Today I ordered a new Dell 24inch TFT monitor for my main PC. I currently have a 19inch Sony (1280*1024), and the new 24inch widescreen monitor has a lot more desktop space, which comes in handy when you work with lots of open programs.
The main reason for buying was that Dell had a special discount till the end of Februari 2007 (nearly 300 euro's off). The secondary reason was that I wanted to treat myself for my upcoming birthday :-). This evening I was surfing the net, and ended up on the US website of Dell, and saw the prices there.....
just take a look at the pictures, and explain the difference to me (I know that you have to add sales tax in the US, but that's not what I'm pointing at).
US Dell Website
Dutch Dell website
I have several wireless devices in the house. Some of them are not capable of connecting to 802.11g (54Mbps) networks. For these devices I have an older Linksys Accespoint (802.11b / 11Mbps). For my other wireless devices (Mac Book Pro, and a Windows Laptop from work), I have a Speedtouch DSL router with builtin 802.11b/g wireless.
Somehow my Mac has some problems connecting to the faster networks. But the problem is that this used to work correctly in the past. The last couple of weeks everything works fine in the beginning, but after a while the connection gets terminated, eventhough the wireless indicator displays full reception.
Switching the 54Mbps network to the Linksys access point (which also support this) is not helping. The only thing that keeps working is connecting to the slower 11Mbps network. I also tried modifing security settings (changed from WPA-PSK to WEP), but that also gives problems. I even tried different wireless settings (changing channels,SSID's, etc.)
I found some possible solutions, like removing the
com.apple.airport.preferences.plist file in
/library/preferences/SystemConfiguration/. This removes all settings concerning the wireless networks for the airport. The result is that you need to reconfigure all wireless networks. After the reboot and reconfiguring the wireless networks, it seems to work a short while.
Another thing, which is very peculiar, is that it seems to happen mostly late at night (like 10 minutes ago). This could be a coincidence, because that's when I use my MBP the most. It's is more than annoying. It's driving me crazy. I have even thought about buying a genuine Airport Extreme, but only if I'm sure that it solves my problem......
AAAAAAAAAAAARGH
A while ago, I thougt that I had contracted a virus on my Windows laptop from work. Unfortunately, there's no chance that I can migrate to a Mac there :-(.
The strangest things were happening on my laptop. Suddenly there appeared strange pieces of text in Word documents, and in e-mails I was writing. My first reaction was that someone was typing along with me.
After scanning my laptop with three virus scanners and using several anti-spyware software suites, it turned out that there was nothing wrong. After that the uninvited pieces of text were gone..... Until yesterday. But this time I had a clue what had happened.
I use the keyboard a lot for copy, and pasting (CTRL-C and CTRL-V). It seems that WINDOWS-V starts voice recognition. I must have pressed the wrong key combination. This key combo starts with a dialog box explaining that the mic needs tuning. I canceled that dialog, but somehow the voice recognition is still being enabled. There's no visual indication that it's running.
It seems that Windows doesn't recognize the Dutch language, and therefor it starts
guessing what you say and displays that in the focussed window.
Lame ass Windows functionality if you ask me.......
LOL... I already
reported that Windows Mobile 5 is buggy as hell. Even
Trend Micro thought so. Well, nothing new if you ask me.
The upgrade versions of Windows Vista are less expensive than the normal retails versions. If you want to install the upgrade it should be done from within (a legitimate copy of) Windows XP. There is however a
workaround which doesn't need the presence of a Windows XP installment, or even the original Windows XP CD.
- Boot with the Windows Vista Upgrade DVD.
- Click "Install Now."
- Do not enter a Product Key When prompted.
- When prompted, select the Vista product edition that you do have.
- Install Vista normally.
- Once the install is complete, restart the DVD-based Setup from within Windows Vista. Perform an in-place upgrade.
- Enter your Product Key when prompted.
That saves some money on the purchase of Windows Vista. It also saves you from installing a 'lesser' OS (which I personally doubt) first with all of its own problems etc.. I personally think that upgrading is always bad. Better start a new, and fresh installment of any OS (even Mac OSX).
Arstechnica has an article explaining OEM (mainly the difference between the Microsoft Vista OEM and retail versions)
Buying OEM versions of Windows Vista: the facts
It seems that anyone who can install software is eligible to purchase a Vista OEM copy, without extra hardware.
Can I buy OEM?
Yes, you can. Microsoft licenses OEM software to "system builders," which the license defines as "an original equipment manufacturer, or an assembler, reassembler, or installer of software on computer systems" (emphasis added). You can install software on computers, right?
When asked, Microsoft says that OEM software is not intended to be installed by end users. Off the record, Microsoft spokespeople have told me that the big concern in Redmond is for Joe Newbie. They don't want inexperienced users buying OEM software, but the fact of the matter is that anyone can buy OEM versions of Windows.
