K seems to be a little down beat about the future of the internet. What he has to say makes interesting reading. I've never used iTunes but I have always seen the advantage of using the internet as a data transport mechanism of a desktop application, be that Win32, Mac, KDE, etc…

Desktop applications are great, just think of Word, Excel, Photoshop. These applications allow normal users to do remarkable things very easily, just think how hard it would be to create a spreadsheet application in a web browser. I know they can be done. But they don't give you the same experience.

If well written there are positive aspects of a desktop application:

• Powerful - you don't have to wait 10 seconds to perform a spell check a document
• Familiar - they share the same look and feel as other applications so that the user very quickly becomes familiar with the application.
• Predictable - the application should run the same on all machines.

However desktop application are often :

• Difficult to write - you generally need to be well versed in the underlying technology of the target operating system.
• Difficult to update - you must rely on the user to perform the update. Updates can often be massive to fix a few bytes of code.
• Reliant largely on technology out of your control - libraries that you use can be updated often breaking compatibility.

Just like desktop applications there are pros and cons to internet application. The pros include:

• Easy to create.
• Secure - a website can be secure the client may not be.
• Portable - a website can be written that is accessible to all types of users.
• Easy to update - there is one copy of the website - change that and everyone will see the effects instantly.
• Data rich - it's very easy to extract data from.

And the cons.

• Slow and "clunky" - Not sure if clunky is a proper word - but we all know what it means, unresposive.
• Reliant on technology out of your control - if your telephone line gets cut then you've had it.

Sadly, poorly written applications blight us whether they are internet websites or desktop applications.

These aren't eshaustive lists by any means, and this isn't meant to be the start of those endless discussions of what's better than something else:

• VB.Net is a better language than C#
• Windows is better than the Mac
• Britney is better than Christina
• Halogen is better than Argon

Who cares, you're not comparing like for like. There's nothing wrong with a balance between the two, when you need the power of a desktop applicatin write one - when you need the flexibility a website will give you write one. And when you need power and flexibility then there's a happy medium.

As part of a document I'm writing I wanted to group together a list of bullet points. If I was writing the document long hand I would have used a brace (curley bracket). I'm sure that I've done this in word before, but for the life of me I can't work out how.

The only way I can see how to do it is to use a table and some extremely dodgy font formatting. I've added a screen shot below - the top image is the view of the table with borders, the bottom is the image with the borders switched off. This seems like a bit of a sledgehammer approach and it also looks bad.

Any clues anyone?

Is gmail an attempt to prove the 6 handshakes across the world hypothesis? Since acquiring the account I've had 9 invites gratefully received from the random gmail invite generator.

So if you want a gmail account, then let me know. At the moment I've only got 3 left.

I blogged back on April 1^st about how I thought that Gmail was just one big hoax.

Well it turns out that it wasn't, I received my invite yesterday, and so for it knocks the socks off anyother web based email system. I wonder how long it will be before Google start to offer an instant messenger.

So I forgot to renew the hairy-spider domain name, embarassing I know!

This wasn't helped by the slow service of my registrar, easyspace who were useless. When I did try to buy the domain - it turns out that they had let their SSL certificate lapse. So that held me up by a day.

Nevermind, I'm back now and my knowledge of DNS has increased dramatically.

Disclaimer: The content of this entry if used incorrectly can be seen to be foolish and childish. In addition to this you could cause days of work to be lost, or even machines to be corrupted. You may also need ribs of steel to cope with the chuckling.

I want you to cast your mind back to the days when the dot com era was ending. The company I was working for was waiting for more venture capital to stay afloat, and during this lull of uncertainty there wasn't a great deal of development work to do so most of the day was spent not working.

One of the ways to cheer up the day was hacking into other user's machines and changing the execute permissions on some of the system executables (explorer.exe for example).

Another game we affectionately titled: System Kerplunk.

Kerplunk was a game from our childhood where you had to pull sticks, placed horizontally, from a tube, resting on top of the sticks were marbles. The idea of the game was to not pull any sticks that might accidentally cause the marbles to fall.

With our version of System Kerplunk the idea was for a few people to target a coworker, who is obviously unaware, and kill processes on their machine.

There are two aims for the game:

• Avoid suspicion - if you get caught killing processes you're out of the game.
• The player who causes a bluescreen is the loser.

To play the game you'll need administrator rights to a coworker's machine, PsKill and PsList.
You'll probably want some kind of IM so that the players can keep in touch.
And let's not forget that you'll also need a coworker with a sense of humour... or not :)

Any process can be targeted but bear in mind if you kill Word.exe the coworker will lose their work.

