I know, I haven’t blogged much lately, and I’m sorry. Ironically, I have less time to blog in the holidays than during the semester. “What?!” you say. In the holidays I am doing things that I like, for example writing my Command Console C++ program, and thus I am less likely to spend time on things I like less than coding eg blogging. But during the semester, procrastinating from working means that I “make” time to blog (so that I don’t work).

Anyway, the last blog I wrote (Smackdown for Conroe) you can pretty much forget, since apparently, reverse hyperthreading is not real. So the Conroes are kicking the crap out of the AMD AM2 CPUs. Ah well, such is life in IT. You buy some tech and it gets outdated straight away.

I also have another guilty confession. I have started to use Windows Live Messenger (WLM). I normally use Skype, but unfortunately I need WLM to talk to people at university, so I’ve had to install it.

It really is an inferior piece of software compared to Skype. The instant messaging experience is crap. For example, Skype manages somehow to remember when a conversation gets broken across a 6 hour gap and brings up the previous messages sent, so I can remember what we were talking about. WLM just erases it and starts afresh.

Skype also doesn’t have advertising crap shoved in your face, like WLM does. However, I have ripped that crap out of the software with a patch called A-Patch. It also lets you remove other annoying things like “Buy a Webcam” links and other useless teeny-bopper buttons and rubbish.

Skype also, in instant messaging, shows the difference between who’s message is who’s by putting a colour background behind the “Daniel says:” part and different colour background behind the “Daniel’s friend says:” part. In comparison, WLM relies on you to change your text colour. Too bad if yours is the same as someone else’s.

However, I will give some kudos to the WLM development team. It has come a long way since I used to use it years ago. The fact that voice chat works now, the shared folders feature, etc are all good new things that WLM has.