Truth be told, Microsoft is not opposed to the practice. Rather, the company says that people who purchase OEM software will simply be expected to abide by the terms of the licensing agreements.
Today is the official launch of the newest operating system (OS) from Microsoft, and it's called Windows Vista.
All over the world shops opened early (even at midnight) to give the public the change to buy this new OS. Tons of people (at least that's what they had hoped) would be gathering in front of these shops to be the first.....
Well, that didn't work out that well.
It seems that only a hand full of nerds were standing in the cold to be the first. There were no lines, or riots as we have seen with the launch of the PlayStation 3 or the Nintendo Wii.
Here in Holland, there was a computer shop which opened at midnight and served about 90 customers.... 90 on a total of over 14 million people.
I guess pricing, and lack of available drivers is to blame. It's by far the most expensive workstation/desktop OS released by Microsoft (the most expensive retail version is over 500 euros). Most of the people will be getting Vista when buying a new PC, and the rest will probably be using a pirated version of the OS (or switch to Mac or Linux).
No Vista for me anyway.
I added a new plugin to Wordpress v2.1. It's called
WP Movie Review Ratings. It enables you to place
movie reviews on you Wordpress blog.
At this time it's fairly empty, but I'll try to migrate my
older existing movie database to this one, so it'll be filled soon (I hope).
B.t.w. many thanks to the developer
Paul Goscicki in assisting me in getting it to work. Seemed that I had a small misconfiguration in my PHP config.
Last year, I bought a
HP iPaq hx2790. Partly because I'd been without a PDA for a couple of years, but mostly because I don't want to boot up my laptop to see my mail or calendar.
The hx2790 comes with Windows Mobile 5 (WM5), wireless, bluetooth, fingerprint scanner, and built-in encryption. All very very nice.... Well, there is a downside to this nirvana;
- Wireless broke down after a couple of weeks (also see an old post on my old blog). The first time they fixed it... they didn't fix it at all. So it had to go back for repairs again.
- On the weirdest occasions all my synced e-mail bodies were complete gibberish or they were just empty. The only way to solve this was break the pairing with ActiveSync remove everything from the PDA, and sync it again.
[SOLUTION: disable the HP Encryption Tools crap]
- 9 out of 10 times I had to reset the device when I powered it on. So most of the times it would be more time efficient to boot up my laptop.
[SOLUTION: don't use the HP Encryption tools for securing your device. Just use the simple standard PIN code for logging on to the PDA]
- Applications would crash easily. Result: more resets.
[SOLUTIONS: do not install third-party software]
As long as I stick to this everything works just fine.
This makes me wonder why would I buy an PDA with a gazillion megabytes of free space, and lot's of SD/MMC/CF slots for adding even more bytes. Every program I add makes the device more unstable.
During these periods of complete misery I also tried a PDA encryption suite of Utimaco. I just wanted some sort of encryption to protect the data on the device. Their latest software version includes support for the hx2790 fingerprint scanner, but after installing the software everything went berserk (again). Uninstalling didn't work, so the only solution to get back in control again was to reset the damn thing to factory defaults.....
One more thing; why is it that EVERY older Windows Mobile version has an iPaq backup program for backing up SETTINGS, and the WM5 OS doesn't have this. Every time when I needed to reset the thing to factory defaults (about 8 to 10 times so far), I had to setup my mail accounts, etc manually. This feature isn't even available on ActiveSync for WM5.
No more Windows Mobile devices for me in the future. I just hope that this crappy piece of software holds on till the end of the year when the iPhone is being released.
Most companies/institutions use Windows clients (Windows 2000, XP), but their backend might be different. There's the
Microsoft Active Directory, [cough]
Novell eDirectory (former NDS)[/cough], or a more Generic LDAP (like the
SUN Directory ONE).
The problem with network authentication with the use of Microsoft clients is that the authentication process uses MS-CHAPv2. This is a Microsoft mechanisme for authenticating. This means that the RADIUS server used for authenticating should also be able to authenticate using MS-CHAPv2. The Internet Authentication Service from Microsoft is pretty MS only, so not much of a help with other backends. So there's a need for a RADIUS server which talks to different backends. One option is the great RADIATOR RADIUS server. It's fully customizable, but
not for free.
Today, I stumbled on
FreeRADIUS. This RADIUS server is free (duh), and is also fully customizable. Downside is that you need to compile the software yourself, and the documentation is not that great.
Tried to compile/install it on my FreeBSD 'server', but
make was missing. So I downloaded
make, and installed it, but the install script kept saying that
make wasn't installed.... Well I guess that's one of the reasons why Linux won't be adopted by the masses soon. Spent about an hour to fix it, but I just have to give up.
Well, time to download a precompiles Win32 version from
freeradius.net
