It's fantastic: just excellent 10 minute snippets of top entertainment...

Sunshine

The new Danny Boyle film Sunshine is fantastic. The crew of the spaceship Icarus II head towards the sun with a bomb the size of Manhattan Island to try and kickstart the dying star.

You can guess that this film could be labelled as science fiction, and frankly it is (due to science not yet being able to take us to the sun). However, the label science fiction immediately gets some people's backs up and they immediately decide they don't/ won't like the film which I think is a shame, and which I believe misses the point.

Like many other films in this so called genre, this is an intelligent film with very rounded and believable characters faced with decisions with enormous consequences. It is about people under stress and how they react to situations and each other. It just happens to be set in space.

There are many appalling science fiction films: Lost in Space and Stargate to name two, but I think it is wrong to dismiss a whole body of films due to being set in space, and thus being complete fiction.

Really is a fantastic film though...

Reinstalling Windows...

After 3 years, my Windows XP installation started running so slow that it would take nearly 5 minutes for the PC to come out of hibernation. This only occurred after I installed (and then removed) Windows Desktop Search, so there could be a link but I couldn't find it.

So the only solution was to reinstall Windows. Not a technically difficult job, but boy does it take time, mainly due to all the necessary stuff you need to put on afterwards. So here is a quick list of what to do:

• Reinstall Windows (also making a separate partition for data if not already done so: means that after any future installations, you don't need to copy across everything in 'My Documents'.
• Reinstall SP1 and SP2 and any necessary updates from Windows Update.
• Install IE7 (much better than IE6), although I had to reinstall Windows twice to get this to work.
• Move the IE7 menu bar to the top where it rightfully belongs: [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Toolbar\WebBrowser] "ITBar7Position"=dword:00000001
• Move the default Favourites setting to point to your favourites handily stored in My Documents (helps back them up and keeps all data in the one place) by updating the value in: [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders]"Favorites"=REG_EXPAND_SZ:"D:\My Documents"
• Add the fantastic Inline Search to IE7 from IE Forge.
• Add the excellent Task Switch manager from NTWind.
• Set up IIS for your local website development.
• Download and install Php.
• Download ActiveState Perl.
• Download Filezilla (for all your FTP needs).
• Download Microsoft ActiveSync for your Windows phone.
• Download the very nice Desktop Earth backdrop.
• Download Digiguide, so you know what is on the TV.
• Download Password Safe, for all those less secure passwords we all need to keep track of.
• Download ConTEXT programmer's editor, as it hanldes C/C++, Tcl/Tk, Perl and lots else although at the moment I am trying Programmer's Notepad.
• Add the very useful Microsoft Photo Info.

And that is more or less it, although I'm sure there will be more stuff that you vaguely remember having on your old machine, and only remember when you really really need it... Still, it's nice to have a brand new clean installation running at top (or probably just relatively high) speeds...

Later additions to the list...

• Download the excellent Firebug for script debugging in Firefox.
• And this very good Html Validator.
• And CutePDF for writing pdf files for free.
• And don't forgot to make sure Command Prompt auto completion is turned on.