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 […]

How Bad Things Have Gotten Read More »

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

An Obstacle to Going Microsoft-free Read More »

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

Windows XP Pro SP2 Hibernation Problems – Fixed? Read More »

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

Computer Annoyances Read More »

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

Civ IV – Problems and Play Read More »