Tall Mike

 

According to the Washington Post, the incoming U.S. presidential administration are upset by the outdated Office running on Windows, no Facebook and no IMs.

 

Well, welcome to the real world. That is exactly how the IT in 95% of corporations and  organizations works.

Here is list of most of common IT policies

• No Facebook, what so ever. Facebook is simply blocked within the corporation network. Sorry and now get back to work.
• IM clients, most likely ports are blocked. Unless it is for work.
• Macintosh is not supported at all because those internal web apps doesn’t run well.
• Blackberry, now get this, President. You could have blackberry and get emails on your corp. Blackberry. But there’s no way to install 3rd-party apps and they are blocked by IT Policy!
• Office 2007, Vista? Not right now, because IT department has to test them before rolling out.

Basically that is exactly how people work everyday. Now stop being a baby and go back to work!

 

Apple Iphone owners get to view free digital magazines of 70 or so popular magazines without costs, courtesy of Zinio and Texterity, including Popular Mechanics, PC Magazine, and U.S. News & World Report.

However, non-iPhone/iPod touch browsers can also score free access using the User Agent Switcher extension for Firefox or a simple Safari tweak.

All that needs to be done is change the User Agent in your browser to the one of the iPhone which will trick the website into thinking that you are accessing it with an iPhone. This in turn will give you access to those magazines, among them PC Magazine, Technology Review, Macworld, Lonely Planet and, um, Playboy and Penthouse.

The content is provided in full screen in your browser and you can flip through the pages with a click. It’s probably not the most comfortable way but it’s free and easy enough. Pages are actually shown as images which means they can be saved to the local hard drive.

In Safari, set your browser to the iPhone user agent in the Develop menu, which you can enable at Preferences->Advanced->”Show Develop menu in menu bar.”

Opera users have built-in user agent switching for iPhones

Firefox users can install the User Agent Switcher add-on and configure it with the following User Agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A102 Safari/419 (United States)

 

 

Then switch to that User Agent and visit the Zinio or Texterity.

 

 

recently the Gmail team has been working on a structural code change that we’ll be rolling out to Firefox 2 and IE 7 users over the coming weeks (with other browsers to follow). You won’t notice too many differences to start with, but we’re using a new model that enables us to iterate faster and share components (we now use the same rich text editor as Groups and Page Creator, and the Contact Manager can be seen in several Google apps). A few other things you will notice are some new keyboard shortcuts and the ability to bookmark specific messages and email searches. One side effect of this change is that if you’re using third-party Gmail extensions, they’re likely to stop working. And that is the case for Gmail manager, because this extension no longer shows new messages.

But there is quick fix before the new version:

find your profile folder
browse to the extensions directory
open the folder named {582195F5-92E7-40a0-A127-DB71295901D7}
open the components folder
Open “gmServiceGmail.js” in your favorite text editor (notepad)
Use the find feature to the following text: “?search=inbox&view=tl&start=0&init=1″ (without the quotes)
Append “&ui=1″ to that text (again, without the quotes)
Save the file, and then restart Firefox! It should now show your unread messages!

Hope that helps someone!

 

Windows installed another round of updates and now it’s asking you to restart. Again. One simple command line entry can disable this obnoxious reminder. Reader Jack writes in with the trick:

To stop this service, open [Command Prompt] (Start>Run>cmd>Enter) and type the following command sc stop wuauserv. This will not prevent Automatic Updates from starting at the next boot. So don’t worry, you’ll keep getting Windows updates. Just don’t forget to restart eventually.

It works on XP and Vista as well.

 

Stop memory hogging

The default way the Windows version of Firefox consumes memory can be alarming if you don’t know what’s really going on. People routinely report a memory “footprint” of 75MB to 100MB or more with only a few windows or tabs open, and they assume a memory leak is to blame. While earlier versions of Firefox did have memory leak bugs, they’re not the reason for this kind of memory consumption in Firefox 2.x.

Here’s what’s happening: Firefox caches recently used objects — Web pages, images — in memory so that they can be re-rendered on-screen quickly, which drives up memory usage. The following tweaks can make Firefox stake out memory less aggressively. (Note, however, that lightening the memory load might make your pages load a bit more slowly than you’re used to.)

