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Sending Ecards was pretty boring until I found JibJab. JibJab allows you to create little animations with your and your friends heads in it. It’s really fun, see for yourself:

I have been using Microsoft programs for a long time now and I have seen a lot of BSDs (Blue Screen of Death), but they usually occur when some application or hardware crashes or when you changed something in your system. 2 days ago, I experienced a somewhat unexpected BSD.

Like every night, I closed my notebook and let it go into stand-by mode. But in the morning, when I opened my notebook to check my Emails, I saw a BSD. "BUG_CODE_USB_DRIVER", it says. That’s weird… I started my system again and got a different BSD saying nothing else than "your system crashed, stupid" and rebooted after making a memory dump. Now Vista seemed to have realized that it’s not working like it should and went into repair mode. That’s nice, I thought, but after the repair mode, I still got the BSD. After the next reboot, Vista went into repair mode again… After about 3 hours, it ended with a message like "Can’t repair you system", quit and left me with the BSD. What now? I tried the safe mode, no luck. The same BSD laughing at me, preventing me from working on my notebook.

After some more hours of battling with the Vista BSD, I used the ultimate Anti-Microsoft weapon and reinstalled everything. I guess in Microsoft’s world, not even the old law "Never touch a running system!" works anymore…

I have a Windows 2003 SBS at home and because Windows doesn’t support VLANs natively, I use Vmware to run a virtual opensuse router. This works perfectly fine for all systems except for the host OS itself. On my host OS, my download speed was around 3.5 MB/s, which is just fine, but the upload was only around 20 kB/s, which is less than 1/50 of what should be possible. After 2 nights of searching, I finally found the culprit. I used Bridged networking for the connection between Host, Guest and all other PCs in the network, but Vmware seems to have a problem with this setting. Switching to host-only networking solved the problem for the host, but disabled the guest talking with other PCs. So I added a new virtual network adapter in Vmware, making one host-only and the other bridged. After removing the old gateway and setting the Hosts Gateway to the host-only IP of the guest, everything is now lightning fast.

How do I get these two working together without additional tools like pptpproxy? That was a question I had for a long time and finally there is a solution. On a forum, I found a post that allows GRE connections through the default openSUSE firewall. So here is the working configuration for my openSUSE 10.2 with Microsoft Small Business Server 2003.

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I never thought that this would happen, but it did. The “My Documents” folder has probably become one of the most important folders I use, so it needs to be backed up, which I did. I had them on my server, on my notebook and on my desktop computer. With my old server having raid 5, I was pretty sure that I’ll never lose them.

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It seems like Firefox has a problem with disabled and re-enabled text input fields. Once deactivated and then reactivated, the blinking cursor disappears. It is also not possible to see the selection. Although everything works just fine, it is pretty annoying. Here is the solution for this problem. It involves Javascript, but you probably won’t have this problem when you don’t use Javascript to de- and re-activate text fields:

var inbox = document.getElementById( 'idOfInputBox');
inbox.blur();
inbox.disabled=false;
inbox.focus();

After using Windows Vista, I wondered if it was still possible to connect to internet via VPN (Virtual Private Network) or DUN (Dial-Up Networking) though the command line. Well, it works just like before in XP.

The command for connecting is (replace name with the name of the connection):
rasphone.exe -t "name"

The command for disconnecting is:
rasphone.exe -h "name"

Yes, it definitely is! I played “Counter-Strike” for years, but I would do it again if I’d given the chance to choose.
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After getting everything to work on my Desktop with Windows Vista, I decided to install Vista on my notebook too. I own a Acer Extensa 2902, which is nothing else than the Travelmate 292 Lmi-M11. With a Pentium M Centrino 1,4 Ghz, 1 GB Ram, 80 GB hard disk and a Mobility Radeon 9700 with 64MB, it still meets the minimum requirements for Vista new Look’n'Feel, Aero Glass. It’s one of the major reasons why I installed Vista. I just can’t take that ugly look of XP. Of course there are other reasons, but a nice design lets you work much more comfortable. Vista will probably rob the gamebility of my Notebook. I don’t think that it’ll be even close for running Vista and a 3D accelerated game at the same time. Well, after having a working set of CD for installation, it actually only took me two tries to install it. Quite amazing compared to my Desktop try. So next were the drivers again. Luckily, the only things missing were my network printer and Bluetooth. The network printer worked perfectly using the workaround I wrote about but Bluetooth was not working. I need BlueSoleil, but the Vista-Version 3.0 is still not finished. Too bad, but I didn’t need it anyway. So now I came across the next problem: Roaming profiles under Vista with Windows 2003 Small Business Server.

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After using Windows Vista for a few weeks and several emails with Samsung support, there seemed to be no solution to get my printer (Samsung ML-1410) to work as a network driver. My printer was connected to my SBS2003 Server (Windows Small Business Server 2003) via USB and shared as \\Server\Samsung Laser. My Notebook (XP) could access it without problems, but my fresh install of Vista on my desktop computer always gave me 2 different errors. First one is “The specified print monitor is unknown”, which is caused by disabling User Access Control (UAC). Turning it back on might help some, but it didn’t work for me. I got the error “There is not enough memory to complete this operation”. Anyway, here is the solution for this problem:
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