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Sorry, Kasia, but I really do enjoy using Windows, and one reason is the plethora of great little products that do one thing really well. One of them is Smart Capture from Desksoft, which does screen snapshots.
The "usual" way to take screen snapshots is with the printscreen button, which copies the screen into the clipboard. Then everybody pastes it into MS Paint and saves a BMP file. A really, really huge BMP file. Ugh.
SmartCapture can intercept PrtScn and grab the whole screen, a window, or just a region that you highlight. It saves the file as BMP, JPEG or PNG, and it's got tons of other features for the frequent screen-capturer. I love this software and was honored to send in my $30.
But note: be sure to disable "accumulate clipboard" mode, or normal cut-and-paste (outside SmartCapture) won't work right. This drove me nuts until I found it. View->Options->Clipboard.
(I need to upgrade - they're at 1.30 now)
The folks at Web Reference have a gallery of computer-related license plates, and I submitted mine: you can see "UNIX WIZ" on page one :-)
Tickets.com was the online sales agent for World Series tickets, and they went on sale yesterday at 10AM Pacific time. I started doing a Ping Plotter graph just before onsale time, and it showed nearly unreachable servers for two hours: I never got a single TCP "connect" the whole time from my browser.
I graphed this for several hours, showing both the web server reachability and that of one of the data center routers to show that IDC bandwidth was not the issue. (click for a fullsize image)
What was particularly irritating to many fans was that they were able to "lock" their tickets but could not complete their transactions. My guess is that all incoming requests were funneled through the same pipe and firewall and servers, so if you had a (say) 1% chance of getting a web server connection on any given try, getting the three or four connections required to complete a transaction would have been like winning the lottery.
I have never run a large web server, so I speak only from speculation here, but it seems to me that in order to do this properly, one needs two pipes. The great unwashed throng goes through the main site, all fighting to get through the door, but once you get a connection and are able to "lock" your seats, the next transaction is redirected to a different server that goes down a different pipe (even though it may very well be served out of the same data center cage).
This way, once you get inside the ropes, your packets are not competing with the thundering herds of visitors. Since the actual transactions would not likely be that bandwidth-intensive, a much smaller pipe could be used for this part of the conversation. Some kind of token or cookie would be used to prevent people from going directly to the transaction servers.
I hope tickets.com gets a handle on this.
Kasia mentioned some of this in her weblog, but the info I've posted is entirely of my own research.
I've been trying to find a decent email client for a long time under Win32, and I'm still not there. I get a lot of email, and I need more than just a show-me-the-message reader.
For a couple of years I have used Eudora, but it's just lousy: some email messages simply make it fail with an exception, and I don't know why I stuck with it for so long. Eudora is history.
About two weeks ago I moved to Outlook Express 6, and though it moves very smoothly, it doesn't support message filters on IMAP mail accounts. I very much want to use IMAP so that I can get my mail from (say) my laptop, plus keep folders on my Linux mail server. But not being able to automatically route mailing list mail (Bugtraq, for instance) means I have to do it all by hand. This is impossible. Outlook Express has security issues that make me nervous anyway.
Finally I decided to try Mozilla, and it's very promising. Never a core dump, works very smoothly, but there is no way to apply filters to an existing message. This means that my mailbox (with 2000 msgs) can't be filtered automatically - I have to do it by hand.
Once I finish, though, I'm encouraged that I'll be able to keep on top of this. But it's been very, very annoying.
OK, so I watch Survivor faithfully every week, and I've always thought it was very well produced - Mark Burnett is a TV genius.
But this week the immunity challenge was what turned out to be a classic problem in computer science: Tower of Hanoi. A whole generation of computer science students learned about recursion solving this puzzle, and a great illustration of this can be found here.
I guess that CS degree is paying off after all :-)