Reduce graphics caching
When the Boolean preference browser.cache.memory.enable is enabled (the default), Firefox keeps copies of all graphical elements from the current browsing session in memory for faster rendering. You can set this to false to free up more memory, but pages in your history will reload less quickly when you revisit them.

Another option: Set the value to true and create a new integer preference called browser.cache.memory.capacity. Then specify, in kilobytes, how much memory to set aside for graphics caching. That way you get some of the speed benefits that graphics caching provides without taking a huge memory hit. If you use -1 as the memory value, Firefox will size the memory cache based on how much physical RAM is present.

Reduce Web page caching
Firefox caches several recently visited Web pages in memory so they don’t have to be regenerated when you press Back or Forward. The integer setting browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers determines how many individual Web pages to store in the back/forward cache; each page takes about 4MB (or 4,000KB) of RAM.

By default, however, this value is set to -1, which determines how many pages to cache from the amount of available physical memory; the maximum number of pages stored when you use -1 is 8. Set this value to 0 to disable page caching entirely. That will save some memory, but will also cause Back and Forward navigation to slow down a bit.

Note that this caching is not the same as browser.cache.memory.enable: That setting is for rendering elements on pages like graphics and buttons, and the contents of https-encoded pages, while this setting is for caching the text content of Web pages that have already been rendered or “tokenized.”

Swap out to disk memory when minimized (Windows only)
A little-known feature in Firefox allows the Windows memory manager to swap out some of Firefox’s physical memory space to disk when Firefox is minimized but not closed. This allows other programs to use the physical memory that Firefox was previously monopolizing.

By default, this feature is turned off, for two reasons: 1) PC memory is generally more plentiful than it used to be, so it makes sense to use it if it’s available, and 2) swapping Firefox’s memory out to disk will slow the program down when it’s restored.

That said, if you run Firefox side by side with other memory-hungry applications, it might help keep them from competing with each other. To enable this feature, create a new Boolean preference called config.trim_on_minimize and set its value to true.

 

 

Hack network connections

The very first batch of Firefox hacks I learned about was how to override its network defaults. Some of Firefox’s out-of-the-box settings for how it deals with network connections are fairly conservative, probably because Firefox has no way of knowing what kind of network it’s using (dial-up vs. broadband, etc.). If you have a network that readily supports multiple simultaneous connections, you can make a number of changes to Firefox to take advantage of that.

But proceed with caution. If Firefox’s network settings are set too aggressively, they can lead you to being blacklisted for a short time by a given remote server. And you should certainly get permission from the IT department before attempting this kind of hack in a corporate environment. Regardless, moderation is the key. For the most part, I find that setting the network settings to absurdly high numbers does not accomplish much of anything; it helps to ramp them up a bit, but generally not much more than that.

Maximize connections to multiple servers
The integer preference network.http.max-connections controls how many simultaneous network connections Firefox will make at any one time to any number of Web servers. One typical way this pays off is if you have Firefox set to load multiple home pages in different tabs at once, or if you access pages that aggregate contents from several different servers (for instance, multiple advertising systems).

By default, this is set to 24, which should work well for most network connections, but you can raise it to 32 and see if that has any effect. (I’ve seen people raise this as high as 64, but anything above 32 doesn’t seem to provide much discernible payoff.)

Maximize connections to the same server
The integer preference network.http.max-connections-per-server controls how many separate connections Firefox makes to the same server, which allows multiple elements in a page to be downloaded in parallel. Normally, this is set to 8, but some people choose to set it as high as 16.

Note, however, that some Web servers will block you if you try to establish more than 8 inbound connections, typically as a bandwidth-protection or antileeching measure — this is the kind of behavior also exhibited by download managers that try to use as many “slots” as possible to speed things up, and many server admins hate that sort of thing. Also, if you’re on a connection that’s not fast to begin with (e.g., slow ISDN or dial-up), changing this setting will have no discernible effect, and may in fact slow things down.

Bump up persistent connections per server
Firefox keeps persistent connections to a server “alive” to improve performance: Instead of simply sending the results of one request and then closing, they’re held open so that multiple requests can pass back and forth. This means a little less network traffic overall, since a connection to a given server has to be set up only once, instead of once for each separate piece of content; it also means successive connections to the same server go through faster.

