Duh! I have a second monitor that I attached to my laptop in the office so that I can extend the desktop. Last time in the office I had Notepad running on the second screen. Back home (minus the extra screen) I opened a new Notepad session. Unfortunately Notepad remembered where it was on the desktop last time, and so Notepad has positioned itself on the screen I have not got, and cannot see. This despite the fact that Windows 7 has detected that I have reverted to just one screen.
To bring the window back onto the main screen, either of the following will work:
Right-click on the taskbar and select one of the window layout options. Unfortunately this [click title to read more…]
IP (Version 4) is based on four octets (bytes) to create an addressing space af 2 to the 32nd power, but as it has been arranged in slices, the actual collection of available numbers is less than you would think. John Curran of ARIN earlier today at the W3C TPAC said that based on the current demands, IPv4 addresses will be completely exhaused in 717 days. (He pointed out that this number will vary from day to day for many reasons, and this variability is part of the reason why people are not taking the issue seriously.) When the space is exhaused, it will be impossible to add more servers or clients to the Internet.
The solution is IPv6, but [click title to read more…]
Colleagues of mine have been bending over backwards to get their hands on pre-release copies of Windows 7, which is due to be released on October 22. Is this just another last-minute attempt by the software giant to get some more beta testing in?
Here are some alternative names for beta testers:
Guinea Pigs
Unpaid QA Staff
Stress Junkies
Suckers
Of course, I have to confess being a beta tester for MS myself once, evaluating Excel during the early 90s, having spent time using the original version on the Mac. But back then we were a small team of volunteers who had to fill in forms and send back reports every week. We had test sequences and task-oriented [click title to read more…]
In a detailed response to Apple’s decision to exclude one of its patents from the Widgets Update specification, the W3C has said via a Patent Advisory Group that implementations of the Widgets Update specification would not necessarily infringe Apple’s patent. This opinion is based on the observation that the patent requires the update to be self-contained, whereas the Widgets Update specification assumes the update to be facilitated by an external “update manager”, and that the Widgets are necessarily contained within a host browser.
While this conclusion does not invalidate Apple’s patent, it does remove a barrier to the Widgets Update specification, which had been stalled at the draft stage.
Interestingly, a side-effect of the work of the PAG was the contribution [click title to read more…]
For weeks I’ve noticed the laptop churn along at 50% CPU (total spread over both cores) and the temperature slowly rise, to the point that the trackpad was too hot to use. Thank goodness for wireless mice. Task Manager showed nothing in particular, but when I decided to use SysInternals Process Monitor (now a MS tool) it revealed that the load was caused by hardware interrupts.
Searching the Web turned up lots of possibilities but nothing certain. I experimented, and eventually discovered that this was only happening when my Wifi was off. If I resumed the Wifi, or disabled it completely through Vista’s “Manage Network Connections” panel, then the interrupts stopped. I’m using the latest drivers. Odd.