Once again, thanks to Raman for letting me know! For some reason I didn’t get the email at all this time. Booo! Dell Days goes on from March 20th to the 29th. And this time they started with the 24″ LCD for $649!

While I’m not quite as hardcore as some people mentioned in this article, I do have to agree with the fact that once you go dual monitor, you can’t go back! Unfortunately I do have to visit client sites with my laptop and bringing a second LCD isn’t really an option. (Lol, can you imagine?) But honestly, having a second monitor to work with is so much nicer when you’re working with multiple applications, documents, etc. While on the subject, ComputerWorld has an article showing that power use of LCDs are pretty low and typically isn’t going to put a hole in your wallet. The issue with applications loading to a non-existant monitor when you’re ack to one LCD, can be easily resolved with UltraMon mentioned in a previous post.

Adobe released a document yesterday [pdf] answering questions about software compatibility with Windows Vista. In short, there are no plans for Adobe to release updates for all current versions of their popular programs such as Photoshop, Illustrator, and Dreamweaver. What this means is that if you buy a new computer packaged with Windows Vista, don’t plan of having your current Adobe software work happily away without any issues. Some issues include Photoshop CS2 asking you to register the software every time you start up, to Dreamweaver crashing when you browse for files on the new OS.

Source: InformationWeek

I know this is late but maybe it’ll still be useful for some of you.

As you know, North America changed the date Daylight Savings occurs. Windows users should already have gotten a patch via Windows Update but Linux users need to do this a bit differently (unless of course you’re using up2date, or I believe Unbuntu has an update feature as well).

Whatever the distribution, the manual update process is all the same.

First off, you’ll need to download the new timezone data and untar them to a temporary location (in this example I’ll use /tmp/zoneinfo/). Interestingly enough, the US Department of Health and Human Services maintains a list you can download. (I use the wildcard here because the list is updated every so often and this just ensures you have the latest file)

wget 'ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tz*.tar.gz'

Next compile the zone data for North America

cd /tmp/zoneinfo
zic -d /tmp/zoneinfo northamerica

This creates a number of directories, copy these to your zonedata directory. This might vary between distributions but in my case (Fedora), the zone data was located at /usr/share/zoneinfo/

I went and deleted the old directories first and moved the new ones in but you can simply overwrite them.

mv /tmp/zoneinfo/America /usr/share/zonedata/
mv /tmp/zoneinfo/Atlantic /usr/share/zonedata/
mv /tmp/zoneinfo/Pacific /usr/share/zonedata/

And finally, replace your localtime file with the new one.

cp -f /usr/share/zonedata/America/Vancouver /etc/localtime

Now just make sure that everything was successful…

zdump -v /etc/localtime | fgrep 2007

You should see the new change dates Mar 11, and Nov 4 instead of Apr 1, and Oct 28. Now when you run ntpdate, your date and time will be correctly adjusted!

The point of this isn’t to remind YOU of a task or anything but more of a reminder for those you deal with via email like a contractor or vendor. Someone you don’t have any real control over.

When someone is committing themselves to you on when they’ll start a project or task, you don’t want to respond to them right away or constantly remind them or nag them. The key here is not to respond until the time arrives when they promised to work on it.

This way, you don’t look like a nag and you save the other person a flood of emails and headaches. While I’m not sure how often someone really gets subjected to something like this (maybe I’m just lucky to have good clients?), to me it is defintely more of an email etiquette thing than anything else I think.

Everyone wants to be smarter right? More productive, learn new and exciting things… Even picking up a new hobby will require to learn its ins and outs.

Well, here’s a list of 77 things you can do to help you in being able to do so.

I have yet to have tried Vista or really seen it in person and I doubt my poor laptop here will even be able to fully handle it to make it worthwhile but when the day comes, this sounds to be the best way to go about installing Vista!

Kurt Shintaku, a Principal Technology Specialist at Microsoft, has come up with a few simple steps, and a few minutes of preparation ahead of time, could cut the period of time it takes to install Windows Vista down to about 5-10 minutes versus the estimated 20+ minutes it would normally take when installing off DVD.

And while I’m on the topic of Windows Vista, anyone who’s on the 30-day trial period of Vista, by way of a single command, can extend that period up to 120 days before finally having to actually enter a product key.

I’m sure any of you out there who do a lot of downloading, *cough*, have seen that little popup a number of times before and maybe some of you have wondered how to get rid of it, but never really bothered.

Well, you can either get TweakUI which I believe has a little checkbox you can click to get rid of it, or you can just manually do it via a quick and easy registry edit.

Just pop into the command prompt and paste this single line in. (I had to cut the command up into 3 lines to fit the blog, so you’ll have to correct that when you’re pasting it)

regini
HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionPoliciesExplorer
"NoLowDiskSpaceChecks" = REG_DWORD 1

If you really wanted you can navigate your way through regedit, but this way is just simpler. Of course, the alternative is to go buy yourself some more storage. Space is cheap these days