• Mood: restless
• Music: Dizzy Gillespie - Three-Afro-Cuban Jazz Moods: Calidoscopico

Desperately Seeking Solutions

First of all, I would just like to say that a permanent account on LiveJournal is the best $150 I ever spent. I composed this entry in my office and forgot to save it, and I thought I would have to wait until tomorrow morning to go and retrive it. Then I started a post and found that it had restored from the autosaved draft! Kudos, LJ developers. Keep up the great work.

Thanks to all who have helped with previous ones, which I posted on:

• March, 2005: Sat 05 Mar 2005, Sun 27 Mar 2005


• April, 2005: Sat 16 Apr 2005, Sat 29 Apr 2005


• May, 2005: Sun 15 May 2005, Sat 28 May 2005


• June, 2005: Sat 11 Jun 2005, Sat 25 Jun 2005


• July, 2005: Sat 09 Jul 2005


• August, 2005: Sat 13 Aug 2005, Sat 20 Aug 2005


• September, 2005: Sat 03 Sep 2005, Sat 17 Sep 2005


• October, 2005: Mon 03 Oct 2005, Sat 15 Oct 2005, Sat 29 Oct 2005


• November, 2005: Sat 12 Nov 2005, Sat 26 Nov 2005


• December, 2005: Sat 10 Dec 2005, Sat 24 Dec 2005


• January, 2006: Sat 07 Jan 2006, Sat 21 Jan 2006


• February, 2006: Sat 04 Feb 2006

Special thanks to burkhardt, tvn, and darana for replying to my last query.

Here's my fortnightly update:

• 1. Windows Vista woes: Here's the breakdown (literally).
  
  
  
  • The Jumping Cursor problem. This seems to have gotten better, but it might be that I've habituated, or perhaps it's because I type less text (as opposed to serial numbers) during all the installations. (Edit, 11:10 CST Wed 22 Feb 2006 - make that "during all the reinstallations of Vista". Gah.) I hear there is a Dell utilty for turning off that accursed touchpad when you plug in a USB mouse, though, so I'll check that.
  
  
  • The Incredible Vanishing Transparency. Killing UXSS.EXE solves this window manager problem, just as killing Explorer solves some file browser lockups. The window manager comes right back, with transparency. Every other time it dies, though, I have to either wait for it to die again, or kill it myself. It's like Infidel, if you remember that Infocom game. :-P
  
  
  • No sound from the headphones: I'm still waiting for a fix here.
  
  
  • Incompatibilities: Yeah, these aren't fixed yet. Edit, 11:10 CST Wed 22 Feb 2006 - Do not, repeat, do not install Daemon Tools or the ATI Mobility Radeon X300 display driver supplied by the OEM (Dell). These will hose your system - to wit, the first will bluesreen assiduously in the first case, even in safe mode, and I haven't been able to get out of 1024x768 mode in the second case.
    Oh, and do format the Windows partition if you reinstall Vista; the Windows.old and Windows.old.000 and Windows.old.001 directories take up a lot of space, and if you delete them, your current installation will stop booting. In a Harlan Ellisonesque episode, I deleted Windows.old.001 and found to my horror that I no longer had a login box, only a "Shut Down" button. I have no user name dialog but I must log in? Seriously: the fact that I know what Windows.old.001 looks like testifies to the fact that not only is Microsoft dead - it's getting ready to post personal ads on dHarmony and UndeadFriendFinder. Gah.
  
  
  • My lack of Hotmail access. Hotmail Popper seems to work, but it's a little shaky, and I'm not sure I want to pay $20 for something that works as system tray app instead of a mail client plug-in. Winmail Retriever also seems to work, but the same issue pertains. Why can't people just build it into Mozilla Thunderbird as Outlook 2003 does? (Yes, I know Hotmail's http access is a proprietary piece of legacy garbage. I was grandfathered in with a "valued user" account, so I don't have to pay for MSN Plus access. Also, KSU-CIS and KSU-CNS mail has been notoriously unstable for me for the last year and a half. So now you know why I still want Hotmail.)
  
  
  • My lack of Symantec AntiVirus. So, it seems that KSU CNS is looking to move to a new antivirus system. Fine! Please just quit beating around the bush, tust tell me what it is, and let me get the Vista version. Sheesh!
  
  
  • Macromedia ColdFusion MX 7. I'm still not sure what this is problem all about.
  
  
  
  
• 2. The Compactest Voice-over-IP: darana suggested Shoretel. I'm looking into it, though it may be that a P5-120 is just too dinky for any VOIP.


• 3. Viewing logs in Trillian 3.1: This problem is still happening on Hirilonde, my Dell Inspiron 6000 running Windows Vista Beta 2 (CTP Build 5270).

Now for the new questions:

IE7 Tabbrowser Extensions

Since I'm sure you're all tired of hearing my Windows Vista problems, here's one on Internet Explorer 7 instead. Does anyone know of a tabbrowser extensions package that will let me load bookmark tabs as a group the way I can in Mozilla Firefox?

Turning off security prompts in Vista

Is there any way to turn off those security messages by default? I mean the ones that go: "Do you really want to let me move/install/uninstall this file? Really? Really?"
Gah.

Datalog

What's a good Datalog interpreter? Anything on the order of LPA or Quintus Prolog would be good. Something free like GNU Prolog would be even better. I'm hoping Datalog has good free interpreters like JESS, CLIPS, SML and Objective CAML (INRIA's latter-day work) instead of being dinky like Prolog itself.


Thanks in advance,
Banazir