I was trying out the Office 2010 beta today and decided to share the new office experience with a few pictures.

You can download the beta edition by visiting this website, then pressing “Get it Now” on the top right. Follow the steps and the ‘Download Now’ buttons, and you are on your way.

Apart from some ribbon GUI revamping, the only things that really stood out were the flashy new startup logo, and a new File/Print/Info menus that work a lot better when compared to previous versions of Office. The ribbon is a welcome change to all products across the Microsoft Office suite, including Publisher and Outlook.

Below are some screenshots of the new GUI across various applications of the suite. My theme is set to ‘Black’ (setting carried over from Office 2007), however you can find a blue and silver version of Powerpoint in the relevant section. Click the thumbnails to make them bigger.

Word

Powerpoint

Publisher

Outlook

“Send a Smile or a Frown”

Like something about Office 2010? or dislike something? You can easily give the Office Team feedback by clicking the smiley or frowning icon in the system tray while running Office.

“Send a Smile also automatically collections the file location of all processes running on your computer. File locations may include user names and other personal information.” — Well they do need that information to make the products better I guess… It’s all feedback to improve the process…

Auto-tune: “Used to disguise off-key inaccuracies and mistakes, and has allowed singers to perform perfectly tuned vocal tracks without the need of singing in tune.”

News: “communication of information on current events”

Below are a collection of Youtube videos that make up a playlist of auto-tuned news. A link to the Youtube playlist can be found at the bottom of this post.

Some of the videos take a little while to get ‘going’, but most of them have picked up a pretty good beat in the second half of each song.

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=736C3116AD309B58

The other day I was listening to some music from BioShock (one of my all time favourite games), “Cohen’s Masterpiece”.

Below is video from YouTube of the song played piano

You can also view the scene from BioShock involving “Young Fitzpatrick” and Cohen’s masterpiece in the following video

I thought it would be interesting to source the sheet music and take a look at it. My favourite parts are from bars 4 through 7 (0:12 – ~0:25 in the topmost video), and the similar variations of that segment throughout the rest of the piece.

The pictures below are the three pages that make up the manuscript.

You can download the manuscript as a PDF: BioShock: “Cohen’s Masterpiece”.

Recently one of my computer began to act strange, visiting HTTPS sites would always result in a notification of ‘certificate revocation’, basically that the HTTPS SSL certificate is no longer ‘valid’ or cannot be checked if it has been invalidated. It started to affect multiple things on my computer, particular Live Mesh, Google Chrome updating and general HTTPS browsing (such as Google email login) — and finding a solution wasn’t easy…

And so, that is why I am posting what I have found so far; in-case someone else has this issue as well… All the troubleshooting steps are assuming an install of Internet Explorer 8 with Windows 7.

Summary

SSL Certificates arn’t able to be checked for revocation on Windows 7 Professional 32-bit and 64-bit RTM.

The problem appears to affect multiple applications, all of which rely on SSL.

• Live Mesh
• Google Chrome updates (Error 7)
• General HTTP Browsing

Solution

This error occurred again once when having installed the proxy application, WideCap.

The solution that fixes the issue is simple; in an elevated command prompt ‘netsh winsock reset‘.

Troubleshooting

(click title to show/hide)

These are the following steps I took in order to try and resolve the problem.

Preliminary steps I took to verify basic SSL settings are correct:

1. Check the date and time to ensure it is correct
2. Clear the SSL State Cache
   Go into Internet Explorer > Internet Options. Change to the Content tab. Press ‘Clear SSL State‘
   
3. Delete all temporary files in Internet Explorer
   Go into Internet Explorer > Internet Options. On the General tab, under Browsing History, press ‘Delete…‘ then, selecting all options followed again by Delete.
   
4. Running a virus scan to ensure nothing malicious was causing the issue.
5. Checking that the BITS service was not disabled
6. Running sfc /scannow to verify Windows files were in-tact

Unfortunately, those steps did not resolve the issue. These following, more drastic steps seemed to resolve the issue. I cannot attribute a fix to a specific step they were all performed together.

1. Resetting Internet Explorer settings
   Go into Internet Explorer > Internet Options. Change to the Advanced tab. Press ‘Reset…‘. Then ‘Reset’.
   
2. Resetting the Windows Firewall settings to default
   In an elevated command prompt, type netsh advfirewall reset, then press Enter.
   
3. Resetting the WinHTTP and WinSOCKS configuration
   In an elevated command prompt, type netsh winhttp reset proxy, then press Enter.
   Then, type netsh winsock reset, then press Enter.
   

Preliminary Workaround

(click title to show/hide)

The issue affected various applications as noted in the summary. This is the following steps I took to resolve some of the applications and their errors.

• Disabling revocation check in Internet Explorer options.Go into Internet Explorer then Internet Options, changed to the Advanced tab. Scroll down to the Security section. Uncheck ‘Check for server certificate recovation’ and ‘Check for publisher’s certification revocation’. Note: This reduces web browsing security substantially on the system and therefore finding a solution was a priority.

Cause

So what caused the issue to occur?

• Used a proxy tunnelling application, WideCap
  This program tunnels programs that don’t support proxy protocols through just that, a proxy. This program may have somehow affected the WinHTTP or WinSOCK areas of the operating system. I will continue to use this application to see if the problem regresses.

