I think I already might have mentioned that my pre-installed Windows Home edition on my Sony Vaio notebook is packed with tons little bits of software of which you cannot get rid of. For e.g. one special feature is the bubble which constantly pops up to remind you to register at club Vaio.

Probably this and the rootkit dilemma was just the start. If you look at this nice high quality video over at Akihabara News - Sony Vaio UX50 vs. UX90 you will be surprised.

The screenplay goes like this: Daimaou takes the UX50 with plain Windows XP and its faster and more powerful brother the UX90 with special Sony style Windows XP and compares in realtime the boot time of both. Of course the UX90 must win one might think. But take your time to find out yourself.

My next Notebook definitely will be another brand. Some suggest Panasonic devices. So plain and without annoyance you might wonder what is wrong with the machine. My favourite choice most probably will be Toshiba. So many features out of the box. Devices where the extras don’t cost as much as the device itself (furthermore you don’t have to get them extra… they are just on board from the beginning).

Oh yeah. Not to forget. My dispute with Sony is settled. Online customer support told me that I am allowed to replace the harddisk myself. It does not break any warranty (as long as you don’t destroy anything in a blatant way). You just have to keep the original harddisk. In case of failure of another component you have to put in the original harddisk before sending the notebook in. I guess they just want to reinstall Windows themselves in order to repair any other hardware error.

It is incredible how good Sony is at making their customers look out for alternatives. To be honest I was quite a big fan of their products. I am taking pictures with their digital cameras, I am making phone calls with their mobiles and some months ago I decided to sell my desktop PC and switch to a Sony vaio notebook. Since that day my loyalty was fading.

First of all you don’t get any bundled driver/operating system CDs/DVDs anymore. They use a certain amount of your harddisk to store the Windows recovery there. So they take away some gigabytes from your harddisk in favour of some recovery files. Do you usually buy harddisks where the assembler decides to use a certain amount for his stuff?

Next surprise arrives right after booting the hilarious operating system (which is definitely not my preferable choice). Dozens of popups which tell you to register somewhere. Everytime I boot into Windows I get reminders of joining club Vaio. No option to deactivate this nonsense. It’s like telling Jehova’s witnesses to go away… every time you open the front door of your flat.

After installing GNU/Linux you will notice that Sony does everything to prevent the community to develop drivers. It is not like someone asking Sony to develop drivers for their hardware. It is more like the community asking “please let us develop drivers which work with your hardware for free” but they want to force us to use Windows. But hey… who needs the built in Modem and MemoryStick reader?

Today another bad thing happened. The harddrive decided to break. It is not fully broken yet and I was able to make a backup but I am sure those strange, loud noises it makes are some serious illness. I don’t blame Sony for the broken Harddisk. That happens a lot. But I blame their way of treating the customer. They disallow me (and the company where I bought the machine too) to remove the harddisk and send it in alone. Does anyone have any details on this? I am not allowed to replace the harddisk myself because the guarantee will be violated? What if I want to put in a faster harddisk with more memory?

I depend on my notebook and I cannot waste weeks waiting for replacement (as they don’t offer replacement notebooks during the repair process). It is OK for me to buy another (faster, bigger) harddisk and use that one. I don’t want to charge Sony any cent… they just shall return the old harddisk once it is fixed. Sadly the only way is to take away the whole notebook.

The helpdesk is no use either:

Helpdesk: Your harddisk is broken? Please do a system recovery.

Me: Ok. What for? I am not even using Windows.

Helpdesk: You have to do a full system recovery and see if the error occurs again then.

Me: Ok. After doing the recovery… how will this story go on?

Helpdesk: A man arrives at your place bringing a box. He will make another appointment with you to pick up the box another day with your notebook in it….

Arrrgh. How could setting up my Windows be the solution to my problem? The harddisk is physically broken and makes strange noises.

All this is enough for me. As soon as my Sony products need replacements I will switch to alternatives. There are many out there and I should have done more research before handing over my money to some weird corporation.

From the Mozilla project there are several different calendar solutions available:

• Sunbird calendar application
• Lightning integrated calendar
• Calendar extension

The Calendar extension is not developed any further at the moment because of resource constraints. The Mozilla Sunbird application is (at the name already unveils) a standalone application. The most interesting project for me is the Lightning integrated calendar which is a calendar extension for the Mozilla Thunderbird. On May 14th version 0.1 was released and it integrates into Thunderbird nicely. I am waiting for the future releases which will bring invitations (inactive buttons already available in sunbird), etc. which will definitely be my preferable choice instead of any MS Exchange solutions.

You can read about all the development of lightning at it’s development blog.

Working as a web developer the chance is quite little that you don’t have to deal with differences in CSS interpretation between the different browsers. This book is a great resource of workarounds to the most common problems and it is full of practical examples. Did you know that the “float” positioning elements is relative to the last parent object (e.g. surrounding DIV) which has the attribute “position: relative” set? Or did you ever want to teach Internet Explorer how to interpret the alpha values of a PNG image?