Matt Little's Blog

Just too busy at work at the moment and, well, blogging seems to be a lot of cost and effort.

I'm currently thinking that this might be the last year that the blog (in its current form) exists.

An upgrade appears to have caused issues with this site. Apologies if you have had problems.

Unlike previous versions of Outlook, it appears that the default setting for POP3 mail accounts is to leave a copy of the messages on the server. To disable this option go to the File tab at the top (apparently called the backstage tab) and click on the Account Settings button. Select your account, then click Change. Click 'More Settings' and select the 'Advanced' tab and uncheck the box labelled "Leave a copy of messages on the server"

Easy but why change the default? A lot of people seem to be getting caught out and only discover a problem when their ISP helpfully mails them to advise that their inbox is full.

About time.

I'm running Windows 7 64 bit, so decided to install Office 2010 64 bit. I then tried to sync my Windows Mobile phone with that setup.

I've just found that I can't sync my windows mobile phone with this combination. The problem? Microsoft can't be bothered to get it working.:

"Windows Mobile Device Center (WMDC) synchronization   WMDC does not synchronize with Microsoft Outlook 2010 if you use the 64-bit version of Outlook 2010. In such cases, an error message displays that states that there is no default mail client or the current mail client cannot fulfill the messaging. WMDC synchronizes correctly with the 32-bit version of Outlook 2010. To synchronize a Windows Phone with Outlook 2010 by using Windows Mobile Device Center, uninstall Outlook 2010 64-bit. Then use the original installer that you used to obtain Outlook 2010 64-bit to install Outlook 2010 32-bit. Outlook 2010 32-bit is the default option."

Quote from TechNet.

OK, so I know that Windows Phone 7 is coming soon (or whatever they call it this week) but really - how can you release a 64 bit Office system that breaks everyone's Windows mobile phones?

Not Israeli terrorists, not the Russian Mafia, not Psychotic business tycoons nor the Chinese.

A big debt at the MGM film company can though - apparently the filming of the latest instalment has been suspended "indefinitely" - see here.

Odd. Not bad, but definitely odd.

6 words to sum up my meal earlier at Leven's restaurant. Levens, situated on Leven Street in Edinburgh (near the King's Theatre and Cameo) is a Thai fusions restaurant and one that I have wanted to visit for a while, so yesterday as we were in the area and looking for somewhere to eat, we thought that we should give it a go.

I wasn't sure what a Thai fusion restaurant would serve and when ordering, if the menu looked a little confused, we should have had an idea of what to expect.

For a starter, we had the dégustation which consisted of 5 lovely Thai starters. The fusion? Well, the name was French.

For desert, I had the crème brûlée made with a Thai creamed root vegetable. It was great - a very fine brûlée and something that other restaurants could learn from. The fusion was the mild, yet interesting taste coming from the creamed root vegetable used instead of custard. A great mix of East and West and a damned fine desert to boot! This was the one fusion that worked.

Main course was meat, veg and gravy but not like I've ever had before. I had lamb wrapped in spring roll pastry which was ok - well seared lamb, if a little undercooked overall (I like my meat pink, just not rawish grey) wrapped in crispy pastry - all good. This came with creamed potatoes and baby vegetables both of which were well cooked and seasoned.

So how do you make this into a fusion dish? Pour mild Thai curry sauce over the lot!

Eclectic or schizophrenic? Just confused. It is a concept and it just isn't executed that well. The food is well cooked and tasty but with the exception of my desert, it just doesn't work on the plate.

The starter was pure Thai and the main was just odd; not bad, just odd. If you could take away the curry sauce from the main, it would have been a well executed dish. As it was, and I say it again, it wasn't bad, just confused.

The staff were attentive and very helpful indeed. They almost verged on being a little too attentive but it is a difficult mix to get right when you have 2 diners in the restaurant and 2 serving staff. A 1:1 ratio is difficult to get right!

Would I go again? Hmmmm.....yes, but I'll stick to the starter and desert and leave the main course. And maybe not that soon.

A great story about the ludicrous nature of some big business' practices and how they can't cope when someone doesn't quite follow the rules - very funny and worth a read. Get it here.

Cycling home yesterday in a bus/cycle lane next to a line of statinary cars. Heard a car pull up behind me and then an odd 'creaking' sound. Next thing I know, this car overtook me in the bus lane (illegal) leaving about 4 inches clearance (plain stupid).

Once he was past me, I heard the creaking noise again. It was the pasenger folding the wing mirror back out. The driver/passenger obviously decided that they needed the extra clearance to get between the cyclist and the stationary cars.

If you have to fold in your wing mirror to get close enough to the cyclist to pass them, THERE IS NOT ENOUGH ROOM TO PASS.

Screen shot from an online bank:

Which button does it tell me to press?

Where's that then?

My Grandfather, George Thomas Cheshire, passed away today.

He will be sadly missed.

Bizarrely, if you set your desktop to be a plain colour as opposed to a fancy wallpaper, it takes an extra 30 seconds to login! Glad to see that they tested that one.

Details from Microsoft here.

I installed Windows 7 on a machine at the weekend and I am sadly disappointed by the lack of stability. After a random period of time (sometimes several hours) explorer starts crashing and although it nicely restarts itself, it keeps doing this every minute or two. This issue was apparent on a fresh install with only windows installed.

I have no idea what "starts" this behaviour but once it has started, doing things like right-clicking somewhere, sorting columns in an explorer window or trying to launch the control panel all seem to regularly trigger a crash.

