Bridge stolen? Writing blog posts the “live” way.

Just managed to upgrade to Windows Live Writer 2011 after many attempts over the last few months.

I kept getting an obscure error message, typical of what happens when the multi-component Windows Live gets itself into a mess. As with other such “black box” software packages, it was impossible to determine what was going wrong under the covers. I was at my wits’ end and couldn’t find a solution anywhere, but suddenly yesterday something changed (a Windows Update, or a new version of the installer, perhaps) and it “fixed itself” more or less.

Widows Live Writer (WLW) is an excellent free desktop tool for creating and maintaining blog posts, and these days I wouldn’t want to do it any other way. I use WLW for all my blogs, which are on Google’s Blogger.com (but WLW also acts as a front end to WordPress, TypePad and more).

This is just a fill-in blog post, giving me a chance to play with the enhancements in this version of Live Writer, such as the ribbon.

Blogging couldn’t be made easier! I’ll simply drag an image from the file system into the work area … then use the ribbon to right-adjust the image, and hey presto, there it is over to my right!

A quick speel chack (see bottom image) and I’m ready to click the Publish button.

By the way, the road sign is in Ireland, I think. Did somebody steal the bridge, or take it away for repainting, or what? I hope that they mandate life vests under  car seats over there!

I used the very handy Inpaint, a quite valuable and inexpensive graphics tool, to remove some extraneous objects from the image.

Here’s a snapshot of Windows Live Writer 2011 in action on this blog post:

My conclusion? The ribbon takes a bit of getting used to, but after that it’s  “no sweat” as we say here Down Under. Windows Live Writer 2011 is definitely nicer to use than the previous version (which itself was already far better that using the browser-based editor provided by Blogger.com). Thanks, Microsoft.

An oddity in Windows Live Writer

As mentioned in the previous post (about OpenNTF.Org), I now use the Writer available under Windows Live to create and update posts to my blogs.

I decided to check out the Writer web site for updates, and installed the latest version (build 14.0.8050.1202) which has even more nice features. The upgrade all went fine.

That done, I started researching a problem that has cropped up a few days ago, with Windows inscrutably refusing to go into Standby mode.

It’s very irritating. Now, instead of quickly powering down into standby the system nearly always hangs displaying the “Windows is now shutting down” panel. My only option then is to do a hardware reset in order to get going again.

Some software that I installed or patched in the last week or so is probably the culprit. After a little research, I  decided to uninstall certain products that I suspected might be the cause of the hangs. (Windows power configuration issues like this can be frustratingly difficult to sort out.)

So I opened the Control Panel, and got the following result (only the top few lines are shown). Notice the oddity, near the top?

  
  (Click to show a larger image)

I’ve never seen the likes of it before, in any version starting with Windows 95.

An examination of the Windows registry (by searching for “LiveWriter”) detected the minor but amusing gaffe made by somebody at Microsoft:

(A quite unusual registry key value)

HTML rules, it has now infested even the registry! … And I thought it was only me who did silly things like this.

Technorati Tags: Windows Live Writer,Registry,Gaffe,Humor

Serious, or Seriously Funny?

Last night I again watched two of Australia's best-known movie critics Margaret Pomeranz's and David Stratton's weekly show At The Movies on ABC TV, and they both admitted that it was well into the movie Lucky Miles before they realized that it was meant to be taken as a comedy, although a "bitter-sweet" one.

It was the same experience for me when I read Angsuman Chakraborty's June 2nd, 2006 posting: Top 10 Reasons Not To Use Coding Conventions / Standards

Is he serious, or is he doing it all with a tongue-in-cheek approach? Make up your own mind!

For example, what about this one:

5. Coding convention makes your code easier to understand. That makes your job less secure. Maintaining good coding standard means your code can be understood by anyone and your project easily outsourced to some lowly-paid Indian’s in Bangalore (the horror!).