I laughed myself silly yesterday when I received an email from Microsoft Support with the following:

"I am sorry for the late reply. Unfortunately our Microsoft network is down since last week. All the domain controllers had to rebuild again. The email system is down, internet is down. So we are unable to communicate with our existing customers.

I will contact you as soon our infrastructure is ready.

Sorry for inconvenient."

Best excuse for poor service from Microsoft yet!

Ever wanted to know what all those cups of coffee are really doing to you, check this little gem out: http://coffeefaq.com/caffaq.html

I was reading over at www.lifehack.org about a nice google hack. Ever had a site that your employer or university blocked. All you need is the following url and change www.expample.com to the site you'd like to visit.

http://www.google.com/translate?langpair=en|en&u=www.example.com

So delicious has joined the Yahoo team. For some ultimately strange reason, I just don't like Yahoo. I really cannot think of any definative facet of Yahoo that turns me off but still, I just dislike them. Now that delicious has joined them I am somewhat disappointed, is there anything else out there like delicious?

Having just gotten back from a week away I returned to find that my IPAQ had been shipped back to me. Excited I opened it up and tested the screen...it didn't work. Not only that but they had managed to put someone elses paperwork in my box. So after being bounced around the HP call centre for a while I managed to get a lady who left a message with the technician to call me back....the saga continues.

Update: So I finally got through to someone helpful at HP who without question said someone would be there shortly to collect my IPAQ to have it shipped back to NSW (Teleplan) for repairs. The scarry thing was that the delivery guy was at my desk within about 10min. I didn't even have the unit pack away yet....To be continued.

• Automated update to streamline product upgrades. Notification of an update is more prominent, and updates to Firefox may now be half a megabyte or smaller. Updating extensions has also improved.
• Faster browser navigation with improvements to back and forward button performance.
• Drag and drop reordering for browser tabs.
• Improvements to popup blocking.
• Clear Private Data feature provides an easy way to quickly remove personal data through a menu item or keyboard shortcut.
• Answers.com is added to the search engine list.
• Improvements to product usability including descriptive error pages, redesigned options menu, RSS discovery, and "Safe Mode" experience.
• Better accessibility including support for DHTML accessibility and assistive technologies such as the Window-Eyes 5.5 beta screen reader for Microsoft Windows. Screen readers read aloud all available information in applications and documents or show the information on a Braille display, enabling blind and visually impaired users to use equivalent software functionality as their sighted peers.
• Report a broken Web site wizard to report Web sites that are not working in Firefox.
• Better support for Mac OS X (10.2 and greater) including profile migration from Safari and Mac Internet Explorer.
• New support for Web Standards including SVG, CSS 2 and CSS 3, and JavaScript 1.6.
• Many security enhancements.

I found this one over on Greg Huges' blog this afternoon. All you do is add encarta@conversagent.com as a contact in MSN Messenger then open a conversation window. The first thing I asked was, "what time is it?" Try it out, it is very cool!

I am definately not going to get anything done for the next few hours......

I've been working as a Tier-2 support person for some time now and there seems to be a number of tools that I use frequently to get out of trouble.

• HiJackThis - Removes browser HiJacks
• Ethereal - The best Packet Capture tool you can get for windows.
• Adaware - My preferred adware removal tool.
• Stinger - A tool developed by McAfee that is a stand-alone utility that detects and removes the most recent/popular viruses. It is the fastest virus scanning tool around.
• BartPE - A bootable CD that boots a reduced version of Windows XP. This is the ultimate debugging tool! It allows you to boot a PC into a Windows PE like environment and scan for viruses/adaware, backup files, browse the next, partition disks, restore deleted files....the list is endless.(A MUST HAVE!!)
• RootKit Revealer - If you don't know what a RootKit is then I'd suggest a bit of googling. This is the best tool to detect if you've got one.
• TCPView - An excellent utility from Sysinternals that lets you see all the active connections on a machine.

Stayed tunned, I'll update this post as I use the tools.

A few days ago I had to install Windows XP on a PC that I was selling to a friend. This usually simply exercised turned into a night of lost sleep because Windows XP apparently doesn't like hard drives formatted with Linux. I popped the Windows XP disk in the drive, pressed any key to continue and then....nothing. I tried another Windows XP cd, thinking the last one must have been faulty. Nothing, just a black screen. I swapped out the CD drive and tried again, nothing! In desperation I tried the Linux (Fedora Core 4) CD which worked perfectly. Grrrr!

I then tried an old Windows 2000 cd I had and strangely it worked. Bermused, I formatted the drive with the Windows 2000 disk cancelled setup and then tried to boot off the Windows XP disk; it work first time. For some strange reason Windows XP setup just didn't like the fact that I previously had Linux installed. It would be interesting to hear from someone at Microsoft about the reasons for this problem....

I happened to have deleted the Show Desktop icon in my quicklaunch bar the other day. Now I didn't realize how much I used this lovely little button until it was gone. So I search with the mighty google and found the following:

Many companies will probably hate me for posting this but I think it is pretty cool. All you need to poke your own hole through a corporate firewall is putty and a linux box. The proceedure is simple. Setup your linux box so that it can accept connections for ssh on port 443. Test it to make sure it works.

Then at work grab putty and set it to use your proxy server, which will allow port 443 out. Type the IP address for your linux box and change the port to 443. You also need to go to tunneling and tunnel the remote desktop port through to your local machine and bobs your uncle. Then you can use your PC from work and do whatever you like. Cool hey!

This guy has figured out how to replace windows notepad completely with notepad2, well done I say!

http://blogs.msdn.com/omars/archive/2004/04/30/124093.aspx

So i've fallen in love with this notepad2 utility that you can get over here. It is basically what Microsoft should have done with their notepad. It is a great little program with syntax highlightnig and regular expression support.

To make notepad2 your view source editor just do the following:

After some cool tools, check this out http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ScottHanselmans2005UltimateDeveloperAndPowerUsersToolList.aspx

Ever think it would be really handy to take all your favorites with you where ever you go?? Personlly I hate it when I find a link to a really great site when at work, place it in my favorites and then wonder where it is when I get home. If you can relate to this then check out this http://del.icio.us. The site allows you to sign up and then store your favorite sites online. There are a couple of good links you can use to easily add new links as well. Very simple idea, very useful Web App.