Not that this is any surprise, but the surprise to me was that it was built using Java and that it actually cost money. I would think that with all the pirating going on in Asia that if you were going to create a competitor to Office that you would do so and not make […]

If you think Firefox is too slow on your system you may wish to give these optimized builds a try. The rendering certainly seemed faster on my machine and rendering was pretty fast as it was. In any case they install in their own directory so it shouldn’t hurt your current Firefox configuration.

Josh pointed me to a great resource. At Whitespace I was bemoaning the fact that ClearType and CRTs just don’t seem to mix. If I implemented it the text just seemed more blurry and would make my head spin. Well Microsoft has a ClearType tuner that works really well with LCDs, but also with CRTs. […]

A nice read on Longhorn. I knew some stuff about the OS, but really wasn’t interested in reading other articles. This one however is quick and to the point and offers some great screenshots. My favorite bit has to do with how they are integrating WinFS and its Database capabilities.
Graphically it seems they are trying […]

Jon Udell posts a preview of Adobe’s new Designer software which he describes as “InfoPath for PDF”. Looks to be an interesting piece of software and we all know everyone loves to open PDFs (*snicker*).

Some constraints, such as field lengths, are handled automatically. But when I wrote a regular-expression restriction into the schema, Designer’s preview […]

I have known about this for some time, but figured it would be helpful to a couple of you out there. In a nutshell it can be quite easy to make Windows XP look stunning. I don’t spend too much time looking at my desktop, but if I did I would put some time into […]

A nice discussion going on over at Ars about the merits of using C# for game development. At first you might think that speed could possibly be an issue but it seems that there has been a ported version of Quake2 over to managed C++ (I know not C#) and it was some percentage points […]

David Coursey makes an interesting point on why many people are not interested in Office competitors WordPerfect and StarOffice (OpenOffice). Outlook makes the Office Suite invaluable to a lot of people. Neither package offers and email client. I know on Linux you have Evolution, but it does not come with OpenOffice. Why should someone who […]

Have you ever wanted to display a certain dialog just by clicking on a shortcut? Maybe you wanted to have a shortcut to open the Mouse Control Panel, and display the Buttons page by default (so that you can easily reconfigure your mouse buttons to work for playing games or something). Well, using rundll32.exe, you […]

If you’re using Win2k or XP (or, dare I say it, NT4), you’re probably used to using the Task Manager to see what’s currently going on in your system, and killing any processes that have run amok. I know that I have, and I greatly appreciate all of its additional functionality that makes it worlds […]

First I have posted two Microsoft .Net articles in a row and both titles suck. What the hell is Micorsoft thinking with these things? Are they even thinking? Anyways, here is an interview with head honcho of the World’s Greatest Programming Language, VB.Net (snicker, snicker).

You can’t call me a rock star until I can get […]

Pretty much any forum I have frequented has had a “Post your desktop” thread. In this case I have followed those threads at ArsTechnica for quite a while now and thought I would share them with you. It is amazing what some people do with their desktops. I don’t even see mine but once every […]

If you are a keyboard fiend (I know that I am), you prefer to use the keyboard over the mouse whenever possible. While Windows does have a keyboard equivalent for nearly everything in its UI, there are some keyboard shortcuts that are hard to find, or just aren’t really known about at all. Enter the […]

So this kid find a critical hole in Microsoft’s Jet Database Engine, informs them of it, and spend six months with them fixing it. Very, very cool stuff. All he gets is a mention on their website for the help. Not cool, not cool, not cool.

Mr Thompson said that he initially had difficulty convincing Microsoft […]

I know this has been on everyone’s minds lately. Microsoft’s Java Virtual Machine Implementation was about to lose all support this year, then Sun (or Mr. McNealy for that matter) decided to show up and kiss the ring on Gates’ finger and now the world is good again.

The news isn’t all positive for MSJVM advocates, […]

If you use Windows you owe yourself to give this little app a shot. Although it is shareware you might find it useful enough to pay for.

True Launch Bar is a replacement for the standard Quick Launch bar. All functions presented in Quick Launch are also in it. Fully compatible with Quick Launch because it […]