wade womersley leeds based web developer

One of those little things that help make Windows 7 one of the most user oriented OS’s to come out of Redmond yet – the logon screen can be changed without any 3rd party software allowing more customisation straight out of the box. It’s small, but it’s nice to know Microsoft added it in.

1. Click Start, type Regedit.exe and press ENTER:

2. Create a new DWORD value named OEMBackground

3. Double-click OEMBackground and set 1 as its value data.

4. Exit the Registry Editor.

Next step is to place the background wallpaper (JPEG file) in the following folder:

Note that the info folder doesn’t exist by default. You need to create the info and backgrounds folders manually.

Place the background image file (name it as backgroundDefault.jpg) into the above folder.

For more details, read the full specificaition at the withinwindows blog.

Holger Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya from the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto are both in agreement that one possible explanation for the constant failings of the large hadron collider (LHC) is that it is being intentionally sabotaged by people from the future. Sound weird? Well it is, but at the same time, they’re basing their theories on current science fact about quantum physics and time travel. And the reason this is OK (unlike travelling back in time to kill your grandfather) and wouldn’t result in a paradox is apparently accepted.

However they also suggest maybe God (yes, scientics are saying God) may be preventing it as he does not want us to discover the Higg’s Boson particle either.

One reader on io9 made a comment that if you read the below quotes as though you’re the voice over from the movie Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, they take on a much more amusing tone – and he’s right, they suddenly sound “right.”

It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck,” Dr. Nielsen said in an e-mail message. In an unpublished essay, Dr. Nielson said of the theory, “Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God.” It is their guess, he went on, “that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.

…

While it is a paradox to go back in time and kill your grandfather, physicists agree there is no paradox if you go back in time and save him from being hit by a bus. In the case of the Higgs and the collider, it is as if something is going back in time to keep the universe from being hit by a bus. Although just why the Higgs would be a catastrophe is not clear. If we knew, presumably, we wouldn’t be trying to make one.

Volkswagen have decided to give the world of viral video a go and have pretty much nailed it. These two video’s are spreading over the internet like wildfire. The first is a “deep bin,” a trash can that when you throw rubbish in, sounds like it’s dropping for a long distance.  The second is about musical stairs.

The best bit about these two videos though is the fact the only time you know it was Volkswagen is at the very end for about 2 seconds when they show their logo – that’s it. Now people are discussing Volkswagen like crazy and all they had to do was avoid any real advertising.

After last year’s Back To Earth mini-series, is Red Dwarf coming back for good? The series’ Robert Llewellyn told fans this weekend that scripts for a tenth season of the SF comedy have already been commissioned.

Series 10 of Red Dwarf announcement just been made at DJ 09. To clarify the scripts have been commissioned, wont be filming til 2010

Within a few hours, he was clarifying that last clarification:

Llewellyn made the announcement at this weekend’s Dimension Jump ‘09 Red Dwarf fan convention, twittering it to the internet soon after:

Want to re-state that UKTV, aka Dave have commissioned Doug Naylor to write scripts, still a long way to go before it’s all official

So… there isn’t officially a tenth season yet, but Dave is considering the idea seriously enough to pay for scripts. Guess we should wait and see how good DVD sales for Back To Earth are in the US first…

Original article at io9.

As of yet, the cause of death has not been mentioned, but Stephen Gately of Boyzone fame has died at the age of 33 while on holiday in Menorca. The Irish pop star and actor was on holiday with his civil partner, Andrew Cowles, when he died yesterday, according to the bands website. It said the four remaining members of the band would be flying out to the Spanish island today.

I’m a huge fan of the old bands from the 90’s, I was so happy when Take That reunited and I loved Boyzone too (if anyone who know’s me is even remotely suprised considering the songs on my phone, shame on you!)

It’s a shame to see a good artist die and it will severly reduce the impact of Boyzone – although as long as they don’t do the Pussycat dolls things of a replacement every few months, I’m sure they’ll go on.

So lunch was ’so-so’ – the dauphinoise were undercooked,  the duck sauce was too strong and overpowered the duck (probably good as they were rather cheap legs.)

“Optimising your front end performance” was a very mixed talk. There were some generalisations that were seriously poor such as “80% of access to sites by end users is spent on the front end” – both vague and unfounded. However things like CSS/JS optimisation – specifically 304 Not-Modified headers and forcing caching but needed more expansion – this is a PHP conference afterall so implementation methods would be useful – so I’m going to blog about that later based on my personal experience. It’s something I’m rather passionate about and have wrote scripts to deal with this type of stuff that have worked extremely well.

The entire room seemed to be very much “uum” -ing and “aah” -ing about the whole talk, he did something that turns every programmers head in the other direction – talked from his experience without considering other situations that arise, the “I’ve not seem that problem so it can’t be a problem” situation.

Just started in the 3rd talk today by a guy called Rowan Merewood (twitter link). I had no idea he worked at Plus.net – for those of you who don’t know me, just take a look on Google for wade womersley plus.net. Unfortunately  that means I’m biased to this talk as he’s talking about a company that I know has a very sworded past with its customers and while I’m sure as a developer he’s very competent, his choice in company leaves something to be desired. He’s a good guy so far, talking with some level of comedic intent while making valid points.

The previous talk was by a lady from phpwomen and was titled Passing the Joel Test in the PHP World. Apparently, Microsoft is “infamous” for getting 12/12 – although considering Joel worked at Microsoft, this was hardly suprising. For anyone at Stickyeyes reading this, we’re about 3 to 5…which is actually OK because at the end she said “I don’t think the Joel test really applies to PHP” – a point I agree. There are a few relevant tests there but overall, it’s not the most appropriate.

More to come later in the day.

Friday afternoon, the working week is almost over, so here’s some random crap courtesy of engrish.com.

Dan sent me a link to this last night (only saw it this morning), it’s the ultimate in geek baby couture, the infant creeper.

Now I’m nore sure whether to laugh or cry, it’s funny, I can’t deny that, but at the same time, it’s seriously geeky!

//Humans Support
//Multiple Inheritance
class baby: mom, dad

Once again, the Japanese have excelled themselves in weirdness by creating a human looking robot that can sing so adorably called the Yamaha HRP-4C. By human looking I mean kind of like the puppets in Lazy Town human, obviously cartoony in a very manga style, but at the same time, human enough to make you think “that looks/sounds weird.” Obviously you need sound to watch this video clip of the Yamaha HRP-4C robot.

Another version is below, because of the close-ups, this one is a little more creepy.