I’m starting to notice some odd things happening with Vista (And you thought you’d left all that behind with XP. Ed). I tried downloading the Office 2007 ‘plug-in’ that allows you to save a document as a PDF, and though the software downloaded, it didn’t install. Just sat there morosely doing diddly-squat till I clicked on the cancel control.

Also Vista keeps reminding me that it needs to install a Belkin wireless adapter driver. The Vista PC is actually connected to the router with an Ethernet cable, and when I need a good connection on the XP PC then it gets the Ethernet cable, so the Belkin driver is needed on Vista when that happens. The first time I tried installing it it sat there for 20 minutes again doing nothing before I cancelled it. I think I ended up having to reboot. When I did all I got was a dark screen, Vista would not start. Restarted and it wanted to run a restore. Which I let it. The other day I tried again to install the Belkin driver and this time nothing happened and I was able to cancel it.

I also have trouble with iTunes in that sometimes when it starts it doesn’t connect to the net, and does it take a long time before I get any notice why. Eventually it tells me that the Bonjour service isn’t running. I did think that this might be connected to the fact that recently I have been using Synctoy to backup the iTunesmusic folder and as that took so long, the first time I ran it, and it was obviously reading the iTunesmusic folder, maybe both apps trying to access the same folder at the same time resulted in some kind of deadlock and Bonjour switching itself off out of a sense of pique. The trouble with this thinking is that I’m getting the Bonjour service problem even when I’m not using Synctoy and haven’t even in that logged in session.

If I go to Services to switch on the Bonjour service I always find that it shows ‘Started’ anyway. Hmm… When I then come out of Services iTunes has picked itself up and is invariably syncing up podcasts or downloading iPhone app upgrades. Seems that just opening up Services is enough to scare Bonjour into kicking itself into gear.

Another app that didn’t install to well was Synctoy itself. I think that originally resulted in a restore. Sounds like everything is tickety-boo in Windows land then.

Give me strength.

I noticed that when playing around with Wordpress blog themes that a lot wouldn’t render at all in demo mode. Probably because of all the weird stuff I have in the two sidebars. This is almost certainly compounded by the fact that this theme hard codes, well kinda, the option to display archives and recent entries as well as other bits and pieces on this page. If I took those entries out of the two sidebar php files, but left the skeleton of the php files the demos, with other themes, may work (Wishfull thinking? Ed).

My blog till recently was using Wordpress v2.1 and is now on v2.7.1. From version 2.2, widgets were available which provided functionality for the display of archives, recent entries as well as calendars and a lot more. Now that I am on v2.7.1 I could delete all of the hard coded sidebar displays, but I’m not sure what is absolutely necessary for me to leave behind in those php files. Yesterday I removed at least one line too many as when I reloaded the page I got an error message. I got round this easy enough by re FTP’ing the original sidebar.php from my home PC back to the server and overwriting the bust, by me, sidebar.php file. I suppose I could just keep playing till I have the minimum in the sidebar.php file and if it still works then I can add the widgets for archives, calendar etc.

Having said that some themes that do render in demo mode still manage to mess up the main section i.e. where the blog entries are. Could that be because of the adverts. What some of the themes do is not display the text flowing around the advert and even worse, like lines overwriting each other.

When I understand CSS I should be able to sort this out. In fact when I understand CSS I’ll be able to edit the whole blog on Dreamweaver and sort it out on the home PC rather than the server.

Theme looks okaaaay…. What’s missing? The Technorati subscribe link. The Flickr mention, the email me link, the Quote of the Day, the hits and the Amazon ad.

Most of the missing stuff I have ready to copy back into the right-sidebar.php, or whatever it’s called. Odd but though it displays a right side bar I can’t find the .php file for it. The text and ads render well though. Lord knows what damage I’m going to do to this blog in the next couple of days.

Not sure about this theme. Too light… or summat. Needs jazzing up. I suppose I could load the sidebars with ads and a pile of javascript widgets that’ll slow the page load down to a crawl. To counteract that I could only load one blog entry but then the sidebars will be about 10 times longer than the main blog entry area. I could rationalise the categories… duh. Dunno.

This theme is wrong. The line spacing is too close for a start. It’s more of a food and drink theme than a ‘messing about with flaky code’ theme. Suppose I’d better look for a more predictable tech kinda theme.

I created a new resume with Dreamweaver and used a CSS template and pasted the text straight into that. Is that right, shouldn’t the text go in an HTML template and the CSS just do the formatting? It was still saved as an .html file and looked okaaaay in a browser. Better head back to the DW book and learn this stuff. Frontpage 95 was so much easier.

Right back to where I started and with 2 Meta’s. One is a widget. Ho-hum. (This isn’t a blog entry, more like a buncha Twitter trash talk. Ed)