WebberLog

When I switched to Vista, my main browser switched from FireFox to IE7. The main reason for this was that, in my opinion, FireFox had lost it’s edge to IE. The newest IE incarnation felt snappier, looked better and had most of the features I was looking for in a browser.

Enter FireFox 3.0 b2 and suddenly things are the other way around. FireFox 3 is the newest incarnation of Mozilla’s finest. It has some nice new features which make it easier to use, but mainly it’s just damn fast. Pages render quicker and JavaScript runs stunningly fast.

Of course there’s a faster browser around, but let’s face it; I won’t be running Opera until it can render all websites without errors.

I’ll be using another default browser. Again.

Back in the old days, when I was a younger lad, scribbling my Clipper and C programs, I used QEdit by SemWare. (Nowadays the QEdit name seems to have been trademarked by another company).
It was an awesome little editor, blazingly fast and feature rich enough to stay with me for quite some years of programming. One of the great things about QEdit was I could carry it around on a floppy; the .exe file was only some 30Kb in size. When the time came and I needed more power, I tried Brief but quickly turned to Multi-Edit.

All these editors did a great job at what they were meant for while keeping their own footprint reasonable.

Today, I’m using ActiveState Komodo Edit, and as I type this, I’ve got a couple of PHP files loaded. Nothing special, maybe 50Kb worth of text. When I just started the Windows Taskmanager to see what was slowing me down, I was flabbergasted by the amount of memory that Komodo consumes; a stunning 100Mb.

Now, I’m sure the source highlighting and syntax checking come at a price, but this seems a bit steep…

Not being a regular poster, I’m always surprised to see a burst in pagehits. This time it seems to be because of an increase in RSS subscriptions.

Let me just say: Welcome

As you may have heard, Microsoft has been sending out Vista powered laptops to a handful of bloggers.

Of course I wasn’t one of them. Question is, do I need to feel insulted or glad…

Only a couple of days to go in 2006. And I’m wondering… do I start the new year with a new design or do I keep things as they are.

Only a couple of days to make up my mind…

Every now and then, Windows makes a mess of it’s disks. Most often, this is caused by the infamous scandisk actions at boot. Since my desktop machine locks up every now and then, I have to turn it off and restart it without doing a descent shutdown. The automatically started scandisk has turned my life into a nightmare more than once.

Yesterday it happened again. One of my harddisks (I have three) was no longer visible from Explorer after rebooting. Checking disk management, it told me that I had a new and unpartitioned harddisk waiting for me. Since this disk contains some of my backups, I don’t need to explain some of the terms I uttered.

Looking around on the Internet I found this little tool; TestDisk by CGSecurity. I downloaded it, ran it and within 2 minutes of locating it on the Internet, my drive was back in working order, all stuff still on it.

Now there’s a tool that’s going onto my Top 10 Tools I can’t do without.

So. I’ve crapped on talked about helpdesks before, but it seems like I need to do so again. Could be the guys at my own ISP don’t read this. In that case, they should be.

At 13:45, my Internet connection died on me. Being the gracious guy I am, I waited for 15 mins before I lost my cool. In those 15 mins, I reset my cable modem, disconnected my router, connected my laptop directly to the modem and made myself some coffee. Still no connection at 14:00 so I decided to call my ISP.

The first helpdesk employee I talked to was a middle-aged woman that was very nice and very un-helpful. Of course she asked me all the wrong questions and even though she could not even “see” my cable modem from her end, she insisted the problem could be in my laptop. I told her my router was connected before my laptop and showed the same problems. I also told her my modem was offline and refused to go online. She couldn’t care less. Her shortlist said I had to turn off my virusscanner and try again. Actually, I think she wanted me to takedown my firewall, but since she didn’t do the IQ test on me, she didn’t want to use complicated terms. I told her I’d give it a shot and ended the call.

The second helpdesk guy was a guy who actually bothered to listen. After I told him my modem was offline, he asked me to try and do a hard reset by disconnecting it’s power cord for 30 secs. Of course I already tried that (and he knew that), but again, being the gracious guy I am, I did it again. And again, that did not solve the problem. While I was fiddling with the cables, he discovered that there were a lot of cable modems in my area that were offline, pointing towards a problem beyond my modem.

The moral of the story, if someone calls you with a problem, check for a broader scope. Don’t just follow your simple tasklist if the person on the phone seems to know what he’s talking about.

It’s all about listening.

Rough translation: Hey, what are you doing here? Didn’t you read my blog yesterday? I fired you!

Someone is gonna have a really bad day when he finally finds his lottery ticket. Cause he (or she) won roughly 14 million euros in the Brittish lottery but never collected the money. Now, 180 days after the prize was issued, it’s set to be donated to charity.

Good day for charities, but hell of a bad start in 2006 for the “fortunate” winner.

As usual, my only resolution for this year is to do some more blogging than I did last year.

Of course, with the amount of blogging I do, doing any less would be damn hard.

Happy New Year all!