You may think, from the title of this blog, that this would have something to do with Douglas Adams and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Well, you'd be wrong. In fact, the cliché title only refers to the fact that this blog is going to cover lots of different topics because I am too lazy to do lots of little blogs. So I will now unload the demented, crazy thoughts that are generated in my brain daily, to procrastinate from studying for Introduction to Business Information Systems.

Windows Vista. There was a time, only a few months back, I would slobber at the very thought of it. This creation of excess spittle has ceased of late.

I was chatting with some of my lecturers, and one of them was telling me about his experience with Vista Beta 2 (which, by the way, you can get legally free from here). What he had to say was disheartening and he wasn't talking about the release date. Apparently, Vista is a resource hog. To a massive extent. Now, I expected that, what with their SuperCache feature that pre-caches stuff so that things will run faster. Naturally, the more stuff cached, the bigger the memory footprint.

However, it isn't just memory that Vista chews through. It is CPU as well. "CPU?" you ask. "What does it need CPU for?" A very good question, James. The flash "Aero" interface, that's what for. Apparently, ALT+TABBING can take up to 30% of your processor. Because the entire interface is a 3D thing, it eats resources like a mulcher eats a tree.

The hardware requirements for the Aero interface are also ridiculous. You need at least 128MB of graphics card RAM to use the fancy effects. "Say what??". That's right. 128 megabytes of graphics RAM. So that piece of crap 64MB Geforce 5200Go I have in my laptop can burn in hell, apparently.

I'm sorry, 128MB? I'm no staunch fan of Apple's OSX, but their OS has equivalent fancy interface effects and they don't need 128MB of graphics RAM.

A ridiculous fact I was told is that OSX is made by 60 developers, and Windows is made by thousands. Why in the devil's name is Vista so bad then? My lecturer said it was because their developers simply don't know how to write a good desktop graphics application. Although I find that a little hard to believe (its not like Microsoft is full of morons) however, the facts stand.

Another thing that continually sucks my mouth dry of spittle like a desert drinks water is Vista's ever retreating release date. In a recent Inquirer article it was said Vista was late because the management at Microsoft sucks. Now, I could have told them that. There is no other excuse for a bunch of very bright programmers to perform so badly. On a massive project like an Operating System I'd imagine that coordination and management would be paramount.

Another astounding fact that I got out of that Inquirer article is that the average Microsoft programmer writes 1000 lines of code a year. Is it just me or does that seem ridiculously low (no seriously, email me if you don't think so).

Another spittle drying fact of Vista is its new approach to security. The OS will prompt you for admin credentials for a lot of things; so many that people bitch about the inundation of dialogs. Now, I am a control freak so I probably wouldn't mind this as much as the average Joe, but apparently it is ridiculous. It also, thankfully, has improved in the transition between Beta 1 and Beta 2, although its still annoying.

So, I was doing some thinking (as I do), and came up with a shocking logical conclusion. If Vista uses 30% of the CPU to do things as simple as ALT+TAB then laptop batteries will smoke and burn in hell. No, seriously. In hell.

The reason batteries last as long as they do in laptops is because most of the time the computer does almost nothing. For example, I normally get around 3 hours out of my battery. However, you can blow this away to 40 minutes (or less) if you try and play games which are processor and GPU intensive. So with Vista continually using a large portion of your CPU to do mundane things, laptop batteries will be going flat as quickly as a tire punctured with a explosion from a block of C4 goes flat. And that's pretty fast. So this must be why Microsoft is pushing for all laptop hard drives to have a large cache of flash memory by mid-2007 (I can't find the Inquirer article that said that, otherwise I'd link it) to save battery life. Because Vista is going to drink it up.

Let's switch topics shall we? Ah, Origami UMPCs. I don't know whether you know about Microsoft's plan to have small computers that are bigger than a PDA but smaller than a laptop that have the functionality of a full laptop. Sounds good in theory, apparently it sucks in reality. Apparently, the problem with UMPCs is that they don't fit into any market area well enough. They are trying to create a new market, but their problems make them completely unattractive to punters.

The main problem with UMPCs is their crappy battery life. You get 2 hours. That's it. That's really useless for any real task that you would want to do on a real computer, since that's what UMPCs are supposed to be like. This is because of a few factors. Firstly, they can't be too heavy, so a small battery is needed to keep the weight down. Secondly, the first generation of UMPCs use power hungry screens that are not suited to power saving but are cheap to make. *Shhhhh* Yes, that's the sound of battery life getting flushed down the toilet.

