Michael Greenhill

Preserved locos at Dynon

The meteoric rise of the private operators has resulted in preserved locos being pressed into service daily.

Western Line photography

Took a day off work and spent it out west chasing trains

Abbotsford Convent

Suffering a lack of inspiration - decided to visit the convent at Abbotsford.

Rickett’s Sanctuary

During 2010 Freya and I went to William Rickett's Sanctuary in the Dandenong Ranges

New Years Eve 2010

For NYE 2010 I went down to my holiday house with a few friends, to welcome the start of 2011. I took the opportunity to take a few photos down at the beach.

Footprints left in the warm sands of Dromana beach.

Floodwaters

Dandenong Creek bursts through the weir following the torrential rain on Saturday 5th Feb 2011

Windows 8 “Driver Locker” concept

A number of different PC websites have been throwing around this concept of a “driver locker” in Windows 8 – some form of cloud / web based storage area for your hardware drivers. Correct me if I’m wrong, but we already have that – it’s called Windows Update.

Now, you might say the reasoning for this dedicated driver locker is that Windows Update doesn’t always find your hardware driver. Surely then, the best solution would be to encourage hardware manufacturers to publish their drivers to Windows Update, instead of wasting countless hours and thousands of dollars in building a dedicated per-user storage system – especially when things like Dropbox or Windows Live SkyDrive already exist?

Another way of looking at it, is turning Driver Locker into an export t0 CD/DVD or USB solution. Consider this scenario: You have decided to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 8. Anyone who has gone through a clean-install upgrade knows how hard it can be to find drivers. The Windows 8 Driver Collector would solve your problems – simply boot into your existing version of Windows, insert the Windows 8 DVD and run Driver Collector from the menu. It would enumerate your device drivers, copy them to USB or CD/DVD and also check Windows Update or hardware manufacturer’s website for updated / Windows 8 compatible drivers, and prompt you to download them (and save to USB or CD/DVD).

For new installations, Driver Collector would perform in a similar manner. On first boot Windows would prompt you to run Driver Collector to check for unknown drivers.

I can hear you asking “What about the devices Windows doesn’t know about – eg ‘Unknown Device’?” – well, there already are applications out there that go through your devices and check the device’s ID code against the application’s database. For Microsoft to write and support such an application would be trivial – it’s a long shot, but let’s hope something similar comes bundled with Windows 8 now that the idea is out there.

AVG is annoying: Redux

A while ago I wrote an article on AVG and why it’s annoying. Well, I’ve just had to go through the upgrade process on all the home PCs as well as all the desktops of a particular client.

It really does frustrate me that the developers of these applications won’t simply let you download and run the installer. If the application is able to detect when a new version is out and nag you to download it under the pretence of improved security (it’s all bollocks), why is it not able to cut out the middle man and just download the installer as part of its scheduled updates? Market reach is the answer.

With AVG at least, when you click on one of the annoying notifications it takes you to a registration page. Now I know I can’t speak for everyone here, but I have never filled out one of those registration forms accurately. If it’s in the way of me getting something done quickly, I’ll bash out just enough information for it to let me get on with my task.

No doubt the registration form is due to someone in middle management trying to justify their presence.

IE9 and horrible font rendering

After all the hoopla surrounding the development and release of IE9, it still falls short of the mark. Admittedly, while some aspects of it are streets ahead of its predecessor (notably JS speed and UI appearance) the rendering engine has let developers down yet again – this time with fonts.

During the design stage of IE9 Microsoft decided to ditch the existing font rendering engine for DirectWrite. Now while this may have its advantages, it has resulted in a substantial decline in the quality of rendered font.

Compare IE9 to IE8 and Chrome 8 – what a difference.

What a shame – the poor font rendering ruins an otherwise excellent browser.

I hope you’re paying attention, Microsoft.