I didn’t go the ordinary route for installing Windows 7. I had a Windows Vista partition and a Windows 7 RC partition. Win7RC was installed on a newer hard drive, so I wanted to install Windows 7 RTM over that. So I copied my files over to the Vista partition with the intention of copying the files back and then formatting over it to leave that space free.

But, when I came to formatting the partition, Windows 7 wouldn’t let me! It said it was the System Partition, where it boots from and has all the boot entries. Dang, how to get around this one?

Well….

1. Find your Windows 7 DVD and set up your BIOS to boot from it on start up.
2. Shut down your computer.
3. Open it up! Now, you’ll have to remove that Hard Drive (just unplug it from the SATA/IDE cable).
4. Turn on your computer, making sure to boot from the DVD.
5. Wait for Windows 7 setup to start, when it asks you for your language and locales, set the values.
6. At the bottom of the next dialog, click on Repair your computer.
7. Windows Recovery will tell you there are missing boot entries, and if you would like to add them and restart. Don’t, as that isn’t the only problem we have.
8. Select Windows 7 from the list, and click Next.
9. Click Startup Repair, and let Windows Recovery fix it all.

It should now reinstall the boot loader, and repair missing boot entries. Click the Restart button after it has completed to test it.

If it is all working, now you can add your hard drive back in, and safely format it!

These days I buy most of my music through iTunes. It’s incredibly convenient and has a rather large selection. But something that has been irking me of late is the censorship Apple places on song titles.

I first came across this when I purchased Elbow — Leaders of the Free World where track 2, entitled Picky Bugger was replaced with Picky B****r.

I first thought that it would replace that with the uncensored version… nup…

What the hell? I paid for the thing, I’m over the age of 18 and I think I can take the word Bugger (despite it’s disapproval on New Zealand TV for a wee while).

But it gets worse. iTunes thinks the word Kiwi is some sort of swear word.

Well done Apple for taking our national bird, and the term used to describe many New Zealanders, and censoring it as if it’ll offend some people, somewhere.

If iTunes has a “I’m a big boy now,” option somewhere, then please let me know. Otherwise, I think us Kiwi’s should hammer into Apple that “kiwi” isn’t worthy of censorship. Try contacting Apple here, at least, I think that is the right form. Thanks for making that process difficult too.

I caved earlier this month and finally bought an iPhone – a 16gb black 3GS to be precise.

Now, previously I had been really scathing of the iPhone… the first generation iPhone was an overpriced device that only had a touchscreen going for it. Now, it has applications, cut-copy-paste, I can buy stuff directly… pretty much everything on my “Why I hate the iPhone” list was crossed off as the years went by so I finally bought one as it is a significant upgrade to my dying Sony Ericsson W850i.

The cost was one PSP. But I hardly used it anymore.

Since the release of Fantail 0.1 I have been hard at work getting a bunch of new features ready for Fantail 0.2. Of course, I am the only one that’s working on this, so things can take a bit of time to come to fruition, but trust me, I’m working on it!

Fantail 0.2 is about bringing in different views, and that’s exactly what it has got. In the original release, you could only view your Timeline, Replies and Direct Messages from other people (as well as the Catch Up window).

The biggest request I heard from people is to allow for groups, so yes, they’ll be in there.

Plus, search is quite important now, so Fantail 0.2 will support Twitter Search as well, including saved searches.

That’s not all though, but over the coming weeks I’ll let you know more as it comes along. Just believe me when I say, it’s being worked on.

Update If you were still having issues before, I have reuploaded it. It should solve this mess.

Fantail 0.1.1 has just been uploaded. Sorry about the lateness, unfortunately a back-up went awry causing me to rewrite the minimal install script.

This actually fixes two problems:

• Will no longer suffer from the Twitpocalypse. A database conversion needs to take place, so it may take a minute or two to get going at first.
• Has the sending bug fix that affected a number of people at random instances.

Download it now

Oh dear, I’m quite embarrassed about this. I have discovered that Fantail wasn’t quite ready to handle really, really big numbers. The Twitpocalypse has happened, and this has affected Fantail.

Fantail won’t update, and may crash from time to time. You can still send Tweets, but you won’t get any notification that it was sent successfully. The only way to fix this is to release a new version. 0.1.1 will be released later tonight.

