Looks like the continued aversion to Windows Vista has forced Microsoft to continue supplying Windows XP licenses much longer than they had intended.

A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed the existence of a flexible inventory program that will allow distributors to place their final orders for Windows XP OEM licenses by Jan. 31, 2009, and take delivery against those orders through May 30

via Microsoft Extends XP Availability For Distributors by CRN and VARBusiness.

With Windows XP now over 7 years old, it seems incredible that so many of the world’s computers are still reliant on what has to be considered old technology. The fact that MS are not only continuing to support it, but must feel a real fear of letting it go at the risk of pushing users towards other operating systems.

From the looks of things there’s a real possibility that “Windows 7″, the successor to Vista, will be coming out whilst consumers are still able to purchase machines pre-loaded with Windows XP. Surely this can only be considered a major failure on the software giant’s part?

I just read this snippet from a Deviant Art user – it appears that the Chinese government has deemed it necessary to block access to the Deviant Art website.

I am able to update this journal only because at the place I work I am able to remote access a computer that is physically located in US. However deviants in China were abhored to find that we could not access ‘www.deviantart.com’ since Sunday morning (2008-12-15 GMT+8). A simple command ‘tracert’ shows that the internet route is terminated at an IP which belongs to China Telecom. Obviously ‘www.deviantart.com’ is now in the black list of Chinese authority.

We do not know the reason why our government decided to ban dA. There is no official announcement or notice of any kind that we know of…

via News: Chinese Government Bans deviantART.

I’ve been using the Deviant Art website for years, and whilst I couldn’t be considered a contributer, I think it’s a great site with a lot of interesting work to browse through.

Certainly the announcement of the ban prompted a huge response, but I’m not sure how easy it is to get something like that reversed.

I was just scanning through my feeds this evening when a post by Louis Gray caught my eye. The probable reason for it catching my eye was the title “I will teach my children about Steve Jobs“. Well I just had to read it really, what reason could someone possibly have for saying something like this. Apple fanboism gone mad? I think so.

I’m going to have to quote the opening paragraph here to demonstrate:

If I ever had a chance to hear John F Kennedy give a speech, I would go. If I could see Michael Jordan in his prime, I would go to that game. If I ever had a chance to see Henry Ford at his assembly line building Model T’s, I would go. If I could have seen the first moon landing on television, I would watch. And if I could see Michaelangelo sculpt, I would pull up a chair.

But I have seen Steve Jobs do a MacWorld Keynote. And it, like the others mentioned, was delivered by a person unequaled in his craft, who, like the others, will one day be a part of the past, echoed only through our media records, and through tales passed one to another.

How, in anyone’s mind, could you compare someone like Steve Jobs to Michelangelo? Michelangelo, creator of the most incredible pieces of sculpture I have ever had the fortune to see (being “La Pietà”), a piece of such stunning beauty that it completely took my breath away and left me standing motionless for minutes with my jaw open.

Michelangelo's Pieta

Of course, that’s just one of his incredible works of art, and the picture I’ve put in of it here does not do it justice. I have heard similar recounting of people’s experiences viewing his sculpture “David”; I have gazed up at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and been amazed; and I have stood in awe at the fresco of “The Last Judgement”.

Now granted it was 15 years ago that I had first hand experience of these works of Michelangelo, I think the fact that the power of them remains with me today is justification enough to me of the magnificence of these works.

Whilst I see that Louis is attempting to state that the comparison is that of “masters of their craft”, I think he’s gone a little over the top on this one. The suggestion is that Steve Jobs will live on in the history books and the hearts and minds of people in a comparative way to Michelangelo is just nonsense.

Perhaps he is charismatic. Perhaps his company has manufactured technological devices considered well-designed by some. However, the charasmatic launch of a few products quickly forgotten by the gadget loving whores of the world does not a Michelangelo make.

I went down to Dublin last night for Shelley’s 30th birthday extravaganza. Lots and lots of fun and really great to catch up with loads of people I haven’t seen in a very very long time.

Started out with a dinner in the Transylvanian Tavern off Henrietta Place. Strange little restaurant that looked surprised to have so many customers at once. Food was mediocre, but the merriment and catching up with lots of people I haven’t seen in a long time, in some cases years, was more than enough to make up for the food. Hella cheesy music too

Afterwards we headed back to Shelley’s house for a bit of a gathering. My place in Ross’s car was usurped, so I had to catch a taxi, but man, that was the most worthwhile usurping I think I’ve ever had, as what followed was the best taxi journey I’ve ever had. I’m not sure words can describe it amply, but hopefully this video can!

It’s fairly low res, taken with my point and shoot, but it gets the message across I’d like to think.

After the best taxi ride ever, it was back to Shelley’s gaff on the canal. Nice place, lovely housemates, and lots and lots of people. Silly times ensued. Shelley got wrapped in packing tape; big Phil fell down the stairs; I got egged not once, not twice, but three times, by the same person; some of transvestites arrived; overly drunk transvestites played the drums, badly; Shelley ate congealed egg off my head; general silliness..

Thanks to Shelley for an excellent night. Thanks to Ross for driving me and Donn back to Longford at 8am. It was good to be able to have a shower and not go to bed covered in egg.

All in all though, it did occur to me that Shelley got off a lot lighter than he should have. He’d be the first to cause mayhem if he got the chance.

Photos can be viewed here, or on Picasa.

