I’ve wanted to visit Japan for quite some time but the opportunity never seemed to present itself. When my friend Matt wrote to me about his trip there and posted some great pictures of Japan at his photo blog I was more tempted than ever.

With my project reaching a milestone this week it seems like the perfect time to take a well deserved holiday. Clarissa can’t get the time off and isn’t too interested in Japan so I’m holidaying solo again (first time since Vancouver/BC in 2004).

A proposal is currently being considered within the States of Guernsey to ban all replica guns including the air-powered "Airsoft" ones used in the BB-war style sporting events.

I can understand the thinking behind such a decision when replica guns are causing a significant problem such as might currently be in England where the proposals seemed to originate from however a total ban seems absurd.

The project I’ve been working on professionally for the last two years reaches a milestone this week and so is a great opportunity to take a well-deserved break for a couple of weeks.

I was hoping to head out somewhere as far out as Japan but things are held up in a complicated set of scheduling dependencies and a looming demo to investors.

Many many moons ago I created myself a set of animated mouse cursors that I could use day-in, day-out.

They were designed to be easily clear on any background and just catch the attention of the eye when needed without being visibly distracting when not. They achieve this using a gently pulsing white outline.

I’m back home again after our whirlwind of activities in Southampton.

The indoor carting was quite cool fun although as usual the carts felt too slow and the indoor surface meant sliding on every corner regardless of slowing down so no attempt at fine tuning those race lines to the edge of your tires. Well, maybe there was, but I wasn’t slowing down enough to find it.

coconutBattery lets you see how much of a charge your battery currently has, how much it can still hold and how this compares to when it was manufactured. It’ll also show you how many times you battery has been charged.

SlimBatteryMonitor is a replacement for the Apple battery indicator in the menu bar with something more compact.

Anyone involved in support or development on Windows platforms has almost certainly come across the excellent tools from Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell, collectively known as SysInternals (free tools) and Winternals (pay tools).

These tools are well written, small, powerful and provide insightful information and control. The gems include Process Explorer – a powerful replacement for Task Manager that can show you which files are locked by which processes etc. the excellent RegMon and FileMon for keeping an eye on what files and registry entries applications are utilizing and many other invaluable utilities for dealing with the trickiest situation.

Christopher Bennage wrote about his development tool set-up and encouraged others to do the same so here’s my current set-up.

[)amien[)amien

The Microsoft blogosphere is full of posts announcing the release of Windows Vista to manufacturing.

It’s done – the code is finalized and any bugs and fixes will have to wait for Microsoft Update to deliver.

I remember gazing at the screen of Acornsoft’s Elite in my childhood wondering what the code behind those 3D images looked like.

How did they rotate like that? How did it know which lines to hide? And more importantly where I can get a good price for this cargo hold of radio-actives and platinum?