Speed Up IE7

Found a useful tip in PC Pro Magazine for speeding up IE7.

After installing IE7, XP will load ctfmon.exe at startup. You can disable it in the Services, but it will reload itself every time you run IE7.

To fix this and speed up IE7 -

Control Panel -> Regional and Language Options -> Languages -> Details -> Advanced.

Set the checkbox “Turn off advanced text services” and [Apply].

Albert says…

There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle. (Albert Einstein)

43

43 Today.

and…

Got a promotion last Wednesday.

That means I have to buy lots of buns for everyone at work tomorrow.

Second Life

Sam’s into online gaming at the moment.

We’ve given him a subscription to Runescape, since this is the one that most of his friends are using (when they aren’t on MSN Messenger or Bebo).  

I’ve been thinking of trying out some of these virtual worlds myself. I’ve read a few articles which mention Second Life, but I don’t know much about it. Must check it out.  

Blogging is fine for recording a few thoughts, or using as a scrapbook (cutting and pasting info from other places, so I can keep track of them) but you feel as if you are talking to yourself all the time – which I am actually, since I haven’t told anyone about my blog.

Open Source Software

I was talking to a Project Manager the other day who was managing an SAP project I was helping out on. We got talking about web development projets, and he mentioned that he does some web development work for customers from time to time. He uses a package callled NVU. I told him about some of the Open Source packages which exist which can be used for free to generate web sites very easily.

Joomla – for content management, especially useful for sites to be maintained by owners or groups without techie skills. Lots of add-on modules and well-designed style templates available.  ( http://www.joomla.org )

WordPress – for blogs of course ( http://www.wordpress.org ).

Open Source Web Design – for template skeleton pages / sites. ( http://www.oswd.org )

Why pay a web development company when you can do it all yourself?

Browser Applications

I read an article recently on Microsoft’s new rival to Flash for embedding applications in browsers. An example is the online book reader application used by the British Library – see http://ttpdownload.bl.uk/browserapp.xbap