This issue occurred once again and could be attributed to the WideCap installation noted above.

I hope this helps someone who has a similar problem, as unfortunately I couldn’t find the issue reported anywhere else on the internet.

Launch Time

One of the latest most anticipated releases on Steam seems to have missed its launch date. Déjà vu anyone?

The Steam Forums and Steam community are responding sluggishly to requests, most likely bursting at the seams from the influx of gamers that want to get their hands dirty and start playing…

Most users attempting to access the Steam Community site are being presented with a ‘Down for Maintenance’ message, pictured below.

Personally, I am not to fussed if the deadlines aren’t met down to the second — managing the release of a game across millions of computers worldwide isn’t an easy feat. So Valve, take your time, just ignore the barrage of insults and gamer rage…
In the mean time gamers, visit the stats page to view the new in-game achievements and various records statistics.

UPDATE (+ 15 Minutes)

Having blocked comments on the event page (most likely to reduce server load), gamers can now no longer leave their insulting comments.. which is probably a good thing… This has allowed people to once again, gain access to Steam community.

UPDATE (+ 1 Hour)

An hour passed the launch time and L4D2 is finally showing signs of being released. The Steam store page has been revamped and a new post has made it onto the L4D blog site. Maybe daylight savings had something do with it

UPDATE (+1 Hour 15 Minutes)

Users are now able to decrypt game files Happy Gaming!

While the art direction in Borderlands is fairly interesting, so is the music.

Here are two tracks from Borderlands that should be on the OST (Official Sound Track) at any rate.

“Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked” by Cage The Elephant

• Show Lyrics

“No Heaven” by DJ Champion

• Show Lyrics

A sample of the blood files for L4D2, original versions vs. Aus versions.

I will add some more information to this post when I get a chance.

If you want to help Australia on its way to an R18+ rating, visit the following website:

Grow Up Australia

Be sure to sign the petition to show your support!

I was browsing around the other day, and accidentally mis-typed a URL and was re-directed to a ‘Yes Optus’ page with search results from Yahoo based on my query.

It seems a new service “DNS Assist” to help users find what they were looking for, in the event of a typo or outdated link. While this may be great for some more novice internet users, I would prefer to let Chrome and Google handle my typos…

The good thing is that Optus provide two opt-out methods. The first is the simpler of the two, leaving a cookie which bypasses the DNS Assist service. The other option requires alterations to your internet connections’ DNS servers, which is a more technical, but also more permanent solution. The cookie opt-out and alternate DNS settings can be found by clicking the “About this page” link on the bottom right of a DNS Assist transition page.

While Google Picasa Web Albums has had facial recognition in-built for a while now, I knew it wouldn’t be too much longer before the Picasa desktop software was also updated with that feature.

Google finally released the long awaited, facial recognition update for Picasa (Google’s version of photo editing software), to version 3.5.

Along with this update comes the aforementioned facial recognition capabilities; the ability to have faces automatically recognized and identified in the photos you take. This lets you sort photos by who is in them as opposed to tags or file names. Don’t be alarmed; the results arn’t sent to some central facial recognition database! It’s kept purely on your computer for your benefit of photo classification.

Now to how TF2 comes into the picture (pun intended ). So, being an avid gamer, and having an online Game Photo Album, I tend to take a lot of in-game screenshots, which I organize through Picasa. So, Picasa begins scanning for ‘faces’ … and low and behold, the characters in the games are being identified! I found this quite amusing

And so, while the scanning is only at 10%, I have played Medic class at least 46 times… The engineer with the two different poses (on the right) wasn’t picked up as the engineer; but I soon added both the photos under his name.

Interestingly, the 46 Medic photos were all of the same face pose. This was because they were from all the final scoreboard screenshots; an option in TF2 to always take a screenshot of the final match scores.

And the time it has taken me so far to write this post has allowed Picasa to reach 16% of the way through scanning my photo collection. The engineer category now provides substantially more entertaining results

You can download Picasa 3.5 here.

Released mid-Feburary of last year (2008), Audiosurf is still one of the most popular games which utilizes the music as the ‘track’, using the song as the soul of the game.

For only $10 this game is  great way to enjoy your music collection; pushing the boundaries of a new musical experience — immersed within a rich 3d (almost psychedelic) environment. You will find some of yours song produce much more relaxed ‘tracks’ to play on, while some louder rock tracks will provide you quite a challenge…

It is on that aspect that I propose to music stores to add a new criteria to online song purchases… an Audiosurf rating, ASR for short. While some websites list some of the ‘best’, none actually let you purchase the track and find try it out yourself. A dedicated website should be set up to associate these ratings with songs. Online music stores can use an API to obtain the latest ranking (possible a star based system) for a song in particular — an average of tracks could provide a album ranking. For example, the “Windows XP Setup Sound” (played during the initial setting up of your computer) is actually not a bad Audiosurf track compared to some others I have tried… Although I doubt a music store would be able to sell such a song; it would at least give people the opportunity to try out great Audiosurf rides.

Anyway… I’m heading back to my song now that I’ve posted my thoughts of the day. You can read more about Audiosurf here or on the game’s website, www.audio-surf.com.

Happy surfing