside of their ecosystem.  They simply don’t care if you have the absolutely shittiest experience.  Why, it must be Windows’ fault if it can’t render pictures correctly… 

I hate this arrogant side of Apple.  Pisses me off when their engineers can do such a great piece of art and yet at the same time piss on other engineers’ work.

ATI x64 driver fail - Catalyst Install Manager has stopped working

This could possibly be the last ATI product that I'd purchase.  For almost as long as I could remember I can not get the ATI drivers to install.

• Download from ATI website
• Download beta from ATI website
• Download from Dell website

I've always had to rely on Windows Update - but then it doesn't come with the Catalyst utilities.

Today I was forced to upgrade the drivers...

• Running Boot to VHD on the machine with Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 installed
• Default driver that Windows Update picked up is the Generic one
• I need to be able to use an external monitor for presentation tomorrow - Yikes!

Fortunately, I found my solution here:

http://insomniacgeek.com/blog/catalyst-install-manager-has-stopped-working/

To cut a long story short - this worked for me:

bin64\ATISetup.EXE –install –output SCREEN

Google hates Bing and is evil? Surely not!

So Microsoft has an outage in their data centre for Bing travel.  I’ve heard great amazing stories over the grapevine about this one, but anyway…
Bad Microsoft – slap on the wrist – don’t put your eggs in the same basket!

Google caches it (on 4 July) – and displays it in their search for bing – long after the Bing servers are up and operational again (it is now 10 July).

http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=bing&btnG=Google+Search&meta=&aq=f&oq=
(Google result for Bing – currently)

http://www.bing.com/travel/
(Bing travel is running fine now!  And has been – for the last 5 days!)

Makes you wonder if GMail (their own internal product), or CNN (a major external website), or even Microsoft.com (MS itself!) had an error whether Google search would continue to show the cached error page for 6 days.

I guess bing.com (their competitor) gets special cache rules.

Facebook – tattoo ad and privacy?

So I was looking at my wife Lina using her Facebook and saw this ad on the right:

I exclaimed oh wow – Facebook told the advertiser what her husband’s name is.  Look it says John.  I started to wonder what are the privacy implications of that, and whether there are privacy controls for this…

So I flipped back to my Facebook account, and started refreshing the page to look for the same ad.

She exclaimed oh wow – who is Jen?

I am in so much trouble because of Facebook :-(

So it was all a false alarm – it looks like the ad only knows your gender, and displays John or Jen accordingly.