There are many, many reports of similar behavior on Google (the fairly specific search string "windows 7 64 bit explorer crash" brings up over 540,000 results) and many suggested 'solutions' but nothing definite.

Kinda makes me wish I had stuck with XP for a bit longer!

Ok, I've joined the noughties and I twitted a tweet-thingy or whatever the yoof's terminology is this week.

Right, all this snow was really good fun whilst I was on holiday and could go sledging but now I need to get to work, can it please stop now?

Thank you.

I've completed the Pedal for Scotland Glasgow -> Edinburgh bike ride a couple of times and was intending to do it again next year. They've thrown a bit of a spanner in the works this time though; in addition to the 51 mile course, there is now a 100 mile course.

Details here.

Am I mad enough??

...available here.

30% for me at the moment.

Is anybody else out there on the Google Wave preview programme?

Feedback should be open, fair and based upon your true impression of a situation combined with evidence to justify your conclusions.

It is therefore annoying that, having bought something from an Amazon Marketplace seller and left negative feedback about their lack of communication when I complained,  I received an email apologising (or rather explaining why it wasn't their fault) and offering me 10% of the purchase price back if I removed the negative feedback.

Interestingly, the seller didn't dispute the feedback, just asked that I delete it for a bribe partial refund.

Doesn't an approach such as that make the 99% 'good' feedback rating fairly irrelevant and pointless?

You've seen the "Accident Claim Helpline" adverts on TV, haven't you?

Well, I saw one today where a woman remembered the time that she walked through reception at her work and slipped on some water. Her knee "really hurt" (cue pictures of someone grimacing and holding leg) whilst explaining that her "immediate thought was" ....

Can you guess? Did she think "my knee might be badly damaged"? No, you're wrong.

Did she think "I hope this pain goes away"? No, you're wrong.

Her immediate thought was "I hope that it isn't too expensive...." - for medical care? - no, her first thought was apparently "I hope that it isn't too expensive to claim for this".

Yes, next time you hurt yourself and feel excruciating pain, battle thorough the tears and immediately consider the cheapest claims helpline before you do anything else.

How depressing.

I recently installed a well known program called Amaya to create and edit an web site. The app is quite nice and works well, shame that it rewrites the way that my PC handles html and htm links.

The result (and I have replicated this on two PCs) is that when I'm sent an email with a link in it, I can't open the link or various other htm/html links. The problem can be resolved with some fairly wicked hacking with the registry via setting your default browser back to IE and then returning to Firefox.

Why and how did that get past testing?

Following the stories below, Google has decided to purchase ReCAPTCHA in an effort to improve its own programme of digitising literary works.

I guess that we are going to see a whole load more CAPTCHAs soon.

Thank you to Keith who posted a comment on the blog about why the article below may have been a little unfair.

The link to a YouTube presentation highlights the work of the Re-Captcha project; the project aims to combine the basic requirement of a captcha (only humans can read them) with a useful purpose - helping decipher words that OCR (optical character recognition) programs can't decipher.

This work aids the digitisation of many ancient books and other works such as the digitisation of the entire back catalogue of the New York Times.

In order to prove you are a human, it offers you two words in the captcha - one that it knows the answer to so as to verify that you aren't a computer and one that comes from the digitisation project. The reason that they are difficult to read (as highlighted in my previous post) is that the OCR software can't work out what the word is and they need some help!

If you get the first one correct, it doesn't matter about the second one - someone just needs a bit of help with their homework.

I like captchas. I use them. But they are getting silly.

Captchas (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.) are pictures that make it hard to design a computer program to fill in online forms. Without them (and there is one on this site) you get spammers filling your inbox with rubbish as people can write simple programs to fill in contact forms offering you pills, etc. The idea is that you have to be 'human' to read them - and that is the point - you have to be able to read them

Can you read the right-hand two of the four words below? I can't.

And for info, this isn't the NSA or something, it is the Peppa Pig Live website.

Headline on the front page of the BBC's News Website calims that "Optimistic women have a lower risk of death, finds major study ".

Really?

So if you are female and optomistic, your chance of death is less than the usual 100%? Isn't the risk of death *always* 100%?

That's a surprise.

1) Washing machine drain pipe fails leading to flooded kitchen

2) Central Heating Boiler stops working - no heat / hot water for a week

3) Oven heat element fails - no oven until spare part arrives.

All these three happened in the space of two weeks. Let's hope that is it for a while!

I have just transferred my mobile number from one mobile provider to another. Totally painless in fact, it was very, very easy.

I got an email today from the old mobile company to tell me to go to my online portal to view my paperless 'final bill'. I logged in as usual but, instead of 'View Bill', I am offered options to 'Register for Online Bills'. Can you see where this is going?

So, I phone customer services and ask for their help - yes, you've guessed it - despite about 5 minutes of searching by mobile number, name, address, post code or inside leg measurement (OK, I made the last one up) they can't find my account as it is now closed. No access to any details especially my last bill.

I am assured that all is OK as I will be sent a paper bill within the next few working days. I'm not going to hold my breath.....

Since when were jeans not trousers?

Apparently since GAP stared offering 30% off trousers, but that doesn't include jeans as "they aren't trousers". Cotton trousers, linen trousers and tracksuit-type trousers are all trousers, jut not jeans.

Does that seem odd? I know that we don't often refer to jeans are "trousers", but they are trousers!

I thought that I could ride a bike, but nowhere near as well as this: (YouTube)

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