The integer preference network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server controls the number of persistent connections allowed per server. By default, this is set to 2, although some servers will honor a higher number of persistent connections (for instance, if there’s a lot of content from their site that loads in parallel, like images or the contents of frames). You probably only want to go as high as 8 with this; more than that may cause a server to temporarily blacklist your IP address depending on how it’s configured. (If you’re going through a proxy defined by Firefox, use network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy instead of this setting.)

Reduce the interval between persistent connections
If you’ve already used up all the persistent server connections described in the above setting and Firefox needs to make more connections, the integer setting network.http.request.max-start-delay governs how long to wait before attempting to open new connections. This helps if Firefox’s persistent-connection limit has been used up by a number of long downloads, and the browser needs to queue a shorter download on top of that.

Most people set this to 0 (in seconds), with the default being 10. Note that this does not override connection limits imposed by remote hosts, so its usefulness is limited by the whim of the server you’re connecting to.

Turn on pipelining
The Boolean preference network.http.pipelining enables an experimental acceleration technique called “pipelining,” which speeds up the loading of most Web pages. A browser normally waits for some acknowledgment of a given request from a server before attempting to send another one to that server; pipelining sends multiple requests at once without waiting for responses one at a time.

If you turn this on (that is, set its value to true), also be sure to create or edit the integer preference network.http.pipelining.maxrequests, which controls the maximum number of requests that can be pipelined at once. 16 should do it; some people go as high as 128 but there’s not much evidence it’ll help. (If you use a proxy, set network.http.proxy.pipelining to true as well.)

Note that not every Web server honors pipelining requests correctly, which is why this feature is turned off by default and still considered experimental. Some sites may behave strangely if you submit pipelined requests.

 

 

Have tabbed browsing your way

Right from the start, one of Firefox’s strengths has been tabbed browsing. But if the tabs don’t behave quite the way you want them to by default, or you hate the way the default behaviors have changed since Firefox 1.x, the following changes will bring them in line.

Corral close buttons
The integer preference browser.tabs.closeButtons controls how the close buttons (the “X” icons) are rendered on tabs:

0: Display a close button only on the currently active tab. This is a nice way to keep from accidentally smacking into a close button for the wrong tab.

(You can press Ctrl-F4 to close only the current tab, but many mouse-centric people never bother to do this.)

1: Display close buttons on all tabs (default).

2: Don’t display any close buttons; the only way to close a tab is by pressing Ctrl-F4.

3: Display one close button at the end of the tab bar (Firefox 1.x’s default).

Open search results in a new tab
This one is a favorite of mine. When browser.search.openintab (a Boolean preference) is set to true, any searches launched from the Search tool bar are opened in a new tab instead of overwriting the contents of the current one. I can’t tell you the number of times I mistakenly wiped out my current page before I started using this.

Note that if you launch a new browser window with Ctrl-N and perform a search there, you’ll see the search results and the default home page for the new browser instance loading in separate tabs.

Open bookmark groups in new tabs
If you open a group of bookmarks at once, Firefox’s default behavior is to replace any existing tabs with the newly opened pages. Set browser.tabs.loadFolderAndReplace (Boolean) to false, and opening groups of bookmarks will append new tabs to the existing window instead of overwriting existing ones.

Squeeze more tabs into the tab bar
The integer preference browser.tabs.tabMinWidth controls how narrow, in pixels, tabs can be shrunk down before scroll arrows appear on the left and right edges of the tab bar.

The default is 100, but you can set this to something smaller so you can fit more tabs in the bar at once. Note, however, that you might find the shortened titles harder to read.

In the same vein, the integer preference browser.tabs.tabClipWidth sets the minimum width, in pixels, that a tab must be in order to show a close button. This is 140 by default, so if you set this to something lower, you’ll see more tabs with close buttons when the tab bar is heavily populated.

 

Wow.. I can’t believe they are selling these things at Costco. Seems like a good price and beats using pesticide.

 

Praying Mantis Natural Insect Control Egg Case

 

Approximately 40 to 400 
Praying Mantis Eggs

$18.99

Item # 129014

Shipping & Handling included

 

An excellent general predator! Praying mantis consumes aphids, beetles, flies, mosquitos, moths, caterpillars and any insect they can catch. Praying mantis, an insect with an innate killer attitude, is a great garden predator. One egg case hatches many tiny babies that quickly disperse throughout your garden. Your egg case contains approximately 40 to 400 eggs.

