Several thousand bloggers went for the funny April Fools joke put together by WordPress and textpattern. Have a look at the “scam” site, wordpattern , and see if you’d buy their story…

I really enjoyed reading the part about the “Silver bullet”:

“Our ground breaking, no-nonsense approach of creating a fast and lean CMSMS (CMS management system) is unparalleled and will fulfil the need of every user out there – we won’t be content with anything less.

A pluggable and highly scalable framework architecture with zero-configuration will allow the integration of every CMS on the planet and provide full backward-, forward- and sideways-compatibility to existing solutions.

Wordpattern will bring unlimited, unfettered power to the creator of content and will do so with absolute usability in a unified User Interface that is so intuitive… it will make you cry. Wordpattern shall be highly flexible and require no learning or training time. Extensive multimedia documentation will accompany every release, as will trained emergency support personnel.”

Well isn’t this great or what…

Twice this week I’ve been thrown this message in my face. First it was a friend of mine who couldn’t get his computer starting, the last time it was me. After the “Boot Disc Failure” message, BIOS tries to help out by suggesting you insert the system disc. At first I thought it meant the install CD for my OS, later we discovered this wasn’t the case…

You might think your drive is gone to heaven, but on the other hand it might be something as simple as the cables not being properly attached. Over the phone I instructed my friend to open up the desktop (more like the “black box” in this case) and look for a black “thingy” (that’s HD for the more experienced one), then disconnect and reconnect the wide gray cables. And voila, everything went back to normal. I had to do exactly the same this morning and thank God and knock on wood and all that, it worked. I suppose you would have to invest in a new HD and serious amount of time otherwise to get the systems up and running as before. I’m now in the middle of creating a more decent backup plan…

I’ll post more stuff on other hardware related issues in the future, as most individual parts have their own specific symptoms. Instead of spending additional euros on a service person doing what you could have done, you might spend those euros on something else (like more hardware…).

Earlier this week I discovered I was unable to play some of my own personal videos (*.AVI) on neither my laptop at home nor my desktop in the office. The most frustrating thing about it was that I couldn’t get a decent error message from any of my mediaplayers. Most of them just crashed or they continued at 10% of normal speed (very annoying). Media Player told me that an “unknown error” just occurred, so that didn’t help me much either. Even intense “googling” didn’t sort the problem.

When something that used to work suddenly stops working you better remember what you installed last. In this case I did (for a change) remember, and it was interVideo DVD copy. Apparently this release has some issues with one of the Morgan codec’s, or more precisely doesn’t install it/them properly. As a result some formats are unsupported cause the Morgan codec’s breaks down on execution.

Solution came with a nifty little app called GSpot. With this “Codec Information Appliance” I was able to isolate the problem. The problem with the faulty codec’s from Morgan was simply resolved by re-installing the original codec’s found at Morgan’s website. However this is not the only incident where Windows and media codec’s doesn’t walk hand in hand, but so far Microsoft haven’t written anything helpful on the subject. Thank God for those small helpful apps and gadgets people develop to make life easier on the rest of us…

With GSpot you can open any media file and get current status. It will tell you which codec’s you need and also if the ones you have are not behaving properly like in my case. More or less all the info you need to get the files playing, and your system back to normal.

P.S. Yes you’re right, I never said anything about why I need a DVD copier

From time to time Windows might do things we didn’t expect and the result may be both frustrating and irritating. Why this happens? Well have a look at the hidden menu recently discovered by one of its users.

As you can see it all happens for a reason…

This menu is of course not REALLY there, but sometimes I keep wondering if it is. My last crash happened less than a week ago, but fortunately I’ve created multiple backups (learning from experience) so I really didn’t lose more than the email I had been typing on the last 15 minutes. Nevertheless this kind of error shouldn’t have happened in the first place, as typing a message in Outlook using plain text isn’t that hard on the computer.

Came accross this fantastic substitute for the original windows welcome tune this afternoon. Grab the tune and make the replacement to get a more realistic start, and maybe also a good laugh when you start your working day (given you’re yet another user of this OS that is)…

Windows welcome tune

Happy computing…