I am now using Firefox 3. It isn’t much different from Firefox 2. That is probably a good thing, but I don’t know if it deserves the “3″ label.

If I am studying at home, I have been turning off my computer monitor. I get too easily distracted. But sometimes I need to actually use my computer. How to not get distracted then?

If it is with Word, I use full screen. It works well. But with Firefox, their default full screen sucks. The tabs still show. Enter fuller screen. Simple, but beautiful.

Through some Google searching, I have discovered the strangely-named Dial-a-fix. It fixed some Windows Update problems I was having, and can evidently fix other problems as well. I am happy that I got it fixed, but if that program can fix it, why can’t Microsoft? Nothing on the MS knowledgebase helped me at all.

Also, never again will I reinstall Windows XP due to borked hardware. Borked software? - then yes, maybe an OS reinstall. But if your hardware is borked and you have to replace some or all of the components, give the following a try:
1) Make a Ghost image of the machine.
2) Transfer Ghost image to new machine. The first two steps here are only if you’re also using a different hard drive, obviously.
3) Insert WinXP install disc and boot from it.
4) Run the repair utility (not the recovery console). You’ll be asked if you want to run this rather than installing from scratch. This will take about the same amount of time as a fresh install takes you, and the machine will reboot a couple of times.
5) Talking about borked, all of your drivers will be borked. That’s OK. Just download and install all drivers that you need.
6) Your Windows Update may also be borked. Use the Dial-a-fix as suggested above. You will have to run Windows Update, by the way, because during the repair process it overwrites all of your Windows files and hence any updates you have done that aren’t on the install disc.

Voila! All of your programs, files, and settings are now intact on your new hardware. Isn’t exactly fast, but it sure is a lot faster than getting all of your programs and settings, etc., back how you wanted them.

As if you hadn’t guessed from the last post, I am a nerd. And hence…this event on Wednesday is something that I would really like to go to:

WordPress 2.3 is coming out on Monday, so come out Wednesday evening and upgrade your blog with the pros. How badly can you screw it up when the developers are right there? If you upgrade your blog before Wednesday come and help out others and make feature requests.

Super-chill event, just bring your laptop, yourself, and your WordPress blog. I’ll provide booze, soft drinks, and wifi.

Topics of discussion will include Trackback Etiquette: Ping on the First Date?, Join the Conspiracy to Relabel All Websites Blogs, and Putting the Friend in XFN.

Unfortunately, there is another event that I would rather go to that night. Naomi Klein is coming to San Francisco to talk about her book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

So Alyssa and I picked out a new Dell laptop for her. It’s arrived and I have some time tonight to play with it (and install WoW and MS Office).

I have to admit I was a little frustrated with it for the first 15-30 minutes. But it is starting to grow on me. It isn’t slow or anything. But I guess I am glad we got her 2GB of RAM. Because, for instance, Minesweeper is taking up 67MB. Wow. I am just glad it has over 1GB left over. But as a comparison, my Windows XP machine right now is using 1.2GB of RAM (out of 2GB). I have a remarkable amount of applications open, as I usually do. The biggest thing the Dell laptop has going is World of Warcraft installer. So yeah, I guess it is a little bloated. Seems nice, though, as long as you have the system to handle it.

And it took a little hunting for me to find this one…to do the neat flippy thing you’ve seen/heard about, hit Windows+Tab instead of Alt+Tab.

Copy/paste from an email I sent out at work. In short, VMWare Fusion rocks:

Two really cool things about VMWare Fusion for Mac OS X. First of all, it has an automated Windows installer. You punch in your preferred username, password, and product key, and VMWare Fusion takes care of the whole Windows install for you. It even updates all of your drivers for you. None of this “click, wait 10 minutes, rinse, repeat” stuff. VMWare has done the Windows installer better than Microsoft.

Secondly, the “Unity” feature is really cool. It allows you to detach the individual windows from Windows and interact with them in OS X. For example, check out this screenshot.

45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2

So a few weeks ago I made a change to my site on how the permalinks were displayed. A permalink is a link that you can use permanently to link to one of my posts. So if you wanted to say “Look at what this idiot Stu said about Democracy” on your blog and link to a post that I had written rather than the main page, which changes, you’d link to a permalink of mine.

The permalinks had previously been displayed as: http://www.fourmajor.com/?p=291

I changed it to: http://www.fourmajor.com/index.php/2007/04/24/heartbreaking-update-on-the-legless-man/

When I put an image into one of my posts (such as a picture or a screenshot), I would write the HTML like this: img src=”images/image.jpg” That way, if I ever changed the name of my website to, say, bestwebsiteever.com, I wouldn’t have to change any of my image tags. Well, when I changed my permalink structure, all this got broken. Instead of looking for fourmajor.com/images/image.jpg, my web server was looking for fourmajor.com/index.php/2007/04/24/images/image.jpg. This obviously wasn’t going to work. I figured there had to be a better way…

Thankfully, there is. What I did was to download this nifty search and replace plugin. I replaced all instances of “images/” with “http://www.fourmajor.com/images/”. This way, I can use the permalink format that I like. And should I ever change my domain name, I can simply do another search and replace. Oh, and for good measure: w00t.

I’ve been thinking for a while now that while GMail is great, I’d really like to host my own mail. Except I would want webmail, and I don’t want to use SquirrelMail. Well, after a little bit of searching, I found Roundcube WebMail. It’s AJAXy and it is GPL. Looks good to me. Of course it is still in early development stages, but I’ll take a look at it.

And now…A screenshot.

I recently set out to replace Windows XP with Kubuntu GNU/Linux. I figured it might take a couple of months before I would be comfortable with completely removing Windows from my system. It turns out that I won’t be able to remove it at all. In fact, I am giving up on Linux on my main desktop completely.

The reason? My Sound Blaster X-Fi sound card is not supported. Creative doesn’t have a driver and they won’t give any information to ALSA so that they can make a driver. It is really, really annoying.

And right now I need a Linux desktop to do development of the client side of Project Stockton. So it looks like what I am going to do is purchase a cheap, small, and quiet desktop devoted to Linux. I’ll need to get a KVM switch, too.