Windows Vista Business Double Clicking On Single Click

16 April 2009Hardware, SoftwareAlistair Lattimore

In July 2007, I was fortunate to win a copy of Windows Vista Business at a Gold Coast .NET User Group and it wasn’t until January 2008 that I installed it when I was re-establishing my geek prowess. Since that time, I’ve had very mixed opinions about Windows Vista – some have been really positive and others have been quite negative.

Within the last month, I’ve been having a problem with my Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer optical mouse. At whatever interval it feels inclined, whenever I would single click – Windows Vista would register a double click. It would then take several single click attempts before Vista Business would finally register a single click and not another double click. As you can imagine, if you’re mouse is registering double clicks nearly all the time – doing some of the most fundamental computer tasks becomes very difficult and tiresome.

In case software settings within Windows Vista or another program had gone astray, I went through a few different sections of basic Windows configuration to restore default settings such as Folder Options (single click to open an item) and also restored the mouse settings via the Control Panel without any success.

Virtually all of the problems I’ve been having with Windows Vista have been related to hardware driver support in some manner. With that in mind, I also tried uninstalling the current version of Microsoft IntelliPoint and separately changing my mouse drivers back to a standard mouse – neither of which helped. I thought something may have changed on my computer with a Windows Update or some other software. To rule out an incompatibility with my older version of the Microsoft IntelliPoint – I downloaded and installed the latest version via the Microsoft Download Centre but the double clicking symptom persisted.

This evening I connected an original optical Microsoft IntelliMouse which has been absolutely punished from gaming. While it was completely crusty from living in the bottom of a big plastic storage container for an unknown amount of time – the single double clicking issue seems to have vanished for the moment.

While the problem isn’t showing up at the moment, I don’t think that it is my original mouse that is causing the problems. Searching online shows that there are a lot of people having a similar problem – however after reading through a lot of different web sites, I didn’t come across a clear root cause.

Frustrating.

Windows Live Messenger Upgrade

4 April 2009Blogging, SoftwareAlistair Lattimore

Microsoft recently released an upgrade for Windows Live Messenger. I’ve been meaning to upgrade for a while now, however had heard a few negative comments about it which stopped me from upgrading. This evening I took the plunge, upgraded and so far I’m quite enjoying it.

I haven’t changed any settings away from the default and in liking that:

the contact list font size is slightly smaller, so you can see more people in the same vertical space
grouping contacts isn’t new, however the Favourites might be?
the annoying left hand wall of advertising and other useless services has been moved down the bottom
hovering a contact provides a context menu with a few useful options such as send email or view profile
What’s New scrolls through the recent activity of your contact list. Within the settings area, you can choose who you want to see events from, what type and also what you publish (if anything at all). It’s a great way to see at a glance what your contacts have been doing, in case you missed something.

I’m not that interested in the scene (read: themes), animated display pictures or signature sounds functionality but maybe that’ll change in the future. While I’ve only had it installed for a very brief amount of time, I think it is a positive upgrade from Microsoft for Live Messenger.

2008 Traffic Statistics

25 March 2009BloggingAlistair Lattimore

Following on from my 2007 web statistics, below is a summary of what the site saw in 2008.

In 2006 the site had about 95,000 visitors come to the site, which grew in 2007 to around 145,000. With the change in blogging habits through 2008, coupled with the fact that I moved my future technical posts onto a different domain – the site had a slight decline and only saw 134,921 visits over the year. The roughly 135,000 visits generated 176,206 page views which is slightly less page impressions per user compared to last year.

The spike in visits towards the end of May was driven by a burst of interest in zorbing from the United States. It was spread across the different states, however New York drove the most interest for the fun adventure activity. The significant decline toward the end of the year was, not surprisingly driven by a decline in search traffic from Google. There was no single set of search phrases that declined, everything dropped pretty much across the board. The only thing I can attribute it to was that I changed my web hosting midway through November. I was still with the same web host, however the specific web server was different – which hadn’t been changed in a number of years. Fortunately, the search traffic from Google began to recover in January 2009 but it still has some ground to make up yet.

The traffic breakdown for 2008 still reflects the complete dominance that Google holds in the web search space. In 2006, Yahoo! was the first non-Google search engine to show its face at position #11 which improved to five in 2007. Yahoo! have improved their traffic driving potential in 2008 and now sit at position four. Without checking the numbers, it looks as though Yahoo! made it into position four simply because Google Image Search within Australia declined a little. However, in 2007 Yahoo! drove about 1.6% of the traffic of Google web search, which has increased in 2008 to about 2.5%. Great to see such a strong percentage increase for Yahoo!, however they still aren’t competing in web search within Australia.

The most popular posts for the year looks similar to 2006 & 2007, however with a single newcomer:

Given that the same or similar posts have shown up as the most viewed for three years running, it would seem a reasonable assumption that they will again in 2009 unless I start writing about different topics. With that in mind, following is a revised top five list excluding the repeat above:

Removing the heavy hitters certainly changes the landscape, now I just have to wait another nine months to see what the rest of 2009 is going to bring.

Incompatible Compatibility

15 March 2009General, HardwareAlistair Lattimore

I recently wrote about the lack of backwards compatibility when I needed to replace the cutting blades on my lawn mower.

To make sure I hadn’t missed anything at Bunnings, I dropped in there briefly on Saturday with one of the old mower blades to see if I overlooked the correct set in my last trip. I can confirm that there was only one set of blades matching my description, which I purchased last time.

Ironically, I found another set of Rover blades that weren’t the correct version/model that fit perfectly – go figure.

Backwards Compatibility Failure

8 March 2009General, HardwareAlistair Lattimore

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve noticed that our lawn mower has been cutting the grass a little less efficiently. It’s easy to spot when your mower blades are getting worn down, you’ll notice that your cutting width is narrower than normal and you’ll often leave a trail of grass behind you – similar to what happens when your grass catcher is full.

Before heading down to pick up a new set of mower blades from Bunnings, I checked if there was any particular type I should be buying for my Victor lawn mower. To my surprise, it was stamped into the steel on the blades themselves that they were type X – which I thought would make this process very straight forward.

Arrived at Bunnings and I had no idea that the various lawn mower manufacturers could have so many different variations of their lawn mower blades. Just within the Victor lawn mower range, I think there must have been between five and ten different types. I sort though the different packs and pick up two packets of the appropriate type and assume that it’ll be smooth sailing from here on in.

After going through the painful process of removing the first of the old lawn mower blades, I compare the new to the old and feel confident that it’ll go back together nicely. At this point, the fine folk at looking after backwards compatibility of the Victor lawn mower blades clearly had a fuzzy brain day – as the bolt didn’t fit through the disc that the mower blades are attached to. At first glance, it looked nearly identical – the same half moon shaped bold, similar thread, similar length and thickness – however the new bolt was about 1mm too thick!

As you can imagine, the bolts for lawn mower blades get quite worn as well. The packaging rightfully suggests that you replace all of the old parts with fresh parts, however for the moment I’m going to be forced to reuse the old nut and bolt.