Here is a tip that may help some of you out there that are working with Windows and Internet Explorer, which can get kind of quirky at times. I don’t know about any of you, but I have found it rather annoying that I can’t download Internet Explorer 6 from Microsoft’s website, other than the online installer that downloads as part of the install. Well, here is a way to use that installer to download the source files so you can perform an off-line installation, which has been useful for me sometimes.

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Here is an interesting article that I ran across. It’s in response to another article comparing Windows and Linux and attempting to show why Windows is so much the better. The article I am linking to is a rebuttal, yes, but more of a take on the comparison of Linux (which is open source and free) to Windows (which is not free, or maybe it is in some respects). It’s a good article, and he has some valid points I think. All in all I thought it was worth the read, so I decided to share it. Enjoy!

I guess this could be considered part of the password post that I put up a few minutes ago, but I wanted to post this script over in the forums that is a PERL script which generates passwords for you. Check it out, take a look and maybe you can get something beneficial from it!

One thing that I love is text editors. No, I don’t count notepad in the list, but I do count Notepad++ for Windows. It’s one of the best text editors I have used, and it has some very impressive and awesome features. Now, before I go any further, for the record let me state that my favorite, and the best text editor of all time is Vi/Vim, hands down. Whatever platform, whatever you need, it’s the best (it’s better than emacs, get over it!). It is also however, rather a pain to learn to use and most people who aren’t already using it on UNIX/Linux, aren’t going to bother learning it just to have a good text editor on Windows.

Saying that gets me back to Notepad++, which is a very full featured replacement for little old notepad that comes with Windows. A couple of the main things that I like about Notepad++ is that not only can it handle text files created on UNIX/Linux platforms, it can convert between the two! Yes, I said convert between Windows formatted text files and UNIX/Linux formatted text files, and back again. That alone makes it a damn fine tool. Throw in syntax highlighting, a tabbed interface, installer-less operation if so desired and lots more stuff to get a powerful and free tool for your kit. So, go check it out and you can thank me later!

Ok boys and girls, I found a really cool item today! I found a site that has compiled a list of 156 things you can access, get to, or run from the command line. So check it out, some you’ll know I am sure, some you may not. All can be run by hitting Start -> Run and entering the command. Enjoy!

Let me start this article by saying that I finally broke down last year and bought myself an mp3 player, specifically an iPod. I didn’t choose the iPod because it was trendy or hip or whatever, I chose it because for what it could do and the space it had, for the price, it was the best deal. Now, with an iPod you need to use iTunes (I realize there are other 3rd party tools out there, but call me a purist, I want to use it the way it was intended). In many ways, iTunes rocks, and in many ways, iTunes sucks. Whether you love it or hate it, you are pretty much stuck with it.

That being said, let me share with you a couple of errors I received recently, and what I did (finally) to make them go away. In my dealings with these errors, my searching on the Internet didn’t find any solution to the problem, although some information pointed me in the right direction. Ultimately, I spent enough time troubleshooting and testing (a.k.a banging my head against the wall) that I got the problem resolved, so I thought I would share, just in case anyone else runs across this issue. Judging from the number of posts I saw about it, lots of folk other than myself have had this come up too.

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