Microsoft

I found thispost Ryan Hadley a few days ago, which I got working with a little bit of time, I noticed that Thunderbird was displaying all-days events oddly, so I checked the VEVENT info being generated & tweaked to work correctly with Thunderbird/Lightening. I also dropped in the URL of the event in OWA & fixed it for situations where there are public & private names for the OWA/Exchange instance, handy when you want to go and amend an entry etc.

After struggling � cursing Microsoft for months, I found this post, applied this patch, Q330909_WXP_SP2_x86_ENU.exe, everything is good again 🙂 There is a description from Microsoft here.

A good friend of mine, AlanP, sent me this link: http://www.roughlydrafted.com/Oct05.5Flaws.html, which is an interesting discussion design flaws in Windows 2000/XP that aren’t in Mac OSX.

Every now � then I’m forced to deal with databases in Access, the worst case of this is when the database started life in something else, ‘cos that when Dates usually get really screwy. I recently had one with dates stored as 3 seperate fileds, I know I should have transformed the data, but I didn’t, so I came up witha few queries that tried to munge the data into something usable, my first attempt was this:

http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/ It’s just one of those tools you can’t live with out.

Why why why can’t you burn ISO images without having to BUY tools…well, you don’t, if you know where to look [ http://isorecorder.alexfeinman.com/v2.htm][1] Update: 2007/12/04 I needed to burn a DVD ISO today, and ISORECORDER doesn’t do this, so I had a quick search, and there are a few options: http://www.cdburnerxp.se/ http://www.imgburn.com/

My dad has a Dell Inspiron 6000, which I use every now and then, one of the things that has really bugged me about it jaggy images in IE (they are being scaled or something), I did some poking about today (we’re are babysitting at there house..) and found this: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/author/dhtml/overview/highdpi.asp I found it here: http://forums.us.dell.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=insp_video&message.id=79808 He had is DPI set to 120.

I’m a multi-window kinda guy, in GNOME you can have it raise the window when cycling throught them alt-tab style, Windows XP doesn’t do this, so when you’ve loads of windows from the same app open (say IE windows for OWA), it can be a pain finding the right window. Apple’s Mac OS X has a neat feature called expose which shows you all your windows at a glance at the press of a button, allowing you to select the one you want.

I just came across a neat piece of software from ThinkFree, the ThinkFree Office Online. Which is a very neat piece of software, I’ve only used it on a Debian Linux box, but it’s all Java based by the looks of it, so it should run just sweetly on Windows & OSX etc. It’s not AJAX based, the latest craze in browser based apps, but it does a hell of a lot more that your average AJAX app, and looks amazingly similar to Microsoft Office XP/2003.

I’ve just moved jobs, to a predominantly Microsoft shop, so I’m getting used to using Outlook & Exchange again, after about a 5 year break. Exchange always had it’s good points, but some of those good points come with nasties, the whole calendaring & scheduling thing is great, although you have to use Outlook (or OWA) to take advantage of any of it, and there’s the rub, Outlook as an email client is woeful, top-posting is just plain wrong & stupid.