“Can’t create shockwave control”

The answer to fix this is fairly simple - thanks to nameless over on the neowin forums:

If you have this problem, you need to install the Flash plugin for Internet Explorer. You need to do that because Media Player Classic uses the Internet Explorer Flash plugin to render SWF files.

Simple enough! I find the quickest way to get it is open youtube.com (or any other site guaranteed to have Flash content) in an IE window and click on the link to install Flash.

Hey, let me know if this helped you out by posting a quick note in the Comments!

I put Windows Vista on my MBA because I need to be operational for business and I don’t have time to learn how to use a new operating system (and find replacement applications for those I normally use, and put backup procedures in place for the new OS, etc, etc).

Kudos to Apple, the MBA hardware is just gorgeous, and Vista with Aero doesn’t let the side down too badly. I’m sure it won’t go down well with the Apple fanboys but screw ‘em.

On to the Vista benchmarking: there’s good performance from the 1.6GHz Core 2 Duo and 2GB of 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM, but no surprise that the onboard Intel GMA X3100 sucks ass which really drags down the overall score. The hard drive is not bad for a little 4200 RPM thing that’s normally found in an iPod.

Over all it gets a 3.5 out of 5.9 because of the onboard graphics.

• 1.6 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 4MB on-chip shared L2 cache running at full processor speed
• 800MHz frontside bus
• 2GB of 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM onboard
• Intel GMA X3100 graphics processor with 144MB of DDR2 SDRAM shared with main memory
• 80GB 4200-rpm Parallel ATA hard disk drive

I was very impressed with how easy Apple’s Bootcamp software made the install, and the drivers that came on the install DVD seem to do the trick. My only concern is the touchpad, I thought it was a bit flakey and the cursor seemed to hang one time, but it’s running fine now.

Is anyone else out there running Vista as their main OS on the Macbook Air?

Not all of these are free, but the majority are.

• Firefox and get:
  • adblock plus
  • seo for FF
  • web dev toolbar
  • screengrab
• Office 2007 (from DVD) OR OpenOffice
• Notepad2 (and get auto-installer)
• Windows Mobile Device Center
• Skype
• Filezilla
• Putty
• Foxit PDF Reader
• Cute PDF Writer
• AV: Avira or Avast or NOD32 (the latter is not free, but is vying for position as my AV of choice*)
• WinRAR** or 7Zip

• Flashget
• uTorrent
• Adaware
• Spybot S&D
• Klite mega codec pack (includes Media Player Classic)
• CCleaner
• Virtual Clonedrive
• AbbyFine OCR***
• VMware Workstation or Player
• iTunes

* I like NOD32 enough to choose to pay for it over the free Avira or Avast (btw AVG/Grisoft sucks, your machine is not safe if it’s your only AV).

** WinRAR has nice features but 7Zip is free

*** Abbyfine rules for OCR, highly recommended for scanning large docs.

I found out about Stross because he’s a fellow geek and even better, had some of his work available for free download. I first read The Concrete Jungle and then bought paperbacks of The Atrocity Archives, Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise (which I haven’t started yet - I’ll save that for holiday reading).

From making his work available as a free download, he’s managed to sell 3 paperbacks in a month, with many more to follow since I generally buy everything published in paperback by authors I like.

Here’s a review from SFsite.com.

Generally when I’m doing an overview of a website I look at 3 main topics:

• usability and accessibility
• search engine optimisation
• business effectiveness

Usability  and Accessibility

This is important because accessible sites are normally search engine friendly, and usable sites get longer visitor stay time and happier users.

Layout - 0/10

ManagerAssistant.com uses a XHTML doctype but is invalid and worse, uses a table based layout with spacer gifs. The year is 2007, not 1997, and this is not really acceptable from anyone calling themselves a professional development team.

Images - 0/10

The site uses a (slow loading) image at http://www.managerassistant.com/images/MainPageSplashText.gif to contain the main text of the page. This image does not have an alt tag, so the text is completely lost to blind users and no search engine will index it either - so this page will not rank for any of the terms mentioned there. Actually, and even worse, this image is not even a normal image but set as background to a table cell, so it’s not even possible to set an alt tag!

Javascript - 3/10

A lot of Javascript, which appears to contain important content, will not appear for non-Javascript enabled browsers.

Bottom line on accessibility is that users with any kind of special need, including the blind, elderly, or even people using cellphone and PDA browsers will have difficulty using this website.

Recommendation: rebuild the ManagerAssistant.com site template using valid XHTML and CSS - i.e. 2007 standards. This won’t cost the earth - give us a call at Log On Internet Marketing Ltd. and we’ll give you a quote.

Search Engine Optimisation

In-bound links - 9/10

ManagerAssistant.com  has a fantastic 23,000+ backlinks showing in Yahoo. This means that with a toolbar pagerank of 6, the site has the potential to rank very highly for less competitive keywords, and even rank quite good for fairly competitive terms.

On page content - 3/10

Contrary to the great work in building backlinks, the on page content is poor - text within images without alt tags, spammy title tag, too many keywords in meta keyword and description tags. Very few pages of content on the site as a whole. This site will perform poorly in the Long Tail.

Bottom line: this site will rank highly in the search engine results due to number of backlinks but will not rank for very many different terms. This may or may not be an issue if the focus is tight enough and the long tail is irrelevant.

Recommendation: when rebuilding the site (as mentioned above) use SEO best practices to ensure the site ranks well for many different keywords.

Business Effectiveness

So you have potential customers looking at your site. What do you want them to do there?

Clear call to action - 9/10
ManagerAssistant.com  clearly offers a Free Demo - this is one of the first things I noticed when looking at the page. This call to action is big, round and orange - the opposite colour and shape to most of the rest of the content.

The secondary calls to action for BUY Now and More Info - these are clear and strong. Personally, I might be tempted to change the “BUY Now” text to “Add to cart”, as this is slightly more appealing - this is a personal thing and not a big deal on a non-ecommerce site.

Overall 

This is a half-decent site with good potential. The things I’d concentrate on would be reworking the site template to make it standards based (xhtml 1.0 and css2). This will make the site far more accessible and have the nice knock-on effect of being much more search engine friendly and help to rank for many more different searches.

If  you would like your website reviewed here, or want a quote for SEO or webdesign services, ask for Alastair at LogOn.ie.

First they introduced the ban on smoking in public places. Pubs are now closing at the rate of one a day. The government won’t admit this - they put it down to other factors, but the publicans say that it is a major factor.

Afaik we don’t have real data for this, so why do people always assume that the smoking ban is the reason for pubs closing? Sure the publicans claim it’s the case, but I think they’re lying or wrong.

Drink prices in Irish pubs have skyrocketed recently, well more than inflation. We are changing our lifestyle and going to a friends house is much more common now than in previous years. I can get 2 bottles of wine or a box of 20 Rolling Rock for about 20 euros, how’s that compare to going to the pub?

I believe that pub prices together with a massive clampdown on drink driving in the last 5 years (which is particularly noticeable in rural areas), is a far bigger contributory factor to the closure of rural pubs than the smoking ban is.

Technorati Tags: The Tipping Point, smoking, smoking ban, Drink prices, Irish, pubs

A little bird told me.

Technorati Tags: boards.ie, disappeared

Nice one, Andy! btw, personally I’d enable trackbacks and comments for that post.

Originally seen on shoutfile.com.

Technorati Tags: laugh, dumb, Americans, funny