Silverlight

I'm trying to get sliverlight installed in firefox beta, and it installed once but didn't detect. I don't blame microsoft for that. However, when I redownloaded silverlight and installed it again, i got a message that the installation failed, and I could click a link for more information. This seems like something that shouldn't require visiting a website to tell me. Not to mention that it wasn't "another version of silverlight."

Delayed What?

I undocked my computer, went to a meeting, and then redocked it. Windows informed me that I have lost data because of this. I don't know what data, I wasn't trying to save anything, and I have no idea what on earth this is supposed to mean, so I'm going to ignore it.

Quicklaunch bar

I got to work this morning and turned on my computer only to notice that the windows updates I installed yesterday added an additional "Launch Microsoft Outlook" Icon to my quicklaunch bar. I've seen it do this before, so its no big. I just right click on the new Icon and click delete. This time, however, the entire taskbar dissapears and my computer locks up for 30 seconds. When it comes back, I try to click on the firefox icon and up pops the properties dialog for the icon. Same thing for all the other icons in my quicklaunch bar. Reboot and it goes away. WAY TO GO WINDOWS!!!

Outlook never forgets

I just sent this e-mail to our helpdesk. It makes me sad.

Zip files

In case you haven't heard, zip files are a cutting edge technology invented in the 80s to put compress multiple files into a single file. Windows XP comes with a "feature" that integrated zip file management into windows explorer.

However this morning I was zipping up a bunch of files in the background and then made the huge mistake of *gasp* attempting to extract files from a different zip archive at the same time. Take my word that readme.txt has taken much longer than 50 seconds already and there's no end in sight, considering the "time left" timer is going up. Maybe if windows used some of the 92% of my CPU that's idling it would have a chance at finishing this complicated operation before lunch time.

Microsoft TV

I was looking at my network connections the other day playing around with Bluetooth and I noticed a connection called "Microsoft TV/Video." I didn't know that Microsoft was in the TV Business, and I certainly never asked for it:


A quick google search revealed an explanation: this is obviously a feature included in windows by design.

We have some code in production that sends e-mails. Pretty common, I imagine. However I used the app today and received this message:

Unexpected Error: The message could not be sent to the SMTP server. The transport error code was 0x80040217. The server response was not available.

Wow, great error message, .NET! After a few minutes searching on google I found out that means that your SMTP username/password were denied. Thanks for the help, Microsoft!