Mating occurs in early fall and another egg case will be laid that will hatch the following summer. The egg case is laid as a foam that hardens into a spongy almost indestructible mass, usually laid attached to a shrub, weed, grass, etc., a few feet off the ground. The egg mass survives freezing, thawing, rain and all the elements to hatch in the early summer to start the cycle again.

Features:

• Hatching will occur by June

• Egg case contains 40 to 400 young mantis

• Most often green but sometimes brown

• Very territorial, will create a home where hatched

• Feeds on anything they can catch

• Late summer mating season

How to apply

• Place egg case outside in the spring attaching the egg case using the included mesh bag in a plant, shrub or tree 1 to 1.5 m (3 to 5 ft.) above ground, or to observe, place in sealable white paper bag and place inside in south facing window checking daily. Tiny mantis will hatch in 1 to 8 weeks and all eggs will hatch within 1 to 2 hours, leaving the egg case visibly unchanged. Release tiny mantis immediately outside onto plants after the hatching occurs. They will quickly disperse throughout your yard to mature and lay eggs, continuing your population next season.

How much do I need?

• One egg case covers approximately 90 sq. m (1000 sq. ft.)

Specifications:

• Egg case dimensions (dia.):
  2.54 cm (1 in.)

 

 

 

Windows ReadyBoost is one of new features that improves system memory and boosts performance.

Adding system memory (typically referred to as RAM) is often the best way to improve a PC’s performance, since more memory means more applications are ready to run without accessing the hard drive. However, upgrading memory can be difficult and costly, and some machines have limited memory expansion capabilities, making it impossible to add RAM.

Windows Vista introduces Windows ReadyBoost, a new concept in adding memory to a system. You can use non-volatile flash memory, such as that on a universal serial bus (USB) flash drive, to improve performance without having to add additional memory “under the hood.”

The flash memory device serves as an additional memory cache—that is, memory that the computer can access much more quickly than it can access data on the hard drive. Windows ReadyBoost relies on the intelligent memory management of Windows SuperFetch and can significantly improve system responsiveness.

It’s easy to use Windows ReadyBoost. When a removable memory device such as a USB flash drive or a secure digital (SD) memory card is first inserted into a port, Windows Vista checks to see if its performance is fast enough to work with Windows ReadyBoost. If so, you are asked if you want to use this device to speed up system performance. You can choose to allocate part of a USB drive’s memory to speed up performance and use the remainder to store files.

 

 

ReadyBoost Q&A From Matt Ayers:

“I’m the Program Manager in the Microsoft Windows Client Performance group and own the ReadyBoost feature. I wanted to give some offical answers based on the excellent questions and discussions that I’ve seen in this blog, to date. Also, I’ll be using this as a starting point for the official ReadyBoost FAQ.

Overall, as many posters have pointed out, the feature is designed to improve small random I/O for people who lack the expansion slots, money, and or technical expertise to add additional RAM. As y’all know, adding RAM is still the best way to relieve memory pressure.

Thanks, again, for your interest, questions and ideas.”

---

Q: What perf do you need on your device?
A: 2.5MB/sec throughput for 4K random reads and 1.75MB/sec throughput for 512K random writes
Q: My device says 12MB/sec (or 133x or something else) on the package but windows says that it isn’t fast enough to use as a ReadyBoost device… why?
A: Two possible reasons:

1. The numbers measure sequential performance and we measure random. We’ve seen devices that have great sequential perf, but horrible random
2. The performance isn’t consistently fast across the entire device. Some devices have 128M of lightning fast flash and the rest of the device is really slow. This is fine for some applications but not ReadyBoost.

