The pinnacle of shitty software
So today I remembered an app that i used to use to “wipe free space”, it basically writes over your blank space with 0′s. because as everyone knows when you delete something its not actually deleted. so this app would actually go through your hard drives and “clean” your disks. I thought I hadnt done that for a while, but thats because I lost the app, and the only thing i remember about it is that the .exe file was called restore.exe, and google didnt give any results. anyways, so i thought I’d search google for an alternative, I didnt find many that were free(maybe im just rubbish at searching), the most i could find was a shareware version of a pprogram called “12ghosts shredder”. so i downloaded and installed, and looking through the options I thought it seemed quite a through program, so i clicked the “clean now button”, and within a few mins it tols me it was finished, odd I though as i Have around 500gb of space for it o work though, so looking further into the program, i had to tell it what to clean, so after ticking the box’s and pressing the button again, the program then proceeded to fill up my hard drive with files called “delete_me_delete_me_delete_me_(random_number).del”, they filled my desktop, my start menu, my quick launch menu, and pretty much any other folder I could find. WTF? and by the the prgress indicator said it was only 10% done, it stopped every 10 seconds with a dialog asking me to buy the program, which got really fucking annoying, So i quit, and then using windows search i searched for all files beggining with “delete_me”, there were over 50,000 files found, all of them 0kb. what possible use could these files have? apart from pissing off the user. I tried selecting them all and deleting them, but as you can imagine trying to delete 50,000 files in one go wasnt going to be easy. I tried system restore, but that didnt seem to affect it. so eventually I had to open a DOS prompt and use the “del” command to the delete them.
Never again am I going to use such shitty software. and if i Have to i’ll set up a sandbox or VM or something.
>.<
/end rant
Vista beta 2 resources, how NOT to steal a sidekick, other random stuff
Well Vista Beta 2 (aka build 5384.4) has been released to the public, so i thought id post a list of resources 
download from here: (official ms link)
(a download manager is recommended when downloading)
http://download.windowsvista.com/preview/beta2/en/x86/download.htm
mirrors:
http://fileforum.betanews.com/browse/DesktopManagement/OperatingSystems
http://rapidshare.de/users/933H49
http://isohunt.com/torrents.php?ihq=vista+5384.4&ext=&op=and
(make sure you check the size before downloading)
or here for the direct x86 link (“official” ms link) http://download.windowsvista.com/dl/preview/beta2/en/x86/iso/vista_5384.4.060518-1455_winmain_beta2_x86fre_client-LB2CFRE_EN_DVD.iso (3.12GB)
how to get a vista key “early”: http://bartysblog.be/content/get-your-windows-vista-beta-2-keys-early
MSBlog: (source) http://www.msblog.org/?p=746
plenty of links there to get you started 
although the MS servers are getting hammered i would say to try a mirror, but there is no guarantee that the mirrors are “ok”.. (virus free etc)
And now for the sidekick story…
http://www.evanwashere.com/StolenSidekick/
its pretty long, but if your bored :p
click here too to digg the link http://digg.com/technology/How_NOT_to_steal_a_Sidekick
=)
also had a few things going on this week, i started coding my own CMS on monday and its going pretty well, up to now i would consider it to be in “beta 1″ stage.. its fairly stable, but has quite a lot of features missing, I have most of the intended features coded, they just need either finishing, testing or implementing, I probably wont use it when its done because, im only doing this for fun really and to learn, and ive learnt quite a bit about SQL over the past few days, I never thought id do that, it always seemed to complicated so i just stuck to flat text files, which kind of suck compared..lol, anyways, theres also my revamped guestbook script that im still in the middle of working on, and then theres the jobscript which I still need to do a few formatting tweaks to and a few backend bits… oh and create a gui for the letter creator and add some more features / options, although thats a while away yet
anyway (grr i keep saying that, maybe its the new ‘lol’) bye for now 
Windows Vista – The Next-gen OS
Jul 25, 2005 Tech
Windows Vista – The Next-gen OS
The new Windows will be called Windows Vista. From now on the name Longhorn will not be used by Microsoft anymore, but it’s possible that you’ll encounter the name Longhorn in the two upcoming beta’s.
This article contains information about how Windows Vista will handle 2D and 3D graphics and information about Vista’s new features.
Vista uses the Windows Graphics Foundation, or WGF. WGF 1.0 will use DirectX 9.0c as its primary interface, but Vista will also have the Next-Gen 3D API build in. You can see it as DirectX 10, but it’s officially called WGF 2.0.
One of the important features of WGF is the Longhorn Display Driver Model (LDDM). It is possible with LDDM to install a new graphics driver without even rebooting your system. LDDM will ship in two stages. The first, called basic, supports current generation graphics hardware: shader model 2.0 and 3.0 capable hardware. The second stage of LDDM, advanced, will support hardware features that ship at the same time or after Vista is released, but will work with the new features in WGF 2.0. Because of the competitive way of graphics hardware development, we’ll probably see advanced LDDM capable hardware before Vista is released. The current Windows XP driver model is still supported, but will be frozen going forward. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: beta, computer, rant, software, Tech, updates, video, windows