Tag: Tech

  • How Bad Things Have Gotten

    Just how bad has comment spam gotten? Check it out, below. Red is spams, green is good comments, and black is a 30-day moving average. As you can see, I am averaging about 163 comments per day (essentially all spam). You can click on the images to enlarge them. [EDIT: The images in question were…

  • An Obstacle to Going Microsoft-free

    I recently found a major obstacle to going Microsoft-free. I could switch to Linux, if I had the time to fool with it, at the moment, but it appears I am stuck with Microsoft Word, still. While I really like OpenOffice.org 2.0 (OOo), it doesn’t have native support for creating tables of authorities (a.k.a., tables…

  • Windows XP Pro SP2 Hibernation Problems – Fixed?

    I have mentioned before (here and here the problem of “too much” memory causing crashes and failed hibernation/standby attempts in Windows XP laptops. Microsoft has made a hotfix available, but it’s still in testing (until 2007, from the looks of it), so you have to call and ask for it (which is free). It seems…

  • Computer Annoyances

    When I’m writing a program or web script, I usually test it on my own system before deploying it to its final destination (a web server, application server, etc.). Tonight, I made the unpleasant and rather disturbing discovery that Norton AntiVirus 2005, if it’s set to scan outgoing mail, may scan memory before a program…

  • Civ IV – Problems and Play

    Well, I got Civilization IV running on my system, so I have wasted a lot of time, this weekend. Getting it to run was insane, however. For reference, I have a Dell Inspiron 8500 with the ATI Radeon Mobility 9000 (32MB) graphics card and a CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive. These are the steps I had to take…