Generally I like how the new taskbar operates and how it provides an API to interface with programs, such as providing “next and previous track” and “pause” buttons for Windows Media Player. It kind of works with Windows Live Messenger 9 by providing a custom preview containing your display picture and status. The problem is that it also shows the traditional window as well. Both preview images appear to provide the same functionality and therefore 1 is redundant. It would be better if the preview tiles could be merged, to provide both the display picture and the window.

The following images provide an example of what it looks like currently, as well as a poor attempt at image manipulation to show an example of what I would like to see.

Windows Live Messenger 9 previews and the Windows 7 taskbar (Note: the 2 messengers are running by use of Messenger Plus Live!)

The 2 windows merged

I’m not sure whether this is a problem as a result of running Messenger Plus Live!, however, it would be better to remove the redundant preview regardless of what’s causing it. Whether this is done by merging the preview images or just removing the preview of the actual window, I think it would be better.

I’m in the process of creating a little hobby site for Etsuko called Brissylife. It will be a place to find information for permanent residents or people seeking permanent residency in Brisbane. It is a place to learn from, and meet, other people living in Brisbane.

Anyway, it’s not quite ready yet, but you can check it out.

I’ve now completed Dead Space (the game) and watched both the Dead Space movie and comics.

Whilst I enjoyed the experience thoroughly, I found the ending of the game crept up fairly quickly. It certainly feels that the first 6, of the total 12, chapters are larger. Though this may just be a result of familiarity with the game in the latter stages.

The chronological order of the 3 parts are as follows:

1. Dead Space Comics
2. Dead Space Downfall (animated movie)
3. Dead Space (game)

Whilst it probably makes sense to experience them in that order, it does make some of the plot development in the game redundant as you already know it from previously. Perhaps a good compromise, between being chronologically correct and maintaining mystery, is to do what I did and play the first few chapters of the game and then watch the comics and movie.

Quick summary

• The religion (Unitology) is obviously based on Scientology
• The levels are quite interesting and varied; including both areas of both zero-gravity and vacuum of space
• The graphics are fantastic, however, for some reason anti-aliasing didn’t appear to work very well, if at all.
• The sound and music is brilliant.
• The story (particularly the back story) leaves a lot of room for further expansion. No doubt there will be new games or movies, based in this universe, produced in the future.

I am enjoying it a lot. Good story/atmosphere with great visuals/sound. I am currently half way through.

It is very similar in story/feel to System Shock 2 (with “The Many” as the bad guys), and also Event Horizon. Which, in my opinion, is a good thing.

Many things to like about it, including the rather interesting method of displaying the HUD. You can upgrade your weapons and suit, similar to in System Shock.

My only complaint is the control system. The mouse does not behave as you would expect with PC games, even with the sensitivity turned up greatly. Whilst you can get used to it, it would’ve been nice to have it done consistently with what is expected on a PC (for example, Half Life, Doom, Quake and so on). The perspective (third person, but very close over the shoulder) also takes a little getting used to.

I look forward to continuing playing it tomorrow, as well as eventually watching the Movie (prequel to the game) and perhaps looking at the comics (prequel to the movie). It’s a nice universe that EA have created and has the potential for many stories to be told within it.

The teaser trailer for the game is below:

Is it the missing sequel to System Shock 2 that I have been waiting for?

It certainly is looking that way. Bioshock, although supposedly a sequel in spirit, didn’t have the same atmosphere or style of System Shock 2. I am looking forward to Dead Space, and will hopefully grab it later this week.

Has anyone played it? What did you think? How does it compare to System Shock series (if you have played it)?

Well it’s been released, with some fancy new effects, and a new theme. Seems pretty good. Just wish the TV Series plugin would display correctly with the new theme.

Smallville season 8 – The first 2 episodes appear promising, particularly after the somewhat disappointing season 7.

Atlantis season 5 – Pretty average, I can see why they are cancelling it.

Heroes season 3 – Hard to say at this point, but might be good.

Eureka season 3 – I’m enjoying this.

Macross Frontier – Why is there so much singing?

Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles – I’m enjoying this as well.

I just saw the recent Huggies commercial: "Fee, fi, fo, fum, I smell... puoo!" - quite funny. Quite enjoying the Seinfeld/Bill Gates commercials as well.

Anyone seen any other funny commercials?

What can I say about the third Mummy film? It's terrible, in almost every way. It doesn't even feel like its part of the same series as the previous 2 films. It's boring, the dialogue is terrible, the characters are dull and irritating, and the film just doesn't flow well. The special effects were pretty good though.

Avoid it, unless you are really, really, bored.

It's a shame. I really liked The Mummy franchise and was looking forward to the third part. Oh well... lets see what Tropic Thunder brings.

I've long been a fan of ClarkConnect, it's very easy to use and has all the features most home users would want in a home gateway/server machine, such as:

• DHCP server
• Firewall/Proxy
• Web server
• Bandwidth allocation
• and much more

However, the one thing that is missing from the free version, though it is available in the commercial version, is load balancing multiple Internet connections. Now for the majority of people this is not an issue as they only have 1 Internet connection. I was the same until only recently. Seeing as I am not willing to pay for the commercial version, I need to look elsewhere for a solution, and I have settled upon pfSense.

pfSense is not as complete a solution home server solution like ClarkConnect. It is specifically a firewall/proxy that does support load balancing multiple Internet connections. I haven't played with it much, and actually have a problem likely due to unsupported hardware in the machine - which I'm hoping the newer BETA 1.2.1 will support. I plan to have another look at it over the next day or two.

Both are great products, and I'm hoping I will be equally pleased with pfSense as I am with ClarkConnect.

