Those eagerly awaiting the next (and last) service pack for Windows XP will have noticed that it’s conspicuous by it’s absence! So what happened?

The latest fixes and features introduced by SP3 are causing a problem with the corporate Microsoft Dynamics’ RMS. The bug, which was noticed with the release of SP1 for Windows Vista, will be fixed, but only once they’ve tweaked the Windows Update system. Your system will be inspected first to see if you have RMS installed and if it’s found, you won’t be offered SP3. This surely can’t be a huge change to Windows Update, so I would expect the service pack to be available within the next few days. Watch this space!

Just a quick note to let everyone know, that due to some server work and hardware upgrades, the skymonkey.org website will be a little patchy from 9PM tonight until about 6AM tomorrow morning - that’s in British Summer Time (1PM-10PM PDT, 4PM-1AM EDT). Once done, everything should be good for a while! If you visit skymonkey.org during these times and you can’t get onto the website, please leave it for 10 minutes or so and give it another go. Thank you for your patience!

We’ve all been there - you’ve got an image you need to crop or resize but there isn’t anything installed on the computer you’ve got to do it. Enter Splashup (with or without a red cape) to the rescue. As long as you have the internet, you have the means.

With Splashup you can upload your picture to the site, make the amendments and save it out again. It supports basic filters, layers (very welcome) and will import or export to most of the online image sites, such as Flickr, or Picasa. It also has a very familiar interface to those of you that use Photoshop. In fact, it’s so familiar I tried to upload a PSD file, which threw an error! At present it only saves in jpg, png or fxo, but I’m sure more formats will become available as the product gains speed and popularity.

The micro-blogging site that’s big in America, has been used to good effect in the current US election race. Of course, it’s main users are the geek types, who like to check up on what other geek types are up to (check the links on the left!)

Well now 10 Downing Street have jumped on the bandwagon and started their own twitter feed. If you want to know the latest political developments as they happen, then head on over to twitter, create an account and start following. It will make you a more efficient person at slating the government in real-time!

Dice have updated their Battlefield Heroes site with a FAQ section containing some helpful hints such as how to play and what PC specification you need. There are also updates to their screenshots and wallpapers plus a video showing off the character customization system.

Below are the requirements for the game taken from the FAQ section:

Q: What kind of computer do I need to run Heroes?

A: We’re currently aiming for a minimum requirement of…

• Operating System: Windows XP or Windows Vista
• CPU: 1.0 GHz
• RAM: 512 Mb (1Gb on Windows Vista)
• Video Card: 64Mb DirectX compliant video card with at least pixel shader 2.0 support
• Hard Drive space: 1Gb of space is required to install the game
• Internet connection: 256kbit Cable/DSL connection

The game is down for a summer 08 release. Head over to the Battlefield Heroes website to have a look.

Not technically “legal”, or at least according to Apple’s EULA, Psystar have been creating PCs for the last month with OSX pre-installed. So popular are they that they’re unable to fulfil their orders, with various credit card authorisers buckling under the pressure. And because of the suspension of orders on their website, and them moving to new premises, people were getting suspicious thinking maybe it was a big scam.

Well it’s not a scam and the proof is here! A Psystar created PC with Leopard pre-installed. Although, according to the guy who bought it, it won’t patch online, it’s cheaper than having an Apple-created Mac. I’m sure Steve Jobs will put an end to it fairly soon, so if you’re after a Mac, can’t afford the cost, then maybe you should give Psystar a visit.

Exactly 3 weeks ago Microsoft threatened a hostile take-over of Yahoo. However, here we are on the day 3 weeks later and all is quiet in the Microsoft camp. Have they decided to cut their losses and run with their tail between their legs? Or are they regrouping, for the final assault during the week? Only time will tell…

Steve Balmer stated publicly that he wants people to comment on XP, voicing to Microsoft that they shouldn’t give up just yet on the OS. Now it appears the OEM’s are starting to revolt too for the corporate customer’s sake.

And I’m with them, and other corporate customers! Vista is good - it has lots of bells and whistles, and has lots of nice graphical add-ons, but what really counts in an OS in the corporate environment is something stable, easy to use, “in keeping with windows” and above all easy to support. I don’t think Vista is any of those. Things have never been so different and difficult - Windows XP has been a progression of 2000, which in turn, although based on the NT codebase, was basically in-line with Windows 98’s features, which was built on the back of Windows 95. These were all logical progressions. Vista falls short - Maybe it should have been called Windows 7 Beta?

And it appears that my worries supporting Vista in the workplace are not misplaced. Lenovo are going to continue to supply it’s customers with XP well into 2009 - joining the ranks of Dell & HP in their post-June support. Hopefully support will continue until the release of Windows 7. Please Microsoft don’t mess up the next one!!

It’s a common question, and most people don’t really look for the answer. If you make the switch to using OpenDNS, all of a sudden the feature of typing anything into your address bar in firefox, and being redirected to the best-match page from google doesn’t work. And it’s surprising how used to that feature you get. I, for instance, just type “gmail” into the address bar and Firefox/Google gets me to where I want to go. Some people I know of have actually got rid of OpenDNS for this reason alone. Well all is not lost! Don’t change your settings just yet - you can make a simple tweak in Firefox to make it all better.

First things first, go to the address bar of Firefox and type about:config. What appears is a list of the configurable variables that Firefox uses. Beware, messing with the wrong ones can break your browser. We’re interested in only one of them. In the filter box, type keyword. Double click the keyword.URL entry in the list and change the contents of the box that appears to http://www.google.com/search?btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky&q= click OK and you’re done. And for those of us in the UK, just substitute the google.com with a google.co.uk.

Anything you now type into the address bar of Firefox, if it’s not a valid website address, will be redirected to Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” search. I’m Feeling Lucky, for the uninitiated, is a button next to Search on the Google homepage that you can use if you’re sure the first entry that’s going to be returned by Google’s normal search will be what you’re looking for. Firefox will now act exactly the same way when you type your search term into the address bar - bypassing that horrible OpenDNS search page.

In an interesting development regarding the acquisition of Yahoo! by Microsoft, Steve Balmer is quoted as saying that he’s “prepared to move forward alone, without Yahoo.” You could argue that this could be a bluff to wake up the shareholders, as technically the 3 week ultimatum comes to an end this Sunday? Or am I just jumping to conclusions?