One of the most annoying recent trends on Facebook are user created quizzes. They seemed fun at the time, but now they’ve gone ridiculous, in fact, we’re waiting on an “Are you a gay potato?” quiz to turn up at some stage. There is also the other dubious technique of not having any company associated with it, yet people seem quite happy to give them permission to use their profile data as they see fit.

I had enough, the number of quizzes was getting out of hand, and instead of turning up on Facebook to see how my friends are doing, I’ll just get a barrage of quiz results, from the type of smile someone has, when they would get married… stuff I don’t really care about. I discovered a Facebook Purity Greasemonkey extension… I think on Twitter… and it worked wonders, but it was overzealous and blocked some genuine applications. So I modded it, and here’s the link. First, you must install Greasemonkey for it to do anything.

It will only block quizzes and trivia, and has a handy block in the upper right to show them again. Choice! Now I found out useful happenings about my friends.

Credit goes out to Steeev for the original script.

Update I have been asked by the author of the original script to take my version down. You can get the original script from Steeev’s website.

Perhaps one of the subtle differences between Windows Vista and Windows XP is the new font that Microsoft decided to use for the user interface. Tahoma 8.25pt has been used since Windows 2000 (but was available before then) and it has been replaced with Segoe UI 9pt, which is a much nicer looking font, with its tighter and rounder letters, but larger spacing. The bigger point size also helps increase the readability.

But how do you deal with different user interface fonts in .Net? Especially when the default for Windows Forms is the horrible MS Sans Serif (why?). Well, one method is to use the Environment class to detect which version of Windows the user is using and set the font,

if (Environment.OSVersion.Platform == PlatformID.Win32NT &&
  Environment.OSVersion.Version.Major >= 6) {
    // Vista+
    this.Font = new Font("Segoe UI", 8.0f);
} else if (Environment.OSVersion.Platform == PlatformID.Win32NT &&
  Environment.OSVersion.Version.Major < 6) {
    // XP and below
    this.Font = new Font("Tahoma", 8.0f);
} else ... (Unix/Mac code if you want to go that far)

But what if the user has custom fonts selected, or is using the Mono framework, or Microsoft decide to change the default font again in the future? The fonts are probably going to be messed up.

Fortunately, .Net has the SystemFonts class, which is a small collection of the default fonts used by the system. But, the names aren’t actually what is advertised. DefaultFont is not actually the Windows default font, but the .Net default font… MS Sans Serif, ahhh!

The only one that seems to return the real system default font is MessageBoxFont. So, we can turn that whole if statement into…

this.Font = SystemFonts.MessageBoxFont;

You can also use this font when dealing with larger sizes…

HeadingLabel.Font = new Font(SystemFonts.MessageBoxFont.FontFamily, 15f, FontStyle.Regular);

Pretty fonts for all occasion, that even follow the users preferences. Yay!

So, Fantail has now been downloaded a few times now and I’ve received lots of positive comments. Thanks everyone who has downloaded it! If you still haven’t, then check it out at the Fantail subsite where you’ll find a big download button and more information about it.

Recently it has come to my attention of a problematic bug however that I can’t seem to get rid of. It doesn’t affect everyone, from what I can tell, most users can use Fantail without trouble.

When you go to post an update, Fantail will just sit there with the busy indicator spinning indefinately. This is due to a problem in the communication between Fantail and Twitter, specifically, Twitter has returned a 417: Expectation Failed exception. I’m busy trying to work out the cause of this and why it affects only a few people.

I am curious about one fix though, and I’ve attached it over the break. If your version of Fantail isn’t sending tweets, then please try it. It does require your hands getting slightly dirty. Otherwise, it’s onwards to version 0.2!
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After working on it for months, and having a month of testing I’m pleased to finally present the first proper release of Fantail!

I started Fantail purely because I didn’t think the other solutions were adequate enough, they required AIR which didn’t work on my computer, and I thought there were better ways to show tweets.

This first release, admittedly, doesn’t have a bajillion features just yet. It is just the beginning. I have many ideas and I hope to realise them through Fantail. A special thanks goes out to all those who helped test out the release candidate versions and gave feedback and support.

You can download version 0.1 now by clicking the link. Go over the break to read a quick start guide, and any changes made since the release candidates.

Before you begin, please make sure you have the Microsoft .Net Framework 2.0 installed. If you have Windows Vista, you already have this. If you have Windows XP, visit Windows Update to make sure it is installed.

Download now!
For Windows XP, Vista and 7 (32-bit only) – .Net Framework required

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