OK, this is off-topic but what the heck - it's interesting (to me, anyway).

I've seen commercial advertisements for Silver Lightning on various television shows, The product demonstration shows a person placing the Silver Lightning plate under water, then placing tarnished silver on the plate -- and like magic, the silver brightens and the tarnish vanishes.

I'm an inquisitive guy, so I assumed this was due to some kind of chemical reaction involving electrolysis, so I searched the web to see what I could find on the subject.

It turns out that silver tarnish is silver sulfide, much of which comes from the trace amounts of sulfur in the air. The Silver Lightning product is apparently nothing more than an aluminum plate, which, when placed in a solution of baking soda and water (about 1 cup per gallon) causes an electrochemical reaction that draws the sulfur away from the silver and to the aluminum.read more »

I was debugging a Windows application that makes use of DirectShow to render media - and for some strange reason, the application would terminate without warning when run under Visual Studio's debugger.

No error message, no exceptions, nothing. The application ran fine outside the debugger. I was able to debug the same code base several weeks ago without incident.

Poking around a bit, I isolated the line of code causing the silent termination: The DirectShow IGraphBuilder interface's Render method. Digging deeper, I find that the ultimate culprit is Ahead Nero 7 Essentials, which had been installed on my development system several weeks before. Apparently, Nero Essentials installs a variety of DirectShow filters on the target system, and, these filters actively prevent running under a debugger. In this case (on my development system), there was absolutely no error message or other indication of why - just a silent termination.

After I isolated the problem, I was able to determine that there is supposed to be a "Nero Protection Error" message box presented to the user, but it never appeared on my system, nor did the system event log contain any useful information. Feh.

This gets my vote as one of the dumbest stunts I've ever seen. I am pretty sure there's nothing all that special about Nero's DirectShow filters, and, if someone really wants to reverse engineer them or break the protection/licensing, they will. This lame attempt does nothing more than encourage (force?) legitimate users to remove the Nero filters from their machines. Nice going. Did the developers or marketing geniuses stop to think about this use case?

Ahead Nero 7 Essentials just cost me an hour or more of productive time. Then there's the aggravation.

Lame. Stupid. Did I mention lame? And I used to *like* Nero software.

ImgBurn - Freeware, and it works!

Update: I've tried ImgBurn, a freeware CD/DVD image read/write utility, and so far, it looks good. UI is slightly wonky but it's a very good piece of free software - and, best of all, you can install it without Administrator rights. Give it a try!

Here's a great page with a roundup of programmer fonts:
http://www.lowing.org/fonts/

Other resources

Consolas (Microsoft)
Inconsolata
Revisiting Programming Fonts

I had the 'honor' of rescuing yet another victim of a pre-installed software nightmare. A new co-worker was working with his notebook (a Hewlett-Packard, recent vintage, less than a year old with Vista Home Basic installed).

The complaint? Minimum five (yes, FIVE) minute boot time from power-on to desktop interaction.

After a cursory examination, I found that it wasn't a hardware problem, nor was it due to memory limitations: the system had 512MB RAM, Vista was using just over 300MB with no other applications running (yes, that's a lot, but this is Vista, after all).read more »

It's one of the occupational hazards of computer use: eye strain, fatigue, and repetitive strain injury (RSI). Computer Vision Syndrome (CVS) is a definite risk.

It's important to take a break from time to time - but how do we do that when there's so much work to be done? So many web sites to visit? Another forum post to read?read more »

You can remove items from (or add items to) the Vista Welcome Center. If your Windows Vista machine came bundled with a bunch of pre-loaded software and trialware (as do most consumer machines) you are likely to see promotional entries in the welcome center that may be more annoying than useful - for example, if you uninstall the cure-worse-than-the-disease anti virus software or some of the other disk-filler trialware, you will probably still see lingering but non-functional items in the Welcome Center long after you uninstalled the related programs. read more »

I just stumbled on to this PDF file that provides examples of misleading advertising or claims and how to avoid them when building a web site or page.

This registry file fixes the very broken search function in XP - by default, only known file types are searched, so, if a folder has files with extensions that do not have file associations registered with XP, they will not be searched for the desired text string - and, you won't be told about the files that weren't searched! I've spent countless minutes trying to figure out why a file wasn't found when I know it's in a folder somewhere...

Background info:read more »

• Search for All File Types (Windows XP) - Winguides.com
• Microsoft's info on the registry mod
  

In the good (bad) old days, we used to use a Microsoft tool, RegClean which would scrub the Windows registry for dead information (which tended to accumulate if you removed previously installed software, and for other reasons.) This accumulation would cause your system to slow down, use more memory, and be less stable.

Microsoft stopped supporting RegClean for anything newer than Windows 98; so, if you have Win2k, XP, or Server 2003, what can you do to maintain system performance?

We used to use ToniArts EasyCleaner (older site here) which worked pretty well. I've not felt the need to use this since I don't add/remove software or components very frequently.read more »

D-Link DWL-650 Info and Drivers

Interesting article regarding an external
antenna for this card:

http://c0rtex.com/~will/antenna/
(older version archived here) http://www.guerrilla.net/reference/80211_mod/dwl-650_ext_antenna/

Alternative drivers for D-Link DWL-650 wireless network card may be located
at D-Link's UK site:
ftp://ftp.dlink.co.uk/pub/wireless/dwl-650/read more »