XLAB Tech

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In case you need to compare two word files there is a neat functionality available in Word (Office 2007) – without installing new software.

Go to Review pane, compare, and there you are – load two files and you are good to go.

Sometimes solutions to a problem are simple

If you are using Windows 7, 64 bit version, you might encounter a problem, that hard drives are “gone” after waking from sleep mode.

A fix is available on:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/977178/

Follow the link “View and request hotfix downloads”….

Your comp should have one feature less

I have just published a journal article on resource discovery in large distributed systems, which might be of interest to some of you.

Here is the link to the online copy of the article.

Some of us are faced with the fact, that there exist life beyond 7-bit ASCII. (Getting emails with non-US characters in them).

When using Windows 7 64-bit version and Thunderbird, as the last is not Unicode, a person is forced to set “System Locale” to something, that should recognise our special characters.

So here is a twist to the story. By setting System locale to i.e. Slovenian, than the windows do not boot, and there is nothing you can do to make them boot.

By trying to restore the system an annoyed person gets “corrupted System partition”.

At least in my case I could solve the problem by going into the BIOS, and disabling IDE mode on my SATA disc (setting it to AHCI).

If your N900 displays “insufficient power” when you want to charge it from the computer USB port – this is to be done:

when you connect the phone to the computer you have to select “mass storage mode”. After this – your phone should charge without any problem.

When you have a slow “login” on windows 7, here is a helpfull post I found on the net.

——————————————————————————–
Last week i spend hours trying to fix my malfunctioning windows 7, because it showed me the “welcome” bubble for 20 seconds everytime i logged in/rebooted. So today i got fed up with it, and reinstalled win7.
Closely watching the steps i was making, before the dreaded lag would commence, i found out the cause of the long delay when logging in: The lag is introduced when removing the windows background, and selecting a solid color instead.

You can reproduce this easily by putting a background picture, logging off, logging on, -> login is within 1 sec
Now change background to a solid color, log out, log in -> wait 20+ seconds before you can see the desktop.

Original post:

http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7performance/thread/b9e09e89-678a-406c-9f7e-ac2d8919b92e

So you want to send that funny video of your aunt falling down the stairs to all your relatives (who wouldn’t), but the file is over 10, or 20 MegaBytes. Or perhaps you are sending something to people who have a telephone Internet connection that might or might not want to wait 10 minutes to download your one single mail. Or you send a lot of embedded media to your friends who already complain that their Outlook folders are eating their disks (they shouldn’t be using Outlook anyway).

In any case, it is usually a bad idea to send mails with more than, say 5 or 10 megabytes. Instead, web links to the content is usually preferred. In such way, each one can choose whether to download the file or not, it won’t block other more important mails on slow lines, and it will not take a lot of disk space (if they choose not to save them).

But where do you put a silly video you don’t want published on YouTube (or FAIL Blog for what is worth)? Were do you place some illegal stuff that sites often take down?

DropBox is a multi-platform tool that keeps your files in synchronized between your (possibly several) computers and devices. It runs on Windows, Linux and Mac, has a web interface, and even an iPhone application. It provides free accounts with a 2Gb limit (though you can take it up to 5Gb by inviting some more people), as well as paid accounts. It was desktop integration, and works really great.

What does DropBox has to do with my mail? Well, DropBox has a “public” folder that permits anyone to access those files (provided you give them the appropriate link). So, you can place your aunt’s video at the DropBox public folder (say, MyDocuments\DropBox\Public\Funny\AuntRollingDown.mpeg), and from your file browser or DropBox’s web interface get the direct link to that file.
You can now simply send that link to everyone you wish to share it with, and that’s it!

When your aunt gets back from the hospital, and threatens you into removing the file, you simply delete it from the public folder, and it won’t be available anymore. (At least not from that link)

Of course, this can be used with other on-line storage providers that let you link to your files without login nor stupid delays.

So, no more excuses, no more silly PowerPoint or any other huge attachments in your mails!
Safe and smart emailing!

I just noticed that all of a sudden no Java program can access network anymore.

After reinstalling a fresh Sun JDK, checking all policies and properties and proxies, none of which helped, I finally managed to ask the all-knowing One the right question.

It’s got to do with premature eja… erm … IPv6 exclusivity.

Checking this and this revealed the source of my woes.

Thus, running

# sudo /sbin/sysctl net.ipv6.bindv6only=0

and changing the setting in /etc/sysctl.d/bindv6only.conf fixed the problem.