For those of you who use Outlook 2000, SP3, and have been severely annoyed when it occasionally took up 100% of your CPU power, Microsoft has finally released a patch for it.
More info here:
Category: Geekdom
Hand coding’s still the best, but FrontPage will always suck
Dori Smith did a comparison of editors and how much code they produce. “The goal was to produce a simple Web page containing just a single linked image that rolled over to another image.” The summary of the results:
What does this tell you? For WYSIWYG editors, Dreamweaver is still king (it’s the ONLY WYSIWYG editor I would consider using — ever) and FrontPage will always suck (it is a Microsoft product, after all). But I prefer to hand-code my pages in Homesite.
Grabbed via Lockergnome.
Smallest Full System Yet
I thought the Shuttle PCs were small. This guy is an entire computer that can fit in a 5.25″ drive bay. Granted, it’s not NEARLY as powerful or flexible as the Shuttle (the Shuttle has an AGP slot and MUCH more processor power, for example), but it’s VERY nice and small and easily mounted about anywhere.
Spam Manager
Came across an open source Spam filtering app, that sounds REALLY great.
You can read more about it, and download it here: http://popfile.sourceforge.net/
You basically use a proxy for your incoming mail, and it adds headers to track messages. Then you train POPFile to recognize Spam.
There’s a sweet web interface (the page is local though) so you can manage everything, and fix any errors it makes.
Wal-Mart’s $199 PC
I need to get about 15 of these and replace the pile of Wyse Winterms we have here at work. Then we can eBay our Citrix MetaFrame license, replace our P.O.S 10mbs hubs, get Windows 2000 on our servers (instead of WinNT 4.0) and life will be good (or at least better). But that’s just a dream, as this all requires money we don’t have :-).
Housekeepers tend to break things
Some how, our housekeeping department here at Sunray has managed to nearly destroy every printer that gets put in their office. When I first got here, they didn’t have a printer in their office. We had a Lexmark Optra 1250 that wasn’t being used, so I set it up back there so they wouldn’t have to get off their butts and . It was old and beat up, but it worked. Two weeks later, the thing had a paper jam that wouldn’t go away. I ripped and tore the printer apart, couldn’t find a paper jam anywhere, yet the printer wouldn’t print. I figured “oh well, it’s served its due.”
We recently replaced the Brother HL 1440 in my office with a meaty Tektronix/Xerox Phaser 860DP (thanks to FreeColorPrinters.com — e-mail me if you want details on the program that gave us this printer for free, and I can send you information and make myself a bit of money if you sign up). Anyway, I moved the Brother back to housekeeping as it’s a good little printer (really cheap toner and uses standard 72-pin SIMMs). Set it up, and it worked great for a few months.
I get here this morning, and they’ve managed to jam paper in there really good. I reach in to pull the paper out, and only half of it comes out — the other half was completely mashed in there. I spent over 90-minutes with tweezers, needle-nose pliers, and a small-parts-grabber tool, pulling out the little mashed up bits of paper (since there was no real easy way to dismantle the printer to get to its output path).
I told them if they ever had the trouble again, THEY get to deal with it ;-).
Wacky Case Creations
Some people have far too much time on their hands. This guy has created computer cases made out of gingerbread, put them in treasure chests, built one with built-in tissue and lotion dispensers, threw a computer into a toilet and BBQ, and even built a few cases out of PVC.