We were lucky enough to go out for a meal at Le Gallois last night.

The meal was the best I've had on Bristish soil. It compared very well with La Table d'O. The food, as expected, was fantastic but what made it a great meal was the service, and the little tasters that we were given.

The 3 course menu was actually 5 courses - we started with a tiny bowl of mushroom soup which was so tasty that the amount given was perfect. Following that I had the sea trout, and then the saddle of Lamb. After the main courses we were given a little glass of grapefuit ice (I think it was called granite) to clean the palette before desert which was the thyme roasted peach.

Well it did for me!

I installed Document Examiner and found that it no longer worked. Also all the XML files I open in IE failed to work.

It seems that this is due to a new setting in the IE security model: "Allow active contact to run in files on My Computer" the default is for this to be switched off. By turning this on I've fixed the problem I had with document examiner and XML files. You can find the setting under Tools -> Internet Option -> Advanced, then under the security tab.

Disclaimer: I'm not recommending you switch this on because I have no idea what files you have on your local machine.

I've also switched off Disable Script Debugging (Internet Explorer). I have no idea what the "Other" option does though, maybe this relates to scripts running under cscript.exe?

There's nothing new in this package but it's all just a little neater and easier to install.

With my new PC I had to re-install all the IE menu extensions. The old registry files were a bit outdated and so I thought I may aswell bundle the whole lot together and make a .inf installer for them.

Anyway here's a link to them: Download IE menu extension bundle

• Immediate Window - This creates a window in the page which you can use to issue javascript commands to that page.
• Open Frame in New Window - this will allow you to open an embedded IFrame or Frame into a new window, for heavily framed sites it's invaluable.
• View Full Source - this allows you to view the source that IE is using rather than that downloaded - so for example if you have a DHTML application then this will show you the client side created elements.
• Show Form - this sets the border on a form so you can see what controls appear where in a form. Used in conjuction with the Hidden input bookmarklet it's very useful.
• Show Parent Tag - is used to find out what element is under the cursor and the attributes of that element for example: what script runs on the onclick event
• Toggle Border - is the Richard Birkby inspired extension the difference is that the styles applied are slightly different.
• Toggle Image Border - the same as above only sets the border up on the image, useful for finding those annoying little spacer gifs.
• Document Examiner - Useful for analysing the structure and properties on elements.

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.