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…and Happy Birthday to me!

(image by sxc.hu)

christmas, holiday, santa claus

I love web applications. And I have a feeling Web 2.0 will lead to the development of many gems in this field. Three of my favourites are :

• Flickr

  
  Is this one of the most widely used Web 2.0 applications or what? Simple to use, elegant and wildly popular, Flickr managed to gather all preferred photo album functionalities into one robust application.

  Three Things I love about it

  • Very simple, usable and elegant design, non-intrusive and cool.
  • Amazing drag-and-drop photos & collections organization system. Flash at its best.
  • Not just a photo album : contacts and groups and comments turn Flickr into a true community.
• Writely

  
  Imagine being able to write just about anything and post it on web. For free. It sure is in a medium beta phase, but it has potential. Writely is what its name implies : writely.

  Three Things I love about it

  • Sweet and simple web interface, leads you through all basic steps in a breeze.
  • Writely permits collaborative editing of your documents : get your brother join you in that paper.
  • Multiple sharing options : e-mail, messaging, blogging.
• Netvibes

  Do you think that adding features like your custom RSS feeds, your favourite podcasts, your gmail account in a fully personalized page which is accessible by everywhere through the Internet is a dream? Then Netvibes is for you.

  Three Things I love about it

  • Direct access to your page which can be edited in any time. No bells’n'whistles.
  • A great range of possibilities : podcasts, feeds, photos, articles, whatever.
  • An actual useful web application, brings myxxxx.com pages to shame.

Maybe you’re familiar with one or two of them. Check them all and you’ll start to understand what the new generation of information sharing Internet will be like.

web 2.0, web applications, flickr, netvibes, writely

We all know the lovely (and automatic) Windows Update, on which most of us rely to keep our computers safe from harm and registered in the big “I-want-to-conquer-the-world” Microsoft database. (OK, I’m just wearing a tinfoil cap there)

The typical procedure mostly goes like this : updates are published, updates are detected, updates are installed, rinse and repeat.

Every once in a while, though, Microsoft programmers decide to publish major updates, trying to sew tight the gapping holes that plague most Windows systems since the dawn of era. And then comes the fun part : the computer must restart. And how do we feel about restarting computers? That’s right, we feel reeeeeeeeally negative about it, to put it mildly.

So we are not in the mood for restart, and we choose “No”. But almighty software designers had another idea : why not irritate the user so much he’d be willing to restart himself within just an hour? And so came the majestic “Restart Prompt”. You all know it.

This amazing little thingy obeys when we say “No, Sam, I’ll restart later, thank you” only to pop up 10 minutes later to ask again. Imagine watching a movie with this thing popping up every 10 minutes. Do you have second thoughts about that restart now?

The whole thing belongs to the wuauclt.exe process, which of course, like all bad things, cannot be killed easily, it always comes back. I’m sure you all want a solution by now. And there it is:

• Start > Run > gpedit.msc
• Local Computer Policy > Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Update
• Right click on “No auto-restart” for scheduled Automatic Updates installations or on “Re-prompt for restart with scheduled installations”
• Choose Properties
• Either disable auto-restarts or change the delay value of restart prompt to something big like….1440 minutes (that’s the most that Microsoft permits, a whole day)
• Pat yourself in the back

Remember that this does not affect already initialized prompt procedures, so you’ll have to do that restart after all.

Thanks to XianhangZhang and Coding Horror for the great tip.

windows update, bad design, restart prompt