• Mood: irritated
• Music: The Quintet - Wee (Jazz At Massey Hall)

March of the Linux

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, Sat 18 Feb 2006

Special thanks to prahlad, nikolasco, and zaimoni for replying to my last query.

Here's my fortnightly update:

• 1. IE7 Tabbrowser Extensions: I gave up on IE7 and switched - first to Opera 8.5, then to Mozilla 1.7.12. The former gives me tabbed browsing with no GMail; the latter works like Firefox for all intents and purposes, sans certain plugins.


• 2. Turning off security prompts in Vista: To quote U2, I still haven't found what I'm looking for. I haven't really been looking, though.


• 3. Datalog: nikolasco recommended XSB, and I have since read some good things about it, so that is what I will try this fall. It'll take me a summer to get completely prepped.

Now for the new questions:

More Windows Woes

Here are just a few of the persistent problems I am having with Windows Vista. I'm not 100% sure it's all Vista-specific, but I haven't had these particular problems with XP Pro or Home.

• Closing windows with Ctrl-W. What happened to this feature? Do I have to do some explicit mapping of control keys?


• Elevating security privileges for file moving. Is there any way to "Run Elevated" by default? It gets really annoying when you pop in a CD, its AUTORUN executable kicks in, and the 10 minues later, you get a message that you didn't have system administrator privileges and now the installer is quitting.


• System Restore. I'd like to be able to roll back the registry to an earlier state, as I could in XP. "Add/Remove Programs" seems far more helpless than it used to be, and it seems just as dangerous as Sysem Restore to me.

Windows applications problems

• Restoring tabs in IE7. Any idea whether there is a plug-in?


• Making Opera 8.5 work with GMail. I would like to have those Javascript-based "cc:" field auto-completion features and such.


• Reading Chinese... or not. I'd also like to be able to turn on Unicode, Big-5, traditional encodings, and other standardized encodings. Edit, 04:30 CST Mon 06 Mar 2006 - However, this needs to be off by default! I installed Proofing Tools and now the whole computer has a tendency to revert back to Chinese. I would like to turn off the Pinyin and all other Chinese, and only get them when I hit my escape key.

Non-Vista question, kindasorta: latest Athlon processors

Which one of the following do you recommend for a good desktop PC featuring heavy development and testing of graphics, geometry, genetic and evolutionary computation, and why?

• 0. Socket 939 or Socket AM2 (DDR2 SDRAM, 939 plus 754 replacement) motherboard?


• 1. Dual-core or single-core?


• 2. If dual-core, Athlon 64 X2 (Toledo-style) or Athlon FX-60; otherwise, the latest Athlon 64.


• 3. SLI or single GPU.

Thanks in advance,
Banazir