Q: What’s the largest amount of flash that I can use for ReadyBoost?
A: You can use up to 4GB of flash for ReadyBoost (which turns out to be 8GB of cache w/ the compression)
Q: Why can’t I use more than 4GB of flash?
A: The FAT32 filesystem limits our ReadyBoost.sfcache file to 4GB
Q: What’s the smallest ReadyBoost cache that I can use
A: The smallest cache is 256MB (well, 250 after formatting). Post beta2, we may drop it another 10 MB or so.
Q: Ok… 256M-4GB is a pretty big range… any recommendations?
A: Yes. We recommend a 1:1 ratio of flash to system memory at the low end and as high as 2.5:1 flash to system memory. Higher than that and you won’t see much benefit.
Q: Isn’t this just putting the paging file onto a flash disk?
A: Not really – the file is still backed on disk. This is a cache – if the data is not found in the ReadyBoost cache, we fall back to the HDD.
Q: Aren’t Hard Disks faster than flash? My HDD has 80MB/sec throughput.
A: Hard drives are great for large sequential I/O. For those situations, ReadyBoost gets out of the way. We concentrate on improving the performance of small, random I/Os, like paging to and from disk.
Q: What happens when you remove the drive?
A: When a surprise remove event occurs and we can’t find the drive, we fall back to disk. Again, all pages on the device are backed by a page on disk. No exceptions. This isn’t a separate page file store, but rather a cache to speed up access to frequently used data.
Q: Isn’t user data on a removable device a security risk?
A: This was one of our first concerns and to mitigate this risk, we use AES-128 to encrypt everything that we write to the device.
Q: Won’t this wear out the drive?
A: Nope. We’re aware of the lifecycle issues with flash drives and are smart about how and when we do our writes to the device. Our research shows that we will get at least 10+ years out of flash devices that we support.
Q: Can use use multiple devices for EMDs?
A: Nope. We’ve limited Vista to one ReadyBoost per machine
Q: Why just one device?
A: Time and quality. Since this is the first revision of the feature, we decided to focus on making the single device exceptional, without the difficulties of managing multiple caches. We like the idea, though, and it’s under consideration for future versions.
Q: Do you support SD/CF/memory stick/MMC/etc.?
A: Mostly. In beta2, we added support for a small number of SD/CF cards on internal USB2 & PCIe busses. RC1 has a much broader support range.
Q: Why don’t you support SD on my USB2.0 external card reader?
A: We unfortunately don’t support external card readers – there were some technical hurdles that we didn’t have time to address. In general, if a card reader shows a drive without media in it (like a floppy drive or CD ROM does), we can’t use it for ReadyBoost.
Q: Will it support all USB drives, regardless of how they are ID’d to the OS (“hard disk drive” or “Device with Removable Storage”)?
A: We have no way to tell what is on the other end of a USB cable so we do some basic size checks (since no one has a 200GB flash device ) and then perform our speed tests. HDD will not, however, pass our speed tests, and there is no benefit to using a USB HDD for ReadyBoost.
Q: Can you use an mp3 player to speed up your system?
A: Not currently. MP3 players use the ‘plays for sure’ interfaces to expose themselves to Windows. We require that the device appear as a disk volume. These aren’t currently compatible.
Q: How much of a speed increase are we talking about?
A: Well, that depends. On average, a RANDOM 4K read from flash is about 10x faster than from HDD. Now, how does that translate to end-user perf? Under memory pressure and heavy disk activity, the system is much more responsive; on a 4GB machine with few applications running, the ReadyBoost effect is much less noticable.
Q: I can’t get my device to work with ReadyBoost… can I lower the perf requirements?
A: Unfortunately, no. We’ve set the perf requirements to the lowest possible throughput that still makes your system faster. If we lowered the perf requirements, then there wouldn’t be a noticeable benefit to using ReadyBoost. Remember, we’re not adding memory, we’re improving disk access.
Q: Which manufacturers support ReadyBoost?
A: Well, I hope that all of them do, eventually. Right now, we’re working with manufacturers to create a program that will allow them to identify ReadyBoost capable devices on their packaging.

 

 

After installed Vista on my computer, I sadly found out that SAS 9.1.3 couldn’t be installed on Vista and it is not supported by SAS. SAS will be adding support for this operating system for the first time with release of SAS 9.2. But I can’t wait for 9.2, and I don’t want go back XP either.

 

However, here is what I found to make SAS 9.1.3 works on Vista.

Open the Program Compatibility Wizard by clicking the Start button , clicking Control Panel, clicking Programs, and then clicking Use an older program with this version of Windows

 

Click Next. For the next dialog, you will be asked how you would like to locate the SAS program to install. Select “I want to select the program manually.”

Click Next. Browse to the “setup.exe” file you located in step 1.

Click Next. Depending on your current OS and installed Service Packs, choose one that matches your system.

Click Next and select display setting, if it applies to your system. You may skip this part.

Click Next. Check “Run this program as an administrator.”

Click Next. This is the last page before SAS begins with the install process.

After you click Next, follow SAS installation instructions.

That’s all there is to it. Have fun!