Life :: Constant Work in Progress

Although this tool is off Belkin’s website, the information is good for any and all FM transmitters.  http://stationfinder.griffintechnology.com/

I really should use my Macbook Pro more often.  Every time I spend some decent amount of time on it, I remember how nice and seamless this machine works.  It’s pleasant and just the way all computing needs to be.

This update although doesn’t mention that it improves Outlook’s performance, it will provide a night-and-day difference to those who use Outlook 2007. Install it immediately.

This excellent tip from Windows Networking site.

When you activate Windows XP, Microsoft stores the data in the Windows Product Activation database files wpa.dbl and Wpa.bak in the folder %systemroot%\system32. If you change the motherboard or make significant hardware changes, XP will require you to reactive. But if you plan to reinstall XP on the same hardware, you can back up the activation status and then restore it after you reinstall and avoid the activation process. You can backup the Windows Product Activation database files to diskette. They are very small. A directory listing from my XP Pro workstation:

C:\WINDOWS\system32>dir wp*
Volume in drive C has no label.
Volume Serial Number is 8447-0571

Directory of C:\WINDOWS\system32

10/24/2001 08:28 PM 12,584 wpa.bak
01/14/2002 09:05 AM 12,642 wpa.dbl

After you reinstall XP, to restore the Windows Product Activation database files:
Start XP to Minimal Safe mode
Change directory to the \%systemroot%\system32 folder
Rename the newly created wpa.dbl to wpa.nonactivated and wpa.bak, if it exists, to wpabak.nonactivated.
Copy your backed up wpa.dbl and wpb.bak files to the system32 folder
Reboot

The user interface for the new Office 2007 beta is VERY nice.  It has a nice clean look as well as much more soothing fonts for rendering.  (the rendering engine is shared with the new Windows Vista)

The new right pane within Outlook that shows your calendar content as well as to-do items is brilliant.  The way Outlook also handles messages that are deleted is very elegant as well.  All in all, I see great possibilities.  This is a refreshing change as the Office 2003 really didn’t improve upon Office XP.

Only problem is that this being a Beta version, it was crashing every 5 minutes.  Eventually I got it removed from my main laptop as it was getting ridiculous.  But once the product is finalized and becomes stable, it appears that I will finally have a nice version of Office for daily use.

There is a new web browser available.  Opera is now offering their new version at no cost unlike in the past.  Opera is slick, fast, and more secure than Internet Explorer.  Many people think Firefox started the “tabbed” browsing, but the truth is Opera started it first.

The tabs are very intelligent in the recent version and those of you who have been testing out IE7 will realize that there are many similarities.  Of course, one would NEVER think that Microsoft didn’t copy FF and Opera.

I strongly urge everyone to use Opera as their default browser.  It is available not only for Windows, but on MAC OS X and Linux.  If not, at least use Firefox and avoid attracting spywares.

A web site called www.streamload.com offers free 25Gb of space for storage.  Store your files and access anywhere.  For those of you who don’t have local backup drives, you can upload your sensitive stuff here to have an immediate off-site backup of your stuff.