The second problem is that they are apparently too heavy. Around 850g. The easiest way to use a UMPC is to hold it in one hand and use the touch screen with the other. Well, holding 800g in one hand for any length of time is too much. I was laughed at by my friends who reckon that 850g is not that much and I am a weakling. Yeah, OK, I'm not strong, but I don't think most people could continuously hold just under 1KG up for any long period of time. The solution? Smaller battery. But that would destroy battery life. See the problem?

The technology needed to make UMPCs work simply doesn't exist yet. Once high-power, lightweight and cheap batteries are made then perhaps the UMPC idea would take off. I'd like one.

Another topic change and this time we can look at something slightly more funny: breaking Notepad! Notepad is possibly the simplest program in Windows and you can make it break by doing these things: first open a blank Notepad and type without the quotes "this app can break". Save the file as a text file somewhere. Then close Notepad and reopen the text file by double clicking on it in Explorer. Whoops! Its a bit broken! Apparently, some dodgy implementation of Unicode is to blame for this. Go check it out on the INQ.

Just to get you excited I'll hit you straight up with the exciting news: my computer started smoking!

Now I'm not going to do a George Lucas and not start at the beginning, so prepare to hear a saga of love, hate, sorrow, and passion. From the beginning.

A long time ago in a galaxy far far away... uhh... back a couple of years ago, (2002/2003 I think) I went out and bought myself a brand spanking new computer that only had the top of the line components. The CPU was a 3.06GHz 533MHz FSB Pentium 4 and the motherboard a Gigabyte GA-8INXP which had got 9.5/10 reviews wherever it had been reviewed. It also brandished 1GB of DDR RAM using that newfangled (back then) dual stream tech. 120GB of brand spanking new SATA HDD. And EMCA (Even More Computer Acronyms)! :) It was state of the art, top of the line gear that kicked some major butt (especially over my previous P3 800MHz machine). I was happy.

The galaxy was in peace... uhhh... computer worked like a dream for just over a year. Then the Sith made their move. The motherboard died. The computer just refused to turn on. I would press the "ON" button and it would whir up... and do nothing. No POST. No screen output. Nothing.

So I rang Dodgy Brothers (aka Computer World) where I had bought my components and got kicked in the teeth. Apparently the board's warranty was only for one year. And one year had just past. "Damn, no warranty," I cursed. Of course, being the young inexperienced padawan that I was back then, I bought this sweet new tech just before it became redundant. P4 533MHz FSB was outdated to 800MHz FSB a few months after I bought the computer and the whole Socket 478 not long after that.

So getting a different motherboard was out of the question since mine was the best. So I said, "use the force Luke"... uhh... "I'll just get the same motherboard again; mine must have just been dodgy." 350 bucks later (because the initial price was so high ($450) Dodgy Brothers couldn't sell it any lower or they'd make a loss) I came happily home with a new motherboard.

Peace reigned in the Republic for just under a galactic year. The computer worked like a dream. Then the motherboard kicked the bucket again. Same problem. "Aha!", I thought, "Inside the warranty this time!". So I sent it in to Dodgy Brothers. They took it and around a month later (I almost died waiting. You just don't separate a Jedi from the Force. Its just not cool.) the replacement came in. I installed it and it worked no problems.

Then, not long after, around the middle to the end of 2005, my fellow Jedi (cousin) Patrick, who had bought the same components for his lightsaber... uhh... computer as I had, was caught in the gaze of a Sith Lord. His motherboard (the same as mine) died in the same way as mine. He sent his in for warranty, with Dodgy Brothers telling him that the warranty on our boards was three years (they told me one year). So I had bought that second board for nothing. Those damn Neimoidians at Computer World (Dodgy Brothers) had ripped me off!

But the war with darkness was not yet over. Six months passed and this time the Sith were better prepared with a counter-attack, and they had something new up their sleeve. In December 2005, my motherboard developed leaky capacitors (Image). For those who don't know, this is where the acid inside the capacitor leaks out. Not good. However, the board still worked. Mostly. Like Anakin, it was given to small tantrums where it was simply refuse to boot, beeping motherboard error codes that said whinged randomly about broken graphics cards and motherboard faults. However, a few simple restarts would get it going again.

But the dark side had infected it, and there was no going back. By the end of January 2006, it would only boot 10% of the time. So, just before I went away skiing in Canada on the exotic planet Earth which lies in the Outer Rim, I sent the motherboard back into Dodgy Brothers for warranty.

