Sagebrush

We have been looking at Windows Vista (^TM Microsoft) for a few weeks, seeing how it will affect Sagebrush products. View earlier articles Part1 and Part2 .

User Account Control

Some of the restrictions discussed below may have existed under WinXP, but most home users ran as administrator and never noticed any problem. Now, unless User Account Control is disabled, programs will tend to start with “Standard User” priveleges, and restrictions will be noticed. Some home users might be tempted to always run with “Admin Priveleges”, but we, as programmers, must run under low priveleges to find any problems.

Restricted Registry Access

Standard user programs can read anything in the registry, but write access is limited to the HKEY_CURRENT_USER branch. Here is where WinChime nornally stores its user settings, so we didn’t need to change anything:

Read rest of this article.

Honey

Bao

Frankie

Won Ton

Durango

Star

One restaurant has a novel use for ambient nature sounds, reports the Manchester Evening News:

Customers at a top British restaurant will listen to iPods while tucking into their food.

Chef Heston Blumenthal says the Apple music players will help heighten the flavour of a new dish called Sound of the Sea.

(Kudos Gizmodo.)

The biggest application for our audio recording program is logging telephone calls. Sound-activated recording is used to separate calls, and the time code display is handy for displaying when calls occur.

So this news item (which AFAIK does not involve our product) caught our attention:

A Hempfield Area High School sophomore spent 12 days in juvenile detention after authorities in Westmoreland County mistakenly charged him with making a March 11 bomb threat, in part because the district had not changed its clocks to reflect daylight-saving time.

…

The teen said he did call the school’s delay hot line early Sunday, March 11. But that was an hour before the bomb threat was phoned in, said the family’s attorney, Tim Andrews. After Webb’s parents obtained his cell phone records, Andrews found the call times did not match.

…

“All the time stamps were screwed up. Some did (change over), some didn’t,” Charlton said. “Everyone’s system had to be set manually. There were a lot of clocks involved.”

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

This is a good reminder that accuracy in recording systems could have consequences, and I had better go back and test program code carefully.

Our first product, WinChime, was introduced in February of 1995, with a version for Windows 3.1 . Today we introduce a beta version compatible with Windows Vista, showing a felicitous continuity of support.

Every couple of weeks we intend to update another product for improved Vista compatibility. Existing customers will be able to use the same registration codes received when they originally purchased a user license. (Thanks again, customers!)

[In previous articles we explored moving to Vista, here and here.]