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I use Firefox and one of the plugins I like most is the Google Notebook plugin. With Google Notebook I can just click on a button in the taskbar in the bottom of the Firefox screen and see everything that I have copied and pasted into there.

I used to just save things occasionally in Google notebook until a few weeks ago when I had to remember an IP address between my kitchen computer and my living room computer. Think, think, think. I could write this down or write it or save it to a text file in a shared folder (I am very non-digital sometimes) then I thought:

“Hey why not use Google Notebook”

All I needed to do was open that little button on the bottom of my Firefox, copy and paste the IP address into that, walk over to the other PC and open Google Notebook on that computer and Voila (I never use that word in real life just online) I had the IP there to paste into the other thing I was doing.

One of the things that happens more and more to people these days is using multiple computers at home. I regularly use 1 computer at work but I regularly use three different computers at home. Part of my install for all of my computers is to install Google Notebook anyway

I just ran across a story on MSNBC that apparently Microsoft is allowing sales of Windows XP to continue into the missle of next year.

Microsoft to extend Windows XP sales - Tech News & Reviews - MSNBC.com

To some people this may be a sign that Windows Vista has failed as an operating system and I guess to that question time can only tell. The real reason though that Windows XP sales are being extended is because of corporate buy in. Most large customers, who are of course the bread and butter of Windows sales, need to have Windows Vista move into the “evergreen” or PC replacement strategy and this takes time. One way that some companies will do an operating upgrade is to accelearate the deployment of new PCs and in this case becasue of the huge requirements of Windows Vista this will be difficult.

One of the real problems besides the high resource needs of Windows Vista is the lack of any real operating system needs that are being bundled into the Vista operating system. One of the big drivers for businesses to go from Windows NT and Windows 2000 Pro was the greater security in Windows XP SP2. Now that these security holes and deficiencies have been caught there is not really much of a need to upgrade.

I am sure that as the year goes on next year and as a much need service pack for Windows Vista is released that we will in fact see a real uptake in Windows Vista deployments. Coming in 2009 we should also see some kind of work done on the often stopped prouction on Windows Longhorn as it was originally envisioned and these additions will probably make a Windows Vista SP2 a very solid product that will become as popular as Windows XP has become.

One of the nice noew “features” of Windows Server 2003 is how the new enhanced security has broken the ability to launch attachments from compiled help files, also known as CHM files.

I had the opportunity to learn about this problem when I needed to move an application that we internally create content in that shows workflows. The workflows are easy enough to create but you can actually launch attachments with more information, actually forms in pdf format.

Part of the moving of the app involved upgrading from Windows Server 2000 to Windows Server 2003 R2. Windows 2003 was no problem but the R2 release was a big security change for Microsoft. When I first moved all of the files over there was a problem in even viewing the CHM information but after an initial fix executing the CHM file with the workflows I was not able to execure the attachments.

So when an app does not work like this I go to Google and to Microsoft to see what they have to see but in this case I was able to fix only a part of the problem…I am going to give the knowledge base article that gives the full fix, It is info from the patch itself MS05-026 but there was an earlier fix that gave me the ability to view the CHM results, who cares right? We want the whole fix.

So there are two steps in the above knowledge base article that will help you to fix your CHM attachment evecution, both are registry fixes invloving ITSS Restrictions. First you need to point Windows 2003 R2 to the location of the CHM file and secondly you need to tell Windows what kind of security you want to give on a scale of 1 to 4, I think the knowledge base article is great for this so no need to explain exactly.

In my case there was one more change that I had to make and that was to have PDF file on the server to not execute within a browser. We use Adobe Reader 7 and the setting is in the preferences under Internet preferences.