Today, literally every time I stop a debugging session Visual Studio is going into that weird deadlocked-at-40%-processor state that it enjoys so much. Maybe there’s good ice cream there or something.

Anyway, it is irritating me hugely as I’m on a mammoth bug hunt at the moment… for the love of all things you hold sacred, fix your debugger Microsoft (though don’t debug it with itself, I would recommend, use a decent debugger!)

I have written a silly little throw away script that blacklists some words in comments. As most of the spam here so far seems pretty brain dead pasting it might work for a little bit. So, if you are trying to post and nothing appears, see if you have an obvious spammy word and remove it somehow.

I read John Gruber’s article about DRM — digital rights management — with interest. In it he looks at a record industry spokesperson’s quote and comes to the conclusion, rightly I believe, that the record industry wants there to be an interoperable standard for DRM because the record industry wants back control of music. This piece started me thinking about what the record industry should really be aiming for with an application of DRM.

I’m stuck at home with a cold, so I thought that I’d write something on the old weblog. I mean, a cold in summer sucks pretty badly. Even worse is that I’m on holiday from work and I think it’s a little cheeky to take some of the time as sick leave — it’s been a low-level thing for most of the week and as such has not been too bad. It seems to have mounted a counter-attack today, however. Therefore, I thought it best to stay in for a night.

So far my experiences with the Mac have been mostly positive.

Graphically, I’ve never used a system that seems so fluid and, almost, physical in the way it is displayed. Things smoothly move around the place, message boxes emerge from the windows they belong to, staying firmly attached to their parents, and moving windows around feels far more solid — I guess this is all made possible by having properly composited and accelerated graphics so you can get the graphics card to do all the nice effects. Unless Vista is a huge step forward over Windows XP I don’t see this lead changing.