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January 15 Stupidest things ever saidI found this while I was lazily browsing .... It may not be the stupidest things ever said. As I am sure, there will be more to trump these. But this is a good collection to start with.
Read more here.
Its ironic that Bill Gates said, "640K ought to be enough for anybody." -- Bill Gates, 1981, But all Windows operating systems and most importantly Vista (I am not considering server editions because ... they are servers) cant seem to be happy even with 1 GB RAM.
Well ... read and laugh!
-Kalyan October 18 Gutsy GibbonSo I upgraded my Feisty Fawn to Gutsy Gibbon RC day before yesterday. I was sure the day Gutsy is released there will be a huge demand for downloading it and it would just choke the bandwidth. So I figured two days before release, the build would be pretty stable and any new packages could be downloaded easily.
The upgrade itself was the best experience I ever had with any OS till now. All I did was force the update manager to check for new distributions.
update-manager -d
The update manage detected the new distribution, asked me if I wanted to upgrade and thats it. It smoothly downloaded all the packages it needed, about 800 MB and proceeded to upgrade my system. It prompted a couple of times when it had to replace some system files that I customized like blacklist, networks etc. A quick reboot and I am in 7.10. Its the best upgrade ever - no pains, no hassles.
Enjoy.
Kalyan October 13 TG Video: Wirelessly hacking Gmail and more - tutorialI am sure this video would have scared a lot of people. Many go and check email etc from public Wi-Fi access points. But don't people know that unless they use encrypted connections, every packet can be snooped? Thats exactly what is happening here. As long as your packets are going across on unencrypted connection, anyone can see it. I don't see what is new in this.
Watch the video here. The function you are trying to use needs macro language supportI opened a document today in Word and it displayed a Help dialog with a message similar to "The function you are trying to use needs macro language support" and gave me instructions on how to set the macro security. I know for a fact that I set the level to "Disable all macros with notification". Well, I checked it anyway and it was set right. A quick search on Google sent me here: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HP030853041033.aspx
That's when I realized I didn't install VBA when I installed Office 2007. Well, I just opened up "Programs and Features" (the erstwhile "Add Remove Programs") from Control Panel and selected "Change" after selecting Office 2007 Enterprise. I digged in to the list of options and opted to install VBA. You can find detailed instructions on the above link.
Kalyan October 04 IE7 on Vista and Flash - TroublesWell, I finally made the move to Vista a few weeks ago. The first that I had problems with is IE& and flash. Well, I was using Flock primarily, and it didn't bother me too much. But later it got annoying. Then I anyway re-imaged my laptop with a fresh Vista install and still the same problem cropped up.
Here is the problem:
Open IE
Goto Adobe site and install Flash.
You will see the flash animation and it will prompt you to restart IE
go ahead and do that and you might as well restart Vista, just to be sure.
open up the same page and you will notice that it says Flash is not installed
but Manage Add-ons applet shows Flash is loaded and enabled
some flash sites will work. ex: YouTube main page will show static "now seeing" videos but if you click on any video, flash player will initialize and load and start playing movie.
depending on how they script the flash object, some sites will work, some wont.
It was getting frustrating and I noticed many others had the same problem and none of the said solutions worked. some I tried were:
uninstall and resintall flash
use flash cleaner
set registry keys
register ocx etc
finally on egghead forums, I found the solution that worked for me.
Goto C:\WINDOWS\system32\Macromed\Flash, change the permissions for Flash9d.ocx and FlashUtil9d.exe so that "Everyone" has "Full Control". Note you need to be administrator to do this. Vista will prompt you to enter password when it needs it. Once I did this, everything was fine! However, note that this might have some security implications. Use it at your own risk.
thanks,
Kalyan June 17 More SafariI continued using Safari on Windows and I must say it is FAAAAAASSSSSSST! Don't ask me why or how. It is actually faster than IE and FF/Flock. However, there are somethings missing:
But I like it ... I am sure all these and more will be fixed and lot more features will be added.
Kalyan
June 13 Apple Safari on WindowsSo ... Apple released Safari for Windows. I downloaded it to give it a shot. It is nice and simple. However, do we really need another browser on our desktops? I don't think so. However, I am open to new ideas and new usability features. Well ... what is it that prompts us to move to a new browser?
