via Slashdot (actually via Slashdot's RSS fead in my Google Reader...I am such a sellout), interesting article from Baseline magazine on how Google manages it's own IT infrastructure. Awesome stuff.
Outlook 2010 is p r e t t y . Of course aesthetics alone is rarely reason-enough to upgrade, (unless you use the Lotus Notes client). Fortunately or unfortunately at work, my team tends to stay on the cutting edge, testing computer configurations before handing them over to our customers, including our developers. We eat our own dog food, in a sense. One absolutely horrible, annoying, useless, idiotic, empty-headed-fool, middle-management-moron-inspired "feature" which should be ripped out and stuffed violently up said manager's, uh, nose , is this ridiculous uncommanded activity which occurs just by hovering your mouse over a name . E.g., start a new mail message Populate the To: field with one or more of your contacts Let your mouse and mind wander. Hover over a contacts name and sweet baby jebus isn't Outlook wonderful! An uncommanded action occurs a new mail message appears WTF?!1 Try it. Hover your mouse over a name in the To: f...
Annoyances.org has the fix to a bug that's been bothering me for weeks - how to get Windows Explorer to hurry up and list files/folders/mapped drives by simply disabling LMHosts lookup on the file server(s). Brilliant! link EDIT - I had to revisit this, because working in Windows Explorer continually gives the impressions it's fine. But close it, wait a minute, open it again, and it still hangs. (We're mapping drives via DFS to several servers, but mapping them one by one works fine. Also, I'm one of the few users to have detail view enabled...). Finally, via this page , found this fabulous page over at SysInternals , those people rock. This is such bullsh!t--Microsoft fixed this explorer.exe cluster fsck in Vista--but there's no patch for currently supported OSes! No patch for Windows XP, which our entire org. uses. In fact, most of the Windows PC's run it now. Bastards! Stuff like this from Redmond really pisses me off. I'm switching to Linux,...
I know, I know, why would you do this? What can I say...I like the way I can customize IE. But after getting hit with this stupid WMF vulnerability (the popups are back, by the way, the box is hosed), IE is dead to me. When running at higher resolutions (XGA & up), it's great to be able to combine toolbars. In IE, you can drag and drop toolbars onto the same level. Turns out in Firefox, you can customize & put all the objects onto one or two toolbars . Beautiful. You can even get a skin to make Firefox look like IE. I know, I know. But it's all about comfort level. And not getting infected with the next zero-freaking-day-freaking-exploit. Besides, if you can make Firefox look like IE, then make it the default browser for you end-users....most of them won't know or won't care. There are some exceptions (Exchange 2003's Outlook Web Access is positively beautiful in IE). I'm more/less talking about day-to-day usage.