Summertime (and the living is easy)

It's July, so naturally I spent two hours killing wasps as the sun struggled to rise this morning. They'd invaded the kitchen in the caretaker's cottage, even crawling across the Spanish cat Nidos' dinner. A yowl, a bang of the catflap and an appalling choking sound was readily discernable over my wasp-flattening slaps (I couldn't find the spray so dinner mats did the job). No sign of the cat, when I went looking in the grey dawn; he didn't come home for the rest of the night either. I found him some hours later, all puffy-jawed betrayal, curled in the porch avoiding the summer rain and pretending to sleep.

I swept up over thirty horrid little stripey corpses before feeding the understandably nervy cat...

On to business. I suppose 'business' ought to be writing this week's Zend summary at present, but it isn't, because I found myself within sight of the end of my TODO. That means I'm finally free to do some php.net work because I finally have spare time to do it in, so I tried yesterday to install MSVS 6.0 onto this laptop for the first time in its life. That CD-ROM has been through a lot over the last year or so; I took it everywhere just in case I needed it, and it's suffered greatly as a result. There are holes in it :-(

Microsoft seem to have finally realized that a lot of people out there code just because they like coding, and now offer some free development tools, but they don't appear to make old, stable, well-used and 'industry standard' tools available for download - just things that weigh 300 megabytes, which aren't an option without cable. Edin Kadribasic sympathised and suggested I try Visual Studio Express beta.

From the installation notes (heavily edited):

3. Microsoft Visual C++ Express Beta 2

3.1. Product Installation

3.1.1. If you only install Command Line tools, you will not need to register, and the tools will not expire. Once you add the Graphical IDE, registration will be required and expiration will take effect.

3.1.2. MSDN Express installation requires Express "Graphical IDE" to be installed.

Hidden away in the small print somewhere is some mention of the fact that you need Windows XP service pack 2 installed before you can use it at all. Over dialup? Forget it.

Just give me VC++ 6.0, eh guys? I knew where I stood with that...