Category: IT

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Windows Vista or The Holy Grail of Usability

Fine. After years (heck, even decades!) of staring into distorting, flickering, radiating and mirrorlike CRT screens we finally managed to banish those darn things from our desks and to use distortion-free, flicker-free, radiation-free, coated TFT screens instead. Time to put glares and reflections back into the GUI (just try to read the labels on the taskbar)! Hallelujah! ;)

(I bet Microsoft will get back to this once the dust has settled. Apple made a similar experience with Aqua’s transparency effect which was significantly reduced in later versions.)

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Gentoo: If ’emerge postfix-2.2.5′ fails..

..for a rather strange reason like

>>> md5 src_uri ;-) postfix-2.2.5.tar.gz

mind the following:

* You are upgrading from a incompatible version.
* You MUST stop postfix BEFORE install it to your system.
* If you want a minimal downtime, emerge postfix with:
* `FORCE_UPGRADE=1 emerge –buildpkgonly postfix`; then
* `/etc/init.d/postfix stop && emerge –usepkgonly postfix`
* run etc-update or dispatch-conf and merge the configuration files.
* Next /etc/init.d/postfix start

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SugarCRM – an open source CRM suite

SugarCRM

I’ve just installed it on this server. The installation procedure is very admin-friendly: 1.) Create a db 2.) Create a db user 3.) Point the browser to the SugarCRM directory. And it’s amazing how many features SugarCRM offers – probably enough for most SMEs.

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Essential Mozilla Firefox/Thunderbird Extensions (Part II)

Here’s the second, completed part of my list about Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird extensions and hints I find very useful for my daily work (and yours too, possibly ;):

Essential Mozilla Firefox extensions

Web Developer
ScrapBook
Flat Bookmark Editing
savegenpage
DictionarySearch
Duplicate Tab
Bookmarks Synchronizer
miniT (drag+indicator)
Copy Plain Text
undoclosetab (undoclosetab.xpi for FF 1.0.6)
Chinese-English-Japanese Character Hint Bar
Digger

Other hints for Mozilla Firefox:

  • Click with the middle mouse button to open a link on a new tab
  • Click with the middle mouse button on a tab to close it
  • Hit CTRL-p to print a page which is loaded in a new window without any menu or toolbar displayed
  • How to make Firefox silently display error pages (like in IE) instead of the error dialog boxes: Enter “about:config” in the URL field and change “browser.xul.error_pages.enabled” from “false” to “true” (just click on the entry to switch it)

Essential Mozilla Thunderbird extensions

Enigmail
MinimizeToTray
Virtual Identity
Quote Colors
MessageFaces

Other hints for Mozilla Thunderbird:

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Essential Mozilla Firefox/Thunderbird Extensions (Part I): ScrapBook

A useful Firefox extension for people who would like to share cached “bookmarks” between several workstations:

ScrapBook – Firefox Extension
ScrapBook @ Mozilla Update

BTW I had a similar idea for a long time. My architecture would be more flexible though, allowing any client (not only Firefox), not require any client-side configuration and provide even more useful features. I intend to implement it as soon as time permits as I really miss such a power app. In the meantime, ScrapBook serves as an interim solution.