From: Yoz Grahame Date: 15:25 on 27 Apr 2005 Subject: back to easier targets ... namely RealPlayer 10 on Windows. In the "Open" dialog, try giving it a URL pointing at a standard Real .rpm = file. Had you been ludicrously over-optimistic, you'd have thought that RealPlayer would grab the file, read the RTSP URL inside it and then play from that. What it will actually do is suddenly widen the window to accomodate its internal Internet Explorer browser control, which it then uses to grab the .rpm file, which it doesn't know what to do with, so it asks me if I want to save it. This is incompetence bordering on genius, and all I can do is sit quietly in awe. -- Yoz
From: Yoz Grahame Date: 00:23 on 23 Mar 2005 Subject: The amazing disappearing network Windows networking, at home, between two machines, with Workgroups. (All you *nix-at-home people are giggling and pointing at me already, but I shall continue nonetheless. Ubuntu is SO going on this machine as soon as I clear a drive for it, and as soon as their graphics card detection improves. You wouldn't have thought that spotting a vanilla Nvidia 5200 would be so hard, but apparently it is.) I'm not going to get heavily into Workgroups here, because the pain is just too hideous - random shit not working for no reason, the hideous slowness of SMB, confusion between the credentials you use on your own machine and on a server, etc. etc. Yes, using Domains solves much of this, but I don't have a permanently-on machine at home to use as a PDC. But this is the case where the network suddenly *disappears* - as in the Network Neighbourhood (sorry, "My Network Places") suddenly CLEARS OUT and there's nothing there, and then I reboot, and then "My Network Places" is GONE from the fucking start menu and Windows is going, "Network? Huh? Sorry mate, never saw nuffink. You must've dreamt it." ... and it turns out that it's all because ZoneAFuckingLarm on the *other* machine has suddenly, for NO FUCKING REASON, decided to switch the local subnet from "Trusted" to "Internet". So all the SMB traffic is hitting a wall on both sides, and it all disappears. Meh. -- Yoz
From: Yoz Grahame Date: 12:40 on 05 Aug 2004 Subject: Windows Task Manager "hidden feature" Colleague of mine just turned his monitor my way: "Look! Task Manager's gone funny again!" The window border (along with resizers, corner buttons, title bar) had completely disappeared, as had the menu bar, the "Applications/Processes..." tab bar, the status bar at the bottom... all that was left was a floating grey panel with a processes list and the "End Process" button at the bottom. In order to get rid of the window, he had to kill the process. Turns out (as the MS KB article below casually states) that on the lower left side of the panel, in between the main process/apps list and the status bar, there's an *invisible toggle* which you can double-click to switch this, um, feature on and off. http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;Q314227 Fantastic work, Windows Team! -- Yoz
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