Coming back to Safari, its nice and its a bit stable. However, I wouldnt throw out my Flock or IE just yet. For starters, Safari doesnt seem to work well with Live Spaces. I tried posting this massage from Safari, the menu bar didnt appear and shortcuts didnt work. Also, some messages in the Google Reader didnt display well. Telugu fonts are not properly rendered. The browser includes a software update utility and a bug report as well. So, file your bugs away! Update: I forgot to add one important feature I loved on Safari - It automatically grabbed all the plugins from Firefox and IE and didnt ask em to install anything. It sure is innovative and offers the best out of the box experience. Yahoo Mail new interface isnt working really well. Once it opened, it started working fine. the fonts look a little funny though. Have a good day! Kalyan June 22 Back to the browsersI stumbled up on flock, by sheer accident. Now that I think back, I cant even remember how I came across that. But I did love it. Its simple, easy and clean. Its actually very captivating. Its got a bundled RSS reader (pretty good), flickr photo upload tool, tools to manage your photo and other accounts. Its got a Onfolio equivalent for collecting web research and a very helpful community. It also supports blogging directly from browser or your RSS reader (My News)
I actually changed by default browser to be flock for a few days till today (well, except for all my financial and sensitive transactions online). Thats the first time it ever happened since I started using the internet (about 10 years). Many will be surprised when I say that I have NEVER used Netscape for internet browsing willingly. I always loved IE and I will continue to do so unless it gets royally messed up.
Well, then how did I end up using flock? I loved the way it was built and lives up to the claim of a community browser. It is easy to use it. It is built with the Mozilla Firefox rendering engine. Its got great tabs and renders most sites flawlessly. But since it is based off Firefox, it also inherits the latters cons.
Just out of curiosity, I posted a message on the Flock forums. One response made me go back to my IE.
IE is not just a browser, it is a platform and that makes the world of difference for me in every way and I am sure to many Windows developers.
I love my IE. June 01 What are OFFLB.exe, msn_sl.exe and onfserv.exeOFFLB.exe is "Office Life Boat for Program Recovery" - A part of Office 2007 system. No details yet on what it actually does but the name suggests that it has got something to do with handling program crashes and recovery. Duh!!
msn_sl.exe is the process for the Live! toolbar for Internet Explorer. Its a great product ... and it includes Onfolio for free!!! In my opinion, one of the best research tools available.
onfserv.exe is a component of Onfolio. "Onfolio Server" What are wfpsas.exe, wfphelper.exe, wfpuserreg.exe and wfpscheduler.exe?
If you started seeing any of the above processes newly in your task manager, there is nothing to panic about. I say panic because Google doesn’t return any results for wfpsas.exe. These processes are a part of the bigger WFP (Windows Feedback Panel) program, which is by invitation only. The objective of the program is to gather feedback and usage scenario data from end users. Read more about it on its web site.
Coming back to the above processes, wfpsas.exe appears when you are participating in the “Microsoft Office System Information Worker Feedback Program.” It is also called Send a Smile (Sas) feedback program. This is a very handy, light and non-intrusive way to send feedback to Microsoft about the Office suite. As of this writing this tool is for providing feedback on Microsoft Office 2007 only. After you install this application, you will see the following icons in your system tray.
Click on the frown or “Ctrl + (“ to send a negative experience and the smile or “Ctrl + )” to send a positive feedback.
WfpSas.exe – Send a Smile Application Wfpscheduler.exe - Windows Feedback Panel Scheduler WfpUserReg.exe - Windows Feedback Panel User Registration September 16 Windows Cluster Compute EditionWell, all of you might know this by now that MS is seriously trying to compete with Linux. One of the major strong points for Linux is its wide acceptance in the HPCC space. Almost all of the existing applications support Linux and there are some which are exclusively written for Linux than generic UNIX. The penetration of Linux is just too much. And the most difficult thing for MS to do regarding HPC is to convince the end users. No matter what is at the backend, users are almost ok if the environment is not much different. Of course, performance is always the first concern for everyone.
Think of it this way. There is a research guy who is more concerned about his problem and solution. He has been using UNIX based cluster and his code is now a few thousands of lines. How willing would he be to now port that code to a new system where there is no guarantee that t would be successful in the first place.
Another example. There is an old FORTRAN code for weather modelling. The whole build process uses make and a bunch of shell scripts to successfully compile the code. How can that be ported to windows now? How much investment would be needed? How easy would it be? How many would be willing?
I think the most important thing for MS to do now to gain ground over Linux is to provide the users with a reason to move to Windows and more importantly, make that transition a very smooth and easy one. They have to support interoperability with Linux and other Unix systems. Provide an option for users to have a mixed environment. Let them use their existing systems along with Windows edition.
Lets see how far this goes.
Kalyan |
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