Tip

I'm pretty sure that this wasn't happening with the 9.x releases. But, I found that when I middle-clicked in Opera to get the scroll icon and scroll up/down a page, all that happened was that whatever was in my clipboard got pasted into the page, with the page trying to navigate to the clipboard text. In Opera's defence, the paste action is generally the default action across all applications in Linux. However, this also made this behaviour inconsistent across different platforms and even across other browsers on the same platform.

I had no idea how long the windows box I'm using has been up for... While on Linux, I could've just typed uptime to find out, it appears that m$ never expected their systems to be up long enough to bother with such a utility.

A little digging around and some experimentation unearthed the following methods for finding this out on XP:

  1. Open a command prompt and type "systeminfo" and look for "system up time". This might require an updated system.

I made a mistake earlier today when looking for a GUI application to manage samba shares. I installed the wrong application - gadmin-samba (which is quite fugly and buggy) - instead of system-config-samba which is clean and has worked well for me in the past. gadmin-samba added all sorts of nonsense and in a bid to reset the samba configuration, I nuked the files in /etc/samba to give system-config-samba something of a fresh slate.

While doing some routine cleaning up of installed programs on my Windows box, I ran into an entry that simply said "vjOcx1.9"... I had no idea what this was, nor was any related information terribly helpful. Some googling later, I found that that this is very like connected to TV4Africa, a p2p TV player that IIRC, I installed to watch snooker via the net (It didn't work).

Hope this helps somebody out there :)

During a fresh install of Windows XP SP3, upon reboot after the initial copying of files, I ran into an error message stating that there were CRC checksum issues with a file on my CD-ROM, namely D:\i386\asms.(sys?). Google divined that I very likely had a problem with the disc media... but considering the fact that I've installed XP using the same media very recently, I doubted this to be the case.

One of my Linux boxen is primarily used as a server and frequently just sits around without monitor, keyboard or mouse attached. While previously, it used to be connected to the network via ethernet, now that I've got the USB wifi adapter for my machines, it's even niftier and only requires power to get up and running.

Besides P2P, the rise of sites like Rapidshare, Megaupload and the like have provided another avenue for pirates (and other legitimate users of course ...) to peddle their wares. Unlike P2P, there is no upload and related politics involved and matters are attended to with straightforward HTTP downloads (which are usually quite speedy). Most of these sites have a premium option as well as a hamstrung free option.

If you're a firefox user (and usually, also a programmer), you've very likely come across situations where you are confronted with an error page while accessing an https address, because the certificate is self-signed. Getting around it involves adding an exception, which requires a multitude of steps ...

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