Well, my blog has been down for some time while I found a new host. My old one was FreeWebDot and I had a free account. It worked great until they got DOS'd and stopped their free service. I'm now on Hosting A To Z. I had a few problems getting dasBlog running at first, but they were pretty quick to fix it. Hopefully I'll start posting some useful stuff here again soon.

Just moved to a new server and I am testing to see if posting works!

I wonder if Google will be setting up free city-wide WiFi for every city they have offices in? I hope so, because they are going to be opening an office in Phoenix soon!

A couple of days ago, our webserver lost a hard drive. Unfortunately, I didn't have a recent backup of my blog. I had been using .Text previously and I told my friend who runs the server I didn't need my site backed up, since all the data was in the database. Then I switched over to dasBlog and I forgot about the fact that it stores data in XML files. Anyway, I had some of my content files on my local system from when I upgraded from version 1.7 to 1.8 of dasBlog. Between that and the Google cache of my main page, I was able to get all of my posts back. Thanks Google!

If you want to remove ads from MSN Messenger, but you don't want to go to the extremes documented here, there is another option.
Open the file c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts in notepad and add the following line:

0.0.0.0        rad.msn.com

The banner ad at the bottom of the main messenger window will stop cycling and will just display the MSN Messenger logo. The text ads in the IM windows will be gone too.
This information is for educational purposes only :)

It looks like Microsoft is catching up with most of the Linux distributions I've ran over the last few years, in at least one way. Vista will have the capability for users to run as a "non-priveledged" user instead of admin, but still be able to perform admin tasks without logging off and back on as admin.

This feature has been around forever on UNIX (and UNIX-like) operating systems at the commandline. The "su" command would let you run as root whenever you needed it. I know Windows has had the "runas" command for a while now too, but it is a little more of a pain to use. Most Linux distributions also have a feature in their windowing environment, like KDE or GNOME where if you try to do something that requires root, it prompts you for the root password and continues. It looks like Windows Vista will have this feature too, finally!

I recently had a problem with my Presario R3000 laptop. The battery was completely drained and would not charge. The laptop is still under warranty, so I figured I would contact support and see what my options were. Before doing that thought I checked the Compaq/HP support website to see if there were any updates for my laptop. There was a firmware update that was supposed to fix a problem where if the battery is completely drained, the laptop won't charge it. Hey, that sounds like my problem! So, I flashed my laptop's firmware with the new release. Everything went well, but it didn't seem to help my battery problem. So, I decided to contact HP. I went back to their website and noticed they have an option to do a live chat online with tech support. So, I clicked the link and I was greeted by a tech almost immediately. That was a surprise! He got my details and gave me a procedure to try to "recalibrate" the battery. I was pretty sure this wouldn't work, but I figured I should at least try it. I did the procedure and as I thought, it didn't help. So, the next day I got back on the tech support website and started a new chat. The tech got online right away and I explained my problem and told him what I had done the previous day. He said it sounds like my battery really is dead and that since it is under warranty, they would send me a new one at no charge. HP shipped it FedEx overnight, with a return label for my old battery. I put the new battery in and everything is working great!

Anyway, just thought I'd share this, since most of the time all I read are horror stories about tech support! Thanks HP!

Internet Explorer 7 is getting tabs. That's great! I really like the tabbed interface in Firefox. In this blog entry, Tony mentions how Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer share code:

Another example of what makes this challenging is that IE and Explorer windows share the same code for the frame and chrome (toolbars, menus, etc.), which means there are more code paths and different types of interactions with the hosted view (in this case, a ShellView) that were required to continue working after adding tabbed browsing to IE.

That got me thinking how nice it would be if Windows Explorer had tabs too. I always find myself with about 6 or 7 Explorer windows open after working on my PC for a while. It would be great to just have them all in tabs in one window. So how about it Microsoft, can we have tabs in Windows Explorer too?

It's funny how all of a sudden Cherry OS turned into the Cherry Open Source Project. Gee, is it maybe because they are just re-packaging this project's code?

Looks like MSN Spaces is having some troubles today. It would drive me nuts not to be able to go see what's going wrong and fix it!