Here’s an awesome Event Log error I found on a client’s server yesterday:
An application pop up happened. From an application. Problem is, it doesn’t tell me what the popup said — or what application popped it!
I was amused.
Mar 24
Firefox 4 and Two Quick Tips
By now you’ve no doubt heard that Firefox 4 was released last week. I had used it through a few beta and release candidate releases and like it a lot. Here are a couple small tips that I thought I’d share. One specific to XP and the other to Windows 7 (and Vista?).
Firefox 4 on XP tip
At first, I wasn’t a huge fan of the redesigned menu but I’ve grown to like it, especially the amount of space it doesn’t take up. Here’s what it looks like on a Windows 7 machine:
When I first installed it on my little XP laptop I was initially appalled. The bar was gone! Blah, it looked like the previous release:
Fortunately, this is easily fixed. To get the snazzier menu, just go to View –> Toolbars and uncheck the “Menu Bar” option. Presto – problem fixed.
Windows 7
When hovering over Firefox in the task bar, wouldn’t it be nice if it would show a thumbnail of all tabs, not just the current one? I sure thought so – and turns out it is just a checkbox away (assuming, of course, your operating system supports it).
Just go to Options and then the Tabs tab. Check the bottom option:
Now hover over Firefox in the task bar:
From there you can click the tab you want to go to or even close them by hitting the little red “x”.
Search from the Address Bar
Bonus tip!
I’m not sure if this is a published feature or not, but I’ve noticed that I can type keyword searches straight into the address bar – instead of the search box – and it takes me to a Google search for those words. You know, like Chrome?
This doesn’t seem to be specifically listed on the Firefox Features page, but I sure like it. Also makes me think I could probably remove the search box altogether…
Mar 20
Revisiting the Productivity Stack
Last October I had the opportunity to change jobs and it has been a great experience. A little crazy at times but no regrets. I’ve had the ability to use many of my existing skills while having many opportunities to develop or enhance more.
Since we’re a MSP (Managed Services Provider) focused on IT we tend to run the same or similar platforms and apps as our clients. Makes it a lot easier to understand common issues and “pain points” they might have.
So, after years of advocating OpenOffice and Google Apps I find myself spending my days in Microsoft Outlook with our email server running Microsoft Small Business Server 2008 (Exchange 2007). This has been quite a change! Not gonna lie: I grumbled a bit the first week or two but the transition hasn’t really been that difficult and, honestly, in some ways I think it has improved things.
For starters, I’m back to using OneNote as my GTD’ish productivity system (previous mention). I’m loving how well OneNote and Outlook work together, especially the ability to flag things in OneNote as Outlook Tasks. In fact, I now use OneNote as my primary collection system, but I manage all my day-to-day tasks in Outlook – many of them originating from OneNote. Really cool once you get used to it.
In the past, I used Dropbox to store and sync my OneNote notebooks so that I could access them from more than one machine. Worked fine but I had to have OneNote on every machine. Sadly, that left the *nix machines out of the mix.
That’s no longer an issue with the advent of Office Web Apps on SkyDrive. This is some seriously cool stuff! Store your notebooks there and then open them directly via the OneNote web app or open them with the OneNote app if it is installed on the PC. Skydrive keeps it all in sync.
The browser version is pretty slick, too. Not all the features are there but there are certainly enough to be very functional and useful.
What would be nice? An Android OneNote client. I’m miffed that Microsoft did an iPhone one first! But other than that, I’m probably about as organized as I’ve ever been. And that’s critical in my new role!
Mar 10
Win7 SP1 and IE Issues
I wasn’t paying attention closely enough last night and before I realized it I had accepted the recently released Windows 7 Service Pack 1 onto my work machine. The install went smoothly enough but since then?
Not so great.
Internet Explorer stops working very frequently now. The funny thing is, if I just click the red X everything is fine — nothing is actually broken (as far as I can tell) but that dialog is driving me nuts!
Before you say “Stop using IE!” let me just say that I can’t. Some of our productivity apps at work are IE only. Right, wrong or indifferent, that’s just how it is.
Anyone else have similar issue(s)? I think tomorrow I’ll disable all the add-ins and see how things go. While writing this it occurred to me that perhaps it isn’t IE but one of the add-ins…
Mar 07
Grub 2 Fixes
These days I find myself spending the majority of my time in a Windows based OS of one flavor or another. However, I still have most of my machines set to dual-boot to a Linux distro (lately that’s usually Ubuntu). That way I still have it very handy when I want or need it.
Grub 2 is the boot-loader I see the most and I find it quite serviceable. And maddening. Until recently it actually drove me nuts for two main reasons. Fortunately, I finally took the time to do 5 minutes of research last weekend and those reasons are no longer issues.
Item 1: Setting the Default boot OS
By default, the top item in the boot menu list is the default OS to boot. And, by default, that’s the most recent Linux kernel. Well, since I spend the majority of my time in Windows that was becoming distressing.
Initially I found a way to modify the config to tell grub which line number was the default OS. However, each time I updated and got a new kernel this line number was no longer correct — the new kernel would get added to the top of the list and push everything down (see item 2).
Fortunately, I found a blog post titled, “Fix Windows as default boot on Ubuntu with Grub2 loader” that offers a very simple solution. Just specify the default OS by name instead of number! So simple… yet I sure struggled to solve it. For details just follow that link.
Item 2: Cluttering up the Boot Menu list with Old Kernels
I alluded to this earlier. Every time you update and get a new kernel you get two more entries into the boot menu. After just a few updates that boot menu gets long and cumbersome.
Cleaning up the boot menu is pretty simple though — and rather automated. Once you’ve verified that the kernel is working there’s really no reason to keep the old one(s) around. Just fire up synaptic and completely remove those old kernels. When you do so, their associated menu entries are removed automagically as well. I picked up this tip from another blog post titled, “Clean up the New Ubuntu Grub2 Boot Menu.”
So there you go, with just those two posts I’ve removed a major “pain point” from my daily dual-booting experiences. Yay blogs!
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