http://www.mutchek.com/blog works, writings, and creations Wed, 04 Jul 2007 00:43:01 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I have not completely tracked down the culprit here, but if I have seen this behavior, chances are somebody else has (or will) too. When I double-click on an old .doc or .xls file and open it in Office 2007, a shortcut to the file does not appear in Vista's "recent ... http://www.mutchek.com/blog/2007/06/27/office-2003-files-do-not-appear-on-vistas-recent-items-list/ I've been running Vista on two Dells pretty much since its retail release. Overall, I have been very (very) pleased with the upgrade. Power management is much improved and the quick wake-time from a hybrid sleep has allowed me to be a bit more aggressive about how quickly I let ... http://www.mutchek.com/blog/2007/06/15/does-vista-sleepwalk/ Microsoft's TechEd conference this year was every bit as good as it has been for the past few years. This was my sixth TechEd in 8 years and I'm already looking forward to 2008. The week in Orlando was a whirlwind: a firestorm of products, solutions, patterns, and partners. Way ... http://www.mutchek.com/blog/2007/06/11/teched-2007/ In 1984, Milton Bradley released the MB GameMaster Series game "Conquest of the Empire". It probably wasn't long after it's release that I got my copy and it's been with me ever since. Until this past Father's Day I hadn't had a chance to play for many years, but it ... http://www.mutchek.com/blog/2006/06/24/conquest-of-the-empire/ When scanning a stack of multi-page documents to PDF, I find it easier to scan each page individually, then combine them in a post-processing step. Here's a simple Monad script that merges multiple PDFs into a single multi-page document. http://www.mutchek.com/blog/2006/03/28/merge-pdfs-with-pdftk-and-msh/ Here's a simple screensaver I wrote a couple of weeks ago. Tested on Windows XP SP2, the saver gradually dims your desktop. From descriptions I have read, it is probably similar to a MacOS X screensaver that's pretty popular. The target tint (transparency) and the time (in seconds) it takes ... http://www.mutchek.com/blog/2006/03/28/tint-a-windows-screensaver/ This is strange but... it would seem that Norton Internet Security can interfere with the configuration web page(s) on the Linksys WRT54G . And when I say interfere, I mean "render inoperable". I discovered this while walking through a wireless setup with my brother-in-law over the phone. He's a saavy user, ... http://www.mutchek.com/blog/2006/03/22/linksys-wrt54g-and-norton-internet-security/ One of my (many) resolutions for 2006 is to adopt the new Microsoft Shell (MSH) into my daily routine. For me, the first steps down that road are language fundamentals (thank you Andy Oakley) and teaching myself to identify tasks that would be better done from the shell. I'll post ... http://www.mutchek.com/blog/2006/03/20/download-podcasts-with-msh-monad/ After years of hand-crafted web pages and custom templating systems, I'm adopting a basic blog format for this space. This site has been generated by a semi-custom templating/publishing engine that just became too cumbersome to maintain. Of course, when I wrote the engine, blogging had not yet come into its ... http://www.mutchek.com/blog/2006/03/06/new-blog-format/ Vonajé is a simple Java API that gives you programmatic access your Vonage account information, including voicemails. 0.3 includes experimental support for the Canadian Vonage service. Vonajé's primary use today is in Marty Lamb's TiVonage - an extension for TiVo that makes it easy to check your Vonage voicemail through ... http://www.mutchek.com/blog/2005/10/16/vonaje/