CHRISdotTODD

I recently noticed a new problem with Word and Excel opening rather slow -- on a new laptop no less. And when I was connecting through our VPN to the office, I would get an error message, "The printer has not yet responded... Continue to wait?" Turns out there was a problem with my default printer definition in Windows being corrupt. I delete the old definition and created a new definition (Add Printers and Faxes) and the problem has gone away.

I ran across a great article on Royal HeHe2-ness from guest blogger Ian McLean about DRM and why it needs to go. Why Its Time To Kick DRM To The Curb give a good perspective on the options for digital media companies and consumers. Mr. McLean re-enforces the fact that honest folks are impacted, while the less honest have a better product. Further he also points out that in many cases there are free alternatives that are as good or nearly as good as the expensive DRM software packages. Give this article a read.

If you re unfamiliar with the term DRM, it stands for digital rights management. The record (RIAA), movie (MPAA), and software industry has used forms of DRM to prohibit you from sharing your purchased digital goods with others. This continues to be a headache for the honest, while the less honest folks are able to find free "cracked" version of the same materials. Take for example if you purchased music from the likes of Microsoft or Yahoo! You were notified (hopefully) this past year that they will no longer support these services. For reasons that appear to agree with what has been argued all along -- that DRM only impacts honest, paying customers -- Microsoft, Yahoo!, and now Wal-Mart are reversing their business models by discontinuing the DRM practice. Microsoft and Yahoo! have easied up some what on their position, to give you more time to find a work-around, but nevertheless you are left either with losing the music once your current PC dies or the burden of transf...

Recently a new vulnerability was found in the core of the web surfing systems... the DNS server. The DNS server, short for Domain Name System, is used to translate a websites URL to a websites ip address, the addressing system of the Internet, so your web browser can find the website you are looking for. In order to manage the load of users, there are many, many DNS servers. In fact DNS is provided by ISPs -- either their own or third party systems that they have paid for -- so when you connect through your ISP, you can find the website you want. When the DNS you connect to cannot find a website, it will contact another DNS server to update its records. Likewise, websites will have DNS servers to tell other DNS servers what ip addresses are required for their website. Here's the problem at hand. It has been figured out how a hacker could tell a DNS server a wrong ip address, when the DNS server is updating its records. It does this through forcing the server to ask for a new update...

In Excel, I will use formulas quite frequently for my analysis. At times I want to reference the resulting value of the formula for comparison or to feed another formula. Unfortunately, if you are doing a comparison, Excel will try to compare the formula instead of the formulas results. Well, turns out there is an easy way to correct this. If you want your formula result to be a number, then use the VALUE function. If you want the formula result to be text, use the TEXT function. Here is the syntax for each: VALUE(text) TEXT(value,format_text) -- The format_text value can be any format from the Category box on the Number tab (in the Format Cells dialog box) except General. Here is an example of each: =VALUE(MID(A2,46,FIND("&",A2)-46)) -- this actually finds a number beginning with the 46th character of a string, and continues until it finds the ampersand character. By wrapping the formula with VALUE, I can now compare the number to other numbers in my looku...

With the release of Google Chrome just weeks ago, speed tweaking tips are popular topics for Firefox. I found a list at TechRadar to be fairly good. Of the 8 tips offered, I am trying the following: 1 - 3, 6, and 8. Not that some of these are as much about perception as really making any difference. But isn't perception all we really care about? If we perceive it to be faster, it must be faster.

With all the buzz around Microsoft's latest ad campaign, prior videos are re-appearing. Thanks to Digg, I found this video with Christopher Lloyd as Microsoft kicks-off TechEd 2007. I found most of it quite funny. "Oh, Biff..."