Where are KDE 4 wallpapers?

Good luck searching for KDE 4 Air wallpaper on Google.  I spent an hour trying to find it.  Finally a post on some obscure message board led me to the KDE SVN repository.  So here’s the link to all KDE wallpapers: http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/KDE/kdebase/workspace/wallpapers/

Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage

What?  I was trying to access my bank’s web page but instead of the page I was presented with this message.  Is the web site down?  Nope, doesn’t seem to be.  It pings with no problem.  I’m firing up the Firefox, and voila – the web page appears before my eyes.  Is something wrong with the IE?  Did I unknowingly install a rogue browser extension, spyware or adware?  The fact that it’s a bank’s site made me suspicious.

Or is it just IE8?  I’m trying compatibility mode – nope, the same result.  Trying IE8 from another machine.  Works like a charm!  This is starting to look very troubling.  OK, it’s time for serious investigation.

Perhaps Autoruns can tell me what’s going on?  It’s a Sysinternals tool.  I’m looking through IE BHO’s, Winsock providers, other stuff that’s in there.  Nothing stands out.  Everything looks normal.

Perhaps it’s the anti-virus?  Or Vmware network services?  Shutting everything down.  Still nothing.

OK, let’s take a look at what happens at the network level.  Launching the Wireshark.  Capturing some network packets and what am I seeing?  IE8 sends a DNS query for the bank’s site.  The query resolves OK.  Then it establishes the connection: SYN, SYN+ACK, ACK – so far so good.  Then it sends HTTP GET.  And the very next packet it receives from the site is RST.  No wonder it can’t display the web page!  The site just drops the connection.

I’m relieved.  At least it’s not a spyware.

But why the hell it drops the connection on IE8 whereas Firefox works just fine?  It must be something with the User Agent string.  I’m looking at the string and I can’t believe how long it is.  There’s all sorts of crap in there:

User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0; Trident/4.0; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Media Center PC 5.0; InfoPath.2; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; Origami Experience 1.1; .NET CLR 3.5.21022; Zune 3.0; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3

In fact, it’s so long the IE doesn’t even send the whole string.

Time to fix it.  I quickly find the user agent in the registry:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\5.0\User Agent]

Delete everything leaving just a single entry for CLR 2 and CLR 3.  Restart the IE.  And… Tada!  The web page displays correctly.

So the user agent string was too long for the web server to handle.  Maybe it thought I was trying to DoS it?  Or better yet, it was running into a buffer overflow.  I don’t know.  But it certainly looks like a bad piece of software that site runs on.

Collaborate over the Internet with OneNote and Office Live : Matt Ranlett's SharePoint and Office blog

As a OneNote enthusiast I always wanted to know if it’s possible to collaborate and share your notes over the internet.  OneNote requires a SharePoint web site for shared notebooks which is usually a hassle to setup.  But it turns out there is an easy way to do it with the Office Live Small Business account.  Check out the following blog entry for details:

Collaborate over the Internet with OneNote and Office Live : Matt Ranlett's SharePoint and Office blog

Bookmarks are becoming a thing of the past

I collected my web bookmarks for 8 years or so.  I cherished them and carefully transfered them from one computer to another.  But I rarely bothered to look what I actually collected.  Random bookmark folders and various links of temporary importance dominated in my bookmarks.  Today I decided to sort them out, because it was clearly started to become just a huge mess.  It turned out I didn’t really need many of them.  Many bookmarks were just useless because I can find the same information in Google faster than in my bookmark folders.  I went from more than 700 bookmarks down to about 250, restoring some order in my favorites.  After this excercise, it became clear to me that if I need to find something I would first search Google than again… search Google and only then search my bookmarks.  The need to use bookmarks is significantly reduced.  I decided that I will collect only rare information of a special meaning to me, the information that I had a hard time finding on the internet.

Vista performance score of Lenovo S10

I bought this little nice netbook for Christmas.  It came with Windows XP and loaded with a lot of OEM installed craplets.  When I booted it, it wasn’t super fast, but it was OK.  There are some reviews that say Vista will run like molasses on these kind of machines.  I wanted to check if it’s true, so I installed Vista.  It turns out Vista is actually pretty fast on S10.  I got the performance score of 2.7 which is limitted by “gaming graphics.”  This is not surprising.  Next is Intel Atom processor with the score of 3.0 and the rest are actually above 4.0 which is pretty good.  In fact Vista doesn’t need a fast processor so much as it needs memory and a fast disk.

Here is the whole picture (click for larger view):

Interactive Collective Quiz

This is pretty darn funny.  Try to guess which collectivist said what.  Among the collectivists are: Hilary Clinton, Vladimir Lenin, Karl Marx, Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, Barack Obama and many more.  The quotes are strikingly similar.  It's hard to get it right the first time.  And soon you'll love to get it wrong.  Want to know why?  Just try the quiz.

http://thepeoplescube.com/QuoteQuiz/index.php

Constantly changing explorer views in Vista

This is a very annoying problem in Vista.  Vista Explorer adapts its folder views depending on the type of files it finds there.  For example, if it finds a picture it changes the folder view to iconic although you might have another files there and you don't want the iconic view, but rather detailed view.  Here is a solution to this problem that fixes folder views once and for all.

Solution

* Delete these registry keys:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Shell\Bags]

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Shell\BagMRU]

* Create a new key:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\ Windows\Shell\Bags\AllFolders\Shell]

* Create a new string value:

FolderType="NotSpecified"

* Open folder options in Explorer and click "Apply to all folders" button.

* Done!