Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

I know we're not the only folks around with a Toshiba Portege R100...

A failed software install left ours blue-screening on boot due to a corrupted driver. While we've got a USB DVD drive in the house, the R100 doesn't support USB CD or DVD booting. I've spent a goodly chunk of the afternoon trying to find someway of getting it to work.

DUSE, the DOS USB project doesn't work with the R100's USB hardware (though it may well for many other platforms). However, I was able to track down a site with a copy of Toshiba's own recovery boot floppy software - which is conspicuously absent from the UK site.

You'll probably need to add files like SMARTDRV to the disk just to be sure...

It's not just for recovering Windows installs - you can also use it to install Linux or any other OS on your laptop. OpenSolaris, anyone?

Have a play with GetWebKit (aka Swift), which is built on Apple's WebKit HTML rendering engine.

Warning: Very Very Alpha Code

If you were worried that your copy of Windows XP Home would suddenly become unsupported by the end of the year, you can take a calming breath now.

Microsoft has announced that it will be supporting all versions of XP for two years after the release of Vista.

Not really surprising.

Well, that was a bit of a surprise.

A demo in a session on Gadget development for Windows Vista here at the Microsoft PDC just showed the Windows Vista Sidebar running on Windows XP. I'm guessing that WinFX will be a prerequisite, but still that dramatically increases the potential audience for Gadgets.

Gadgets are useful - single function information delivery applications that are hosted by the Sidebar, very like Mac OS X Dashboard Widgets.

Not ready for prime time yet, but an interesting development, as it means that Microsoft is looking at adding rich internet functionality into Windows XP. That's a bit more competition for Yahoo!'s Konfabulator. What's also interesting is that the DHTML/CSS/JavaScript model used for Gadgets will make it relatively easy to port OS X Dashboard Widgets...

Interesting times.