I guess I’m writing this just as a warning to anyone else who’s thinking of signing up for a Vox.com blog account. I had a Vox blog for a couple of years and wrote about 200+ posts on it.

After getting my hands on the leonard.ie domain name, I decided that it would make an awful lot of sense, given my increasing familiarity with WordPress to switch over to a self-hosted WordPress blog. Once I had things set up I went about looking into getting my blog posts off the old Vox blog and importing them into my new self-hosted blog.

All of a sudden I realised that Vox offer no export option for your blog posts. I’ve done an awful lot of searching on this one and haven’t found any simple way to get the information out of Vox and into WordPress. I think I will get there eventually, but it’s certainly not easy.

The strange thing is that Vox don’t even offer an export for any of the SixApart blogging tools (Moveable Type or TypePad).

Exporting Vox

If you’re looking to export your Vox blog posts, I’ve narrowed the options down to (in the case of WordPress as the import tool):

1. Copy and paste every post into a new post – definitely not going to happen
2. Import from your Vox Full RSS feed – you’d have to save “http://yourname.vox.com/library/posts/rss-full.xml to your computer” then upload to the WordPress import function, and then (as the RSS feed only shows the most recent 10 posts) you’d have to delete the last 10 posts from Vox and do it all over again. Not really that appealing if you have a lot of blog posts.
3. Use BlogBackupOnline – this service will “backup” all of the posts from your blog. It does work and it does allow you to export an RSS style feed from it which contains all your Vox posts (and comments). However I am having a bit of trouble importing it at the moment. It will import the titles and dates but none of the content – so I think I’m going to need to do some editing of the xml file to standardise it or something.

As you can see from the above, it’s all a bit of a pain in the hole. Bad Vox.

That is all.

Warren Daly has just released his first EP on Invisible Agent, which I’m proud to say I’ve mixed and mastered. Not only that, I’ve finally gotten a track finished and it appears on the EP – it’s a remix of “Praha” – the first track on the album.

For one day only the whole EP is available on Juno Download for only 99p – which is a great deal.

You can get it here: http://www.junodownload.com/artists/Warren+Daly/releases/

It’s also available on iTunes and eMusic.

Check it out!

Yesterday I received the most excellent news that my sister-in-law, Ros, had given birth to a new baby girl and that mother and child were both doing very well. My new niece is called Zoe.

I’m so happy and can’t wait to go visiting to shower some congratulations on second-time mother. Ros has been an absolute trooper through a difficult pregnancy, but managed to hold out long enough that Zoe had enough time to come out strong. She was born at 4lbs 2oz which is quite light, but the hospital staff are very relaxed about it and whilst she’s in an incubator she doesn’t need any breathing assistance.

Robert sounds absolutely over the moon to have a little sister and they’re exactly 4 years and 6 months apart, which is nice.

My bro, Philip, has sent me through some photos to tide me over til I make it down. Hopefully I’ll be posting some photos of my own soon, but in the meantime, here’s some that Philip took

I’ve been hella mega quiet here once again. Things have been fairly consistently busy the last while whilst I worked on finishing a short film called Two Point Five Billion.

The film played down at the cork film festival which I attended and allowed me to hang out with some of the crew in a more relaxed manner which entailed no stress about the film for once.

Here’s a trailer with which I will titillate you:

If you’d like to find out more you can check out the Two Point Five Billion mini-site, which I designed in a panic just before the film was due to be screened down in cork.

Other than I’ve basically been trying to keep my head above water by balancing too many client jobs and film work all at the same time, as well as finally completing a remix of a tune for an upcoming EP from Warren Daly who runs Invisible Agent Records. I’m hoping to post a little more often (as I always say) over the winter months. You know, sitting in front of a fire and chilling out.

Picasa 3 beta has been released, and if this in any way interests you and you’re based in Ireland you might find that going to the official download page presents you with the Picasa 2.7 release.

After a bit of playing around with proxies I found that the same page is not displayed to American users and you can get Picasa 3 beta here:

http://dl.google.com/picasa/picasa3-setup.exe

Not much to report as I haven’t really tested it out much yet. Seems like most of the changes are reasonably minor, and the face recognition option is not included in Picasa 3 desktop software, it’s only available on the revamped web albums.

Ah the joys of running a business and being wholly responsible for the websites of all our clients. Tonight was update night, what better way to spend a Sunday evening than updating your client’s websites at a completely unsociable time when hopefully, for the minute or so that the site may be offline, no one will be browsing…

Of course, that will never happen, but upgrades are important, for security and to unlock new features that are getting rolled out.

Our mainstay is WordPress and I’m constantly delighted by the new improvements that Matt and his team roll out. I’m most looking forward to the day that one-click upgrade for an entire WordPress install becomes a possibility as this will streamline my work process immensely on days like this. There is a plugin, which I believe is pretty on the ball at this, but I’m tempted to wait for something more official to come out, and even then, I’ll be testing it out on test installs, followed by personal projects, followed by the Pixelapes website, before I go near any client websites.

Everything has to be checked, tested, and double checked when you’re looking after a client’s website.

I’m not sure why I’m saying any of this, I’m only further delaying my bed time.

By the way, I got a bit more work done on the redesign of this website, and hopefully I should be rolling it out in the next week or two. It’s looking pretty good and just needs some tweaking before it’s ready to be unveiled.