Buying a new model of motherboard at this point to avoid warranty and get a new model of motherboard was out of the question. Motherboards of the same socket (Socket 478), which became redundant soon after I bought it, weren't being sold, let alone made any more. So I was stuck with waiting for warranty.

Around one and a half months later I got another motherboard back. Same model, and according to Dodgy Brothers, apparently new. It worked when I installed it, but around a week later it started not booting, and I'd get weird graphical corruptions and freezes in Windows... sometimes. *Sarcasm* Sure its a new motherboard, Dodgy Brothers. I spent lots of time probing with the Force (aka my screwdriver), trying to find the problem.

Software, hardware, I tried it all. It seemed like both the graphics card and the motherboard were stuffed. Sometimes the motherboard sometimes decided not to boot. The graphics card randomly froze the computer with graphical errors (Image) and refused to reproduce the problem when put in someone else's computer. It often would work fine and I would get happy, stealing precious half-hours of Oblivion or Star Wars Empire At War. But always, it would eventually die.

So I turned to Jedi Knight Patrick. After his motherboard also died he ended up buying another model of Socket 478 motherboard. He was able to do this because he bought it far enough back in time there were still some on the shelves. He was forced to buy an entire new board because Dodgy Brothers has yet to (even to this date) send him a replacement board for the one in warranty. But again, the Sith were not far behind. His computer also just started stuffing up for no reason: BSODs in Windows, underperforming graphics to the point of unplayability. Eventually he was forced to destroy his dark-side turned Padawan... uhh... computer. Shutting away his grief at such potential in the Force lost, he bought a laptop.

So he lent me his graphics card (now a spare part) so I could play Oblivion. And it worked... until the Sith got wind of our plan. His graphics card started having corruptions, worse than my card (!), to the point that they were evident in the BIOS and on other people's computers when it was installed in theirs. We will never know the full extent of the Sith's involvement with that tragedy: whether my motherboard killed his card or it just died on its own.

So I installed my old GeForce 4 from WAAAY back so I could at least use the computer for storage. And everything was peaceful for a few weeks... then disaster struck.

This week, studying for my University exams, I set up my computers so that I had slides from lectures at the Jedi Academy... uhh... Swinburne on my laptop and was using my main computer to type notes. I dragged my sorry carcass through days of Introduction to Business Information Systems (IBIS: possibly the worst subject in existence) study and today I hit 9000 words and 33 pages of notes. All saved on my computer.

The Sith's plotting never ended, and I, relaxing, was taken off guard when my computer froze while I was typing notes. "OK", I thought, "I'll just restart." Nothing. No boot. Recognise the situation? I started disconnecting things, hoping that would fix the problem. Then I turned on my computer.

FIRE! Or perhaps just smoke. Whatever, the Sith struck their final blow to the Republic. My computer smoked and I screamed and turned off the power. The room was full of an acrid haze and I found that one of the power cables for the floppy disk drive had come out of its plug and shorted on the case, the wire going red hot and burning through the plastic covering it.

The computer still doesn't turn on. The shroud of the Dark Side has fallen and all has been lost. Well, I don't think the short damaged anything, but I can't tell because the computer didn't work anyway.

Here are some pictures of the destruction:

• Image - You can see the wire loose from the floppy power connector where it ought to be.
• Image - A nice overexposed photo of the burnt wire
• Image - The plastic on the wire is completely deteriorated

So unlike in George Lucas's stories, this saga ends on an unhappy note. My computer doesn't want to boot, and my files are lost (the main thing that wasn't backed up was the 33 page 9000 word IBIS notes, and other stuff like all my Steam apps (CS:S, HL:2 etc)). My hard drives are SATA and in a striped RAID configuration so I can't just slap them in another machine to get the data back.

But its OK. I was never going to read those IBIS notes again, anyway. The learning was in actually typing them out. Even though I still don't know most of that stuff. All my other stuff is either backed up on my laptop, a copy available from Jedi Knight Patrick, or is less important things (still annoying, however) like save games and images of Office 2007 Beta that I can afford to lose.

"But George Lucas... uhh... DC," you ask, "How did the Sith manage to destroy each board you and Jedi Patrick ever got, even though some were new?" "A good question, my young Padawan," I reply. Since I can't find any reports on the Internet of anyone else having problems with my motherboard model, I think that Dodgy Brothers got a dodgy (geddit!?) batch of my motherboard, and so every single one they sold had the flaw that eventually killed it. The one that got repaired in warranty actually didn't die the same as all the others, and instead died of leaky capacitors, another stroke of the Sith (or bad luck).

