Recently I was looking on TigerDirect for some computer parts I planned on buying to build a new PC (after having my current one for upwards of probably eight years). I found that “Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007″ is there marked down to a very decent price for “Black Friday”. I upgraded my laptop to Windows 7 (ordered when Amazon.com had the pre-order discount) so I can keep up with how things will one day be when businesses can’t keep using Windows XP anymore. So, why not Office 2007?
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My laptop came with Windows Vista Home Basic, which is the version with everything disabled because the laptop’s hardware “can’t handle it”. Never mind that Linux+KDE can do the same things and more with no slow-downs.

Since Amazon had the $50 upgrade deal, I decided, “Why not?” I like to have Windows around “just in case”, but Vista is so sluggish, and supposedly Windows 7 runs better on low-end hardware than Vista does (due to the netbook rush). Of course, Windows 7 also recommends 1GB of RAM, and I have only half of that. Linux runs just fine with half a gig, but maybe an upgrade to one gig won’t be too bad in the future. We’ll see…

Update: This is the problem I’m having on activating Windows 7. Rather than calling Microsoft, I used the registry/command line hack to get it “activated”.

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Plain text files and spreadsheets are too limited for necessary data storage for story information. I’ve tried working out a text file format that I can load into a custom-written program to work with the data, but that just hasn’t worked out. I decided to check out database software.

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One of the nice things about MyBB 1.4 (the first version I’ve used) is the “View New Posts” link in the header, but the “Mark All Forums Read” links is only on the main page, and at the bottom.

Below is a plugin I wrote that adds a “Mark All Forums Read” link to the header, after the “View New Posts” and “View Today’s Posts” links. (more…)

Random thinking. I loved using Phoenix. It became Firebird, and it was still great. It became Firefox, and it was starting to become sluggish. Firefox 1.5 is the last I used before Opera released a version I felt comfortable with. (Opera 8, was it?) Recently, I tried Google Chrome for Linux, and I liked what I saw. I’m not planning on leaving Opera any time soon, but recent Firefox news got me thinking about competition versus cooperation. (more…)

I’ve tried KDE on Windows Vista on my laptop previously (4.2.2), but various issues prevent me from seriously recommending it to anyone. I’ve decided to give it another try to see how things have improved in the last minor release (4.2.3). (more…)

Today was a day to get the last of my WordPress installs upgraded to 2.7, and to install the WP-DBManager plug-in on them. (more…)