I’m really, really fed up of comment spam on my blogs now.

MT 3.2 was supposed to kill it once and for all, but it really hasn’t worked out like that. This morning I woke up to 50+ email notifications of "unapproved" (but not junked) comments.

So, I’ve enabled CAPTCHAs using the SCode plugin. If you’re using screen reading or other accessibility software, then you won’t be able to input the CAPTCHA properly, but don’t worry. Your comment won’t be lost – just drop me a mail and I’ll recover it out of the junk pile for you

As an interim release between Beta 1 & Beta 2, Build 5231 is now up on MSDN for subscribers (both 32bit & 64bit).

It contains Windows Media Player 11, a new version of IE7 and a few other bits and pieces – some more screenshots to follow tomorrow once I’ve installed it.

Little did I know that you could get a wireless xbox controller. Now I can watch stuff through XBox Media Centre and all that lovely goodness without wires.

No XBox owner should be without.

This is the little lot you need to study for an MCSE these days.

 To save you scrabbling for an Amazon search engine, it’s these:

MCSA/MCSE Windows XP Professional Study Guide (Exam 70-270)
MCSE: Windows® Server 2003 Certification Kit (Exams 70-290, 70-291, 70-293, 70-294)
MCSE Windows Server 2003 Active Directory and Network Infrastructure Design Study Guide (Exam 70-297)
MCSA/MCSE: Exchange Server 2003 Implementation and Management Study Guide (Exam 70-284)

Another nip and tuck in Office 2003 SP2; smart tags are out, "person tags" are in. These replace the outdated Windows Messenger look and feel with an Office Communicator one. Of course, it integrates with your Communicator & Live Communications Server setup as well.

New person tag showing the sender as "In a meeting".

Same old options screen, just rebranded with person tags and a new icon.

Beta 2 was released yesterday and I’ve now had a chance to install it and have a quick play, so here are my initial thoughts and some screenshots.

The search is now fully working; in Beta 1, it would only search "user" folders. Now you can specify what to search in – you end up defining a virtual folder, so can pick and choose drivers and folders to include & exclude, as well as all manner of other query types. It’s very powerful and seriously quick.

A fair number of the games seem pretty polished (despite the <1.0 version numbers in the title bars) – Solitaire is still there as is Minesweeper. The chess game also looks pretty fantastic, with lots of nice animations.

Domain user switching is still there from Beta 1 – when Vista is in a domain, hitting Windows + L no longer locks the computer, but takes it to the logon screen where someone else can logon and then switch back to the first user. Very neat, and a godsend for IT support staff I would guess! I’ve not found the user save state feature yet that supposedly allows night time reboots for patching without punting a user off.

A quick look at the system properties shows it to be the "Ultimate" edition, just one of out 7 different flavours apparently.

Generally, it’s just a nip and a tuck across the board, but looking pretty neat. I still haven’t found a properly supported (LDDM) graphics card that’s powerful enough to display all the Aero effects yet though  

Cruel and stupid.

Only in Japan I suppose.

[Originally from Engadget]

So, I now have a Sony MP3 player (I’ve had a cassette walkman, discman and two minidisk players from them over the years). Ordinarily I wouldn’t have bought it (despite how fabulous it looks) for various reasons, but this one came free with something.

The one thing that’s wound me up is that you have to use Sony’s poxy SonicStage software to copy files around, despite the fact that it presents itself as a mass storage device and allows you to copy files onto it – it just won’t play them.

However, there is some light at the end of the tunnel, courtesy of Sony themselves, with their little MP3 File Manager program. It installs itself onto the device and you run it from there. You can then drag and drop MP3s onto without the need for Sonic-bloat-DRM-Stage. You still can’t drag the files off it onto another computer though.

Don’t buy one despite the good looks, the utterly restrictive and pointless DRM will frustrate you.