I suppose in an effort to compete with maps.google.com and local.live.com, our own map provider website, whereis.com.au has started to provide a satellite photo option to their maps.

Now, they have got the button marked as “beta” so I guess some hiccups are expected, but this is some pretty wacky photography. Checkout what they’ve got for Phillip St in the city:

How weird does that look? 88|

A couple of days ago, I posted about "Why I won't use Windows Vista Mail." Basically, the reason was because it didn't include a manifest to say it was "high DPI aware", and there was no way to set those compatibility properties (that would force it to be marked as "high DPI aware") from explorer, because apparently it was "part of this version of Windows."

If you don't remember, I posted this screen shot of the "Inbox" and "Outbox" folders. Notice the blurring:

Well, a little bit of investigation and I figured out how to force it. All you need to do is add a new value to the following registry key:

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers

The name of the value should be the full path and file name of the executable, in our case it's "C:\Program Files\Windows Mail\WinMail.exe" and set the value to "HIGHDPIAWARE". You've probably already got a couple of entries in there to help you figure it out :)

After that, simply start up Windows Mail, and you've got it!! The only problem is that it doesn't scale the icons, but that's a minor issue (and most "high DPI aware" apps don't do that anyway - bring on the vector bitmaps, I say!)

Logging in to one of our server machines today, I’m prompted with this doozey:

So clearly, I can’t “Restart Later.” I also can’t seem to “Restart Now.” What do they want me to do? “Restart ½ an hour ago” doesn’t work – I don’t have a time machine.

I thought that I might like to give Windows Mail a try, on my shiny new Vista install, since it should be more "light weight" than Outlook. But there's a problem, and I don't think I will be using, unless I can figure out a work-around...

Take a look at the two screenshots below:

The one on the left is a screenshot of part of folder list in Windows Mail. The one on the right is a screenshot of the words "Inbox" and "Outbox" that I took from notepad - just for comparison.

Clearly, Windows Mail is being "scaled" - like some legacy application that doesn't handle high DPI displays very well. Strange, thought I, you'd think a brand new version of Windows Mail - built specifically for Vista - would support high DPI displays properly!

Ah, I thought, as I remembered the "disable display scaling" option in the Compatibility tab of the executable's properties. But upon opening that dialog up, I see this:

You'd think if Microsoft were going to go to the trouble to disable all the options on that page, that they'd be good enough to ensure that I don't need to use any of them!

Oh well, maybe Windows Mail really doesn't scale on high DPI displays. But if that's the case, then I'm just not going to use it at all.

I think I just had my first experience with the Windows Vista Restart Manager. I'm not sure whether I particularly liked the experience, though.

See, it was updating the video driver for my laptop. What happens is, Vista starts installing the updates in the background - it pops up a "updates are installing" toast, and you can keep working.

Except that while I was working, my screen all-of-a-sudden goes black, flashes up at 800x600 (or some equally low resolution), goes black again, and pops back up at the native resolution.

All of that took about 5 seconds, which isn't a huge amount of time, but it was pretty distracting to say the least, but most annoying of all, because it popped back at 800x600 for a second or two, all my non-maximized windows stayed at their smaller size when it popped back at the native resolution!

I'm sure that if it had just been updating Word or something, I could probably live with Word dropping out for a second or two while updating. But the problem with this was twofold:

1. It was updating "in the background" so I'd pretty much forgotten it. When the screen flashed off, I thought my computer had crashed! And,
2. When everything came back, it'd screwed up all my window positions and sizes.

Maybe it's just because I'm so used to it, but I'd have prefered to just reboot.