We all have fond memories of video game introductory movies and sequences. In fact, I can remember buying a game primarily from seeing the introduction movie. I've only chosen pre year 2000 games as modern games generally have very high quality pre-rendered or in-game introductions. I'm only interested in those uncommonly great introductions. Here are a couple that spring to mind:

1. Mechwarrior 2

This has to be my all time favourite intro. Damn near perfect for it's time, from the skull being crushed by the Mech's foot, to the fireball engulfing the screen - brilliant. All the Mechwarrior games had good intro's.

2. Syndicate Wars

This hasn't aged well, and is in fact quite poor, but at the time I thought it was cool.

3. Command & Conquer

Whilst the intro movie itself isn't spectacular, the entire experience was. Everyone should remember the very fancy installer and the movies throughout. All the Command & Conquer games had good movie sequences - except for Generals.

Any others that you can think of?

Well, I finally got home from watching the opening ceremony at a friends' house. I have to say, there was some pretty spectacular stuff. Apparently much of the drumming was reciprocated by the baby in the womb - similar types of noises, such as the fireworks, seem to effect the little fella.

As far as the idea of the 4 major Chinese inventions, I wonder what the Korean's think about the movable type claim? I believe China considered Korea to be part of China at the time, perhaps they still do... Maybe you could argue Tibet invented movable type?

My only complaint, and it's a sizeable one, is waiting, for what seemed like 4 hours, for the athletes parade... I think most of us would've gone home earlier if we weren't waiting for Australia, which as luck would have it, was third last.

Here's a final thing for you: How the Beijing Olympics got its logo

I just finished watching Starship Troopers 3: Marauder (yes, there was a Starship Troopers 2) and quite enjoyed it. It returns to the style of the original movie, rather than the darker atmosphere present in the second film.

The good: New bugs, new ships and new breasts to look at.

The bad: The special effects really could've done with a few more $$.

It's been a while since I've posted my favourite Firefox extensions, so here is my current crop, and yes, they all work with Firefox 3.

• Adblock Plus
  Ever been annoyed by all those ads and banners on the internet that often take longer to download than everything else on the page? Install Adblock Plus now and get rid of them.

• Adblock Filterset.G Updater
  This is a companion extension to Adblock or Adblock Plus and should be used in conjunction with it. This extension automatically downloads the latest version of Filterset.G every 4-7 days.

• Firebug
  Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.

• Firesizer
  Allows you to resize the window to specific dimensions.

• Forecastfox l10n
  Get international weather forecasts from Weather.com, and display it in any toolbar or statusbar.

• IE View Lite
  This is a cut down version of IE View by Paul Roub, which is 47.4 KB. All the same UI and features are there. It has a right click menu item to open a page in IE and a list of sites to always open in IE.

• Operator
  Operator leverages microformats and other semantic data that are already available on many web pages to provide new ways to interact with web services.

• OperaView
  Open pages in Opera from Firefox and Mozilla context menus, in the same was as IE View operates.

• PDF Download
  PDF Download relieves the pain experienced when encountering PDF files on the Web. Whenever you click on a PDF file, PDF Download lets you know before trying to open it, and then offers you choices such as downloading, opening, or converting it straight to HTML.

• Stop-or-Reload Button
  A Stop-or-Reload. Saves some screen real estate.

• Tamper Data
  Use tamperdata to view and modify HTTP/HTTPS headers and post parameters.

• Webmail Notifier
  WebMail Notifier checks your webmail accounts and notifies the number of unread emails... Supports : gmail, yahoo, hotmail, daum, naver, empas, nate and more.

Are there any others that you use?

I love Firefox 3, but I did wish that it had the nice glass effects from say Internet Explorer 7. Fortunately with Glasser, currently at 1.0.16 BETA, you can. It's still being developed and as such there are some things requiring further polishing, but for the most part it does the trick. Don't forget to read the post for further information on getting Glasser to work as you want.

This pretty much sums my experience up:

Cyanide and Happiness

I'm intrigued with the lack of support for Windows Vista's Aero effects within Windows Live Messenger 8.5. It was released almost a year after Windows Vista and there was certainly time before that to play with pre-release builds of Vista. Version 9 of "messenger" is being prepared for release, but there doesn't seem like any sign of Aero support at this stage. I'm hoping there is a good reason why it wasn't included, but the more I read about the development of messenger, the more I feel the development team just isn't pulling their weight enough. When I read that 2 of the 5 currently known new features of messenger are being able to use animated gif's for your display picture and being able to click links in personal personal messages, I can't help wonder why it will take almost a year to implement those "features".

It hurts even more when we have to put up with things like white boxes appearing on conversation windows and youtube links being blocked.

I like messenger and I use it a lot, however there doesn't seem to be much advancement going on at the moment. 8.5 is pretty much the same as 7, just with a new skin. Why is it that Yahoo's new messenger looks so much cooler on Vista than Microsoft's own product?

My rant is over for now. Bed time.

Just watched it this evening, and whilst I was a little drunk, I enjoyed it.

Silly, but fun.

Unfortunately I don't have any shots that are particularly good, but here are a couple more of our baby boy:

Well I finally got around to installing Windows Vista (64bit Home Premium).

I'm still pretty much of the same mind, I don't hate it, but I don't particularly love it either.

The new interface is inconsistent and somewhat confusing, and whilst I like the new effects Aero provides that alone doesn't overcome the overall amateurish feel of the whole system.

However, the thing that has caught my eye is Vista Media Center. The programs interface, from my limited use so far, is very slick. I'll have a play with it a bit more but if I can get it to do what I want, I may use it instead of Media Portal.