But its all OK. Soon, in a few weeks, I'll get an entirely new lightsaber... uhh... computer. And then perhaps the Sith will leave me alone.

*Scene zooms out with a nasty Sith laugh echoing away into the background and then cuts to credits with a circular wipe and loud Star Wars music*

Ouch. Sony is in big trouble with this one. As you probably know, Sony and some other companies decided it was a good idea to make an entirely new CPU called Cell. Cell is supposed to the powerhouse core that empowers the PS3 enough so that it can kick the crap out of Microsoft's Xbox 360.

Well that seems to be a bit, well, wrong. Instead of creating an awesome processor, Sony has managed (at this point in time) to create a dud that gets severely trounced by the 360. Cell's write speed from local memory is at a paltry 4GB/s and its write speed is at an absolutely rock bottom 16MB/s. Yes that's megabytes per second. What the hell. My iPod writes to its hard drive almost as fast at that. Good work Sony.

So not only is the PS3 ridiculously late, but at this point in time it barely works. I feel sorry for the developers having to work on games for that platform. They've been told to use main memory instead of local memory to avoid this local memory problem. It was said in such a way that indicated that this problem is not going to be fixed any time soon. Surely not?

So not only is the PS3 already difficult to program for (compared to the Xbox 360 which apparently has quite good tools) its going to get even harder with crippled local memory that will put this console in a firm second place behind the 360. And that's OK with me. I'm a Microsoft fan and anything that rubs Sony's face in the dirt makes me happy. I've never really forgiven them after that rootkitting scandal they were involved in.

In my opinion, Sony betted too much on their ability to create a new CPU. Its not an easy thing to do, as evidenced by the fact that only two main companies actually make CPUs AMD and Intel. VIA is an example of a company that will always be behind the 8 ball. Its like in Formula 1 racing: Williams used to be a good team up there at the top, then at some point they stuffed up and now they are constantly behind Ferrari, because Ferrari is always one step ahead. Its too hard to overtake them. Sony's bet on Cell doesn't seem to be paying off.

I got some disappointing feedback about my last blog, so I'll point out the nuances for people who missed it. Yes, I was deliberately being a hypocrite with my whinging and constant "shut up"s. I had hoped that more people would get the irony in my blog, that I, the hater of whinging useless blogs, now am writing one myself. Oh well, obviously it was lost in text, like sarcasm in an instant message.

To my friends who are laughing at me: Shut the hell up.

Yes, I know. I hate blogs. "Wait a second then," you say, "What the frack is this then?" What can I say? I had a one-eighty. No, not a three-sixty, because that would imply that I am then facing back where I started, which is not the case.

"Shut the hell up!" you scream in shock, "Stop avoiding the issue with your semantics and get on with it!" Fine then. This is how this ground-breaking change in the universe happened: I was discussing blogs with my friends at Uni and I kept saying "blogs are shit, they're the trash of the internet, full of rubbish that nobody cares about." I was told that "yes, some blogs are written by whinging kids that should shut up but some can be quite good!"

Well, this got me thinking. I prided myself on not reading shitty blogs that I asserted contained useless crap like "I got to eat food and... uhhh... do stuff yesterday... yeah" and "Im soooo sad manz, Im pining for this lyk grl manz." Then I realised, "shit, I already read blogs and they aren't crap!". Although not formally called blogs, it struck me that the front pages of Penny Arcade, and Ctrl+Alt+Del are really blogs. And they are not shit.

Then, because I'm a stubborn bastard that doesn't like to change, I thought "nah, nobody would read the stuff I wrote so what's the point?" I was then informed that somebody would read my blog and they were also useful for storing cool things you think of and searching for them later.

So that, plus a whole bunch of whinging from Dwain and the prospect of actually writing the blog functionality myself in PHP, got this blog started. I'm not promising to write all the time, but maybe this would be a good place to rant about DRM or extol the virtues of... well, things that need their virtues extolled. What do you want from me?? :)

"PHP," you say, "You're going to write this in PHP? Why? Just download a blogging software!" The short answer to that statement, which should be a question ("Enough with your semantics!" you scream), is "'sif use some crappy software." The long answer is not only will developing the blog function in PHP be a useful project for me to teach myself PHP with, but it will (hopefully) end up with a useful module for my business's CMS (Content Management System).

As you can probably guess, this page is NOT generated by PHP. This is simply a stand in plain HTML blog to shut up Dwain until after the exams when I can actually sit down and write the real deal. So no comments section, no archive, and no searching until then.

Shut the hell up. :)