Following on from the last entry I made on friday the 13th I was reminded today of a classic 13th date time gotcha:

A work colleague couldn't understand some strange behaviour with a function - the function was working yesterday but today - it's stopped. Strange we looked into it and found that the error was with a date conversion routine. Then the penny dropped . The reason was that a month had been set using the day of the month field. obviously there isn't a 13th month. Once the cause was found the solution followed.

The issue was a problem with the default language setting for a user on SQL Server.

I've just found this piece of sql to convert a recordset into csv I've never seen this being used anywhere before. The equivalent of Array.join(",") it never ceases to amaze me how powerful computer languages are.

It's especially useful to me as I was looking for exactly this earlier this week. I decided to go away and think about it, I'm glad I did!

I've created a bookmarklet that will allow you to view any hidden fields on a webpage.

I find this useful for examining all the data that I am about to send through in a form post. The code creates a new input element for each hidden one and calles the replaceChild() function on the parent. This is because in IE you are unable to change the type property of an input element.

The form submission should then work with the hidden fields converted to text fields, as the name attribute will have been replicated.

Convert hidden inputs to text

To add them to your favourites / bookmarks right click the link and choose add to favourites / bookmarks. In IE you may get a warning and if you don't trust me don't add the link to favourites. There's no reason to trust me, you don't know me.

In our second week we visited the seaside resort of La Baule This town is absolutely gorgeous the market is open everyday and being British the choice of food on display is mind numbing. When we get told that we have great supermarkets able to provide everything - When you go to a French market and see more variety in an area the size of a double bed compared to the football size area of the typical vegetable section in a British Supermarket then you start to realise why food in this country is so poor.

Anyway the first night we were there we visited the "Restaurant La Marechal" which was diabolical. The service was awful, we were tucked around the corner away from the other guests, the food order was taken incorrectly, the delivery was slapdash, Mum did get what we thought was the right cheese dish but it was missing the salad. Now when you consider that for the same amount price that we ate at La Table d'O then you can understand why La Marechal was so awful. There's absolutely no good reason to treat your staff with disrespect.

To top it off the staff refused to speak to us in French!

Following on from the previous entry, there is another restaurant which certainly stood out in Josselin and that was La Pelican. Mainly serving fish and very rustic, the food was excellent.

This restaurant is certainly not touristique, but nevertheless the value for money here far exceeding most restaurants in the region. It's quite incredible that for €12 you can get a 3 course meal that in this country you'd be looking to pay more than twice as much.

There was no English spoken here but the staff are friendly and even if you picked you meal blind folded you'd still be very happy.

La Table d'O in Josselin in the heart of Brittany was a fantastic meal. It was simply the best meal at a restaurant I have ever had.

I had the 'Délices de saison' and from that menu I chose the 'Millefeuille de Saumon' which was layers of poached salmon and pastry with I think new shoots of leek, astounding. I then had the 'Jarret de Veau'. Now I don't want to sound like a second rate restaurant reviewer but the 'Rosace de Tête de Moine' was amazing, it was like a curl of cheese, as though the chef was carving a bowl on a lathe.

So the food was great and the staff were excellent. Very often in France when you go for a meal, the staff realise you are English speaking and then continue to offer you a translation of everything, which is quite unnecessary especially when you're still learning the language. But the staff at La Table d'O were good enough to realise this and although their English was excellent they spoke French to us and only translated when necessary.

I have to recommend that if anyone is in the region of Josselin then this restaurant is well worth a visit.

Well actually I've been back for a week now, but haven't had the impetus to write any entries or get in touch with anyone. I thought that the longer I could ignore things the longer the holiday would seem. And I was right!

France was absolutely fantastic we ate incredibly well, drank some gorgeous wines , devoured some of the best paté and cheeses, and even managed to get some sun.

I've had a couple of questions regarding how to (un)install the CSS-Edit using regsvr32.

regsvr32 is a tool you can use which allows you to register COM objects with your computer. Basically you can have a COM object on your machine but if you haven't registered it then in general it will never get used. The CSS editor is a COM object and for it to get used with Internet Explorer it must be registered. To register the object you must open a command prompt, and if for example you have put the cssedit.dll file in c:\dlls\ then you would type:

regsvr32 c:\dlls\cssedit.dll

To unregister CSS - edit you must type:

regsvr32 -u c:\dlls\cssedit.dll

Obviously change the c:\dlls\ to be the location that you have actually placed the DLL.

I now have to go and wait for my car to be picked up as our new C3 has lost all power and needs to go to the garage - who ever said that having a new car is hassle free!