If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

I was handed a PC a while ago to help fix. It was not a work PC but instead one that a director had at home that was not working and I forgot about it until this week. What a mess. I wanted to write about this problem because the troubleshooting was a little complex and I got to use tools that I had not used before.

A Virus and a computer

First of all the PC was infected by more than one virus. The RPC connector would fail after a few minutes of use and the computer would reboot. I could not install any antispyware software or antivirus software because the installer service was corrupt and every time that I would drop Stinger from McAfee on the machine through a USB drive it would immediately get infected with the virut.b virus. Good thing was that when I plugged the usb thumb drive back into my main PC the virus would be found and removed from all of the files. Read the rest of this entry »

Yes I was checking on on the Steve Jobs webcast today from the MacWorld conference. There are few things that excite me as much as MacWorld and the fact is I own no Apple products. Well today that may have changed as I saw pics of this super new super thin MacBook Air. The newest laptop weighs 3 pounds and is thing enough to fit in an interoffice envelope.

The guy from Intel was there saying the the Core 2 Duo is smaller then ever and is now the size of a dime and thick as a nickel. That is a lot of power with a tiny footprint. The MacBook Air also sports a small 1.8 inch hardrive and is not really too expensive at $1799.

The only trouble is that I have no overarching reason to buy a new laptop as great as this thing is. I will have to see later this year if one just appears in my kitchen after a weak moment online at the MacStore.

Just doing a little poking around this morning and I found a Computerworld article, actually I foudn a few that were interesting about the hot skills for 2008. I always hate these lists from IT based magazines because they always seem to spin the articles towards either the advertisers of the magazines or some kind of testing / training organization like Comptia or Microsoft so the slant does not tell you about workplace needs in the future as much as the truth really is.

Anyway I am not sure about the programming languages that they are pushing in this article but the other skills seem to make a lot of sense from the standpoint that I see in my workplace. Here they are is short version.

1. Programming/application development. As companies continue to Web-enable their existing applications and plow deeper into Web 2.0, demand is red-hot right now for people with AJAX, .Net and PHP skills

2. Project management. CIOs are hungry for project managers who have extensive experience overseeing complex efforts that have delivered clear business benefits — not just someone who has obtained a Project Management Professional (PMP) certification

3. Help desk/technical support. Do the math. As companies continue to expand their application portfolios, more help desk and technical support experts will be needed to support those systems. And much of that expertise will need to be on-premises, with only a fraction of the work being shifted to overseas call centers in places like Bangalore, India.

4. Security. There will always be demand for IT professionals with core security credentials, such as intrusion-detection capabilities and government security clearances, but database and wireless security projects will drive that demand even higher this year.

5. Data centers. There has been a flurry of activity among companies and government agencies to upgrade or relocate their data centers to take advantage of virtualization and other recent data automation and efficiency gains.

6. Business knowledge. As IT organizations strive to align more closely with the businesses they support, demand remains strong for people with business acumen, whether they’re specialized business analysts

7 & 8. Networking and telecommunications. All sorts of networking skills are hot right now, including general network administration capabilities and network convergence, wireless and network security talents, as organizations collapse their voice and data networks with wireless and voice-over-IP technologies

If you are looking for a new job this year or even if you just want to know what bigger company IT shops are looking for then I think that this list is really valid.

I just switched my main work computer to the Windows XP SP3 beta as it seems stable to me and have still run into the problem of the Address toolbar not working still.

One of the issues that Microsoft has is that part of the anti trust trials that they have gone thorough stated that this address bar restricts users to Internet Explorer, I use Firefox as my default eweb browser and clearly this is not true, anyway I digress let’s fix it instead!

Many people may not use the address toolbar in Windows XP but I certainly do. What this toolbar does is allow you to type in a command or a web address and it will launch your default web browser with that page. The Windows address bar sits in your taskbar so it is always there and easy to get to.

I was wondering if this functionality could be put back into Windows XP SP3 so I searched around and found a shell replacement by a company called Muvenum and is an address toolbar replacement.

There are a few notes about how this toolbar works:

• The dropdown button currently doesn’t show anything when clicked (empty).

• The combobox supports autocompletion using IE History like the normal address bar.

• The url opens in your default browser. (*seems like they could change it to do this and beat the “legal restrictions”, but as the one above says, it currently only pulls from the IE History.  I’ll look into pulling from FireFox if enough people ask for it.)

• If you type a single word it appends “http://” to the beginning.

• If you type multiple words with a space, it opens google search with the words as the search query.

This toolbar seems to do exactly what I had before and works perfectly. If you are doing your own beta testing on Service Pack 3 of Windows XP then it definitly does not hurt to try this toolbar addon to Windows