Firstly, my apologies for not posting sooner.  I’ve been busy over the past couple of weeks, and we’ve had a visitor from London for the last few days.  So, Microsoft have released Vista Service Pack 2 into beta testing, and I've been taking a look at it.  So far I’m pretty underwhelmed with the included changes, but that’s a good thing.  Service packs aren’t supposed to install new features, but they do.  This one however is lighter on the new features than previous packs for XP for example.

Examples of included features are improved wireless configuration (WCN), Bluetooth 2.1, better RSS feed integration in IE, Windows Search 4.0 and Hyper-V and some power management improvements.  The Windows Server 2008 features, which I haven’t installed yet include power management for servers, which might be of interest.  My server runs 24/7 and has nine hard disks, so anything that keeps power consumption down in that box would be good.  Unfortunately my RAID card doesn’t effectively handle power management, so I’m not sure how far I can actually go with this.  We’ll see!

There’s really not going to be much to report with this service pack, unless things go horribly wrong.  If it keeps going as it is, then its going to be a very smooth rollout indeed.

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I had won some business cards from Janko Jovanovic and that I was having James design them.  Well, it didn’t work out as I was expecting (through no fault of Janko I should add) and they wanted to charge me $39.50 to send them to Germany.  For that price I could have had twice the quantity printed here in Germany, and shipped overnight, individually wrapped and carried by a thousand camels.  It pissed me off a bit that we (James) had gone to all that work for naught, so I went and ordered the cards from Overnight Prints anyway.  I just read an email from them that they had been printed already and are on the way, and UPS tells me that they are in Kirchheim which isn’t that far from here.  In fact, they’ll get here on Monday at around 10am.  Living in Germany is wonderful from that perspective… I KNOW when UPS are going to get here!)

So, here’s what they look like. On the left you can see the front of the card.  Per James’s recommendation, we went minimalist on the front.  Only the salient information is visible, and the design is simple and easy to read.  The colour swapping of my surname is clever, and the overall effect is professional and very cool.  The front is going to be printed without a gloss coating.  The text at the bottom that you can’t properly read says “High-end web and application development”, which is of course exactly what I do.

The back however is a different kettle of fish.  James originally thought that some of Leonardo daVinci’s drawings would be good here, but then came up with some very basic and really effective BASIC code :
10 CLS
20 PRINT “DAVEWHITE.NET”
30 GOTO 10
RUN_

I liked that quite a bit, but it wasn’t modern enough, so I changed it into a C# routine that would print the website and email address one hundred times. You can see that on the right, and its going to look lovely on the card.  The back is bring glossed, and as it is a vibrant red colour graduation it should look fantastic.  Kudos and massive thanks to James for his great designs!

Along with everything else, James went and built multi-colour variations for me as well as some mini icons.  There are print (CMYK) and screen (RGB) versions of each so I’m going to freshen the look of this site soon.  This design is quite heavy and dark, so I’m going to strip out some of the dross.  For example, the titles of the posts are heading level three (<h3>), but should really be heading level 2 (<h2>).  I also want to make this design more accessible and then release it as a theme for BlogEngine.Net.