Witheringtree

I had computer issues on Friday. I had an old external drive that I had a bunch of files on. The drive is going slow so I think it is about to die. I needed to copy a bunch of the files from the external drive and on to a network drive. I thought it might be a little smarter if I copied the files from the external drive to my computer and then from my computer to the network drive. It was 40 Gb but I thought it might be less time doing that. I was wrong. Apparently it was goingto take 11,305 hours. Except it errored out after abut an hour.

At the aame time this was going on, I decided to empty my trash. It usually takes me a while to empty so it can get pretty big. This time I had 32,047 files in my trash can.

Something that's been bothering me latey is the fact that, in forms, I can't tab through all of the form elements. It completely skips checkboxes and radio buttons. It does this in both Safari and Firefox. I thought it was a preferences issue in the browsers. I searched through the preferences and got nowhere. It turns out it is a system issue, not a browser issue. And there is a simple way to correct the issue.

Open the System Preferences and go to Keyboard & Mouse. Click on the Keyboard Shortcuts tab. At the bottom there is a radio button for "Text boxes and lists only" and "All controls." Select "All controls."

This worked for me in both Safari and Firefox without having to restart Finder.

Microsoft has recently released Internet Explorer 8. It's about time. IE7 came out a little under 3 years ago. They even made "Windows Internet Explorer 8: Get the facts" comparison chart where they say exactly why IE8 is so much better than the other browsers. It goes without saying that Microsoft pretty much got slammed for what they said in this comparison chart. I won't go into it but you can read all of the verbal lashings they got on Digg.Even Webmonkey gave them a little bit of a lashing.

My question is, why? Why make that comparison chart? That chart won't even be read my home users. And if they do read it, they won't know what it means. The only people that will read it are developers that will of course rip it apart. So why would they want to set themselves up to be slaped in the face like that?

A lot of the comments are pretty funny. True, but also funny. They talk about IE's slow Javascript engine, slow CSS engine, Favisons, developers tools, crash resistance and so much more. There were a few things I thought were funny. IE8 has full support for CSS 2.1, which is true for the most part. That's great for Internet Explorer. But Firefox, Safari, and Chrome have been supporting it for around 2 years now. I even thought it was funny that HTML5 is rumored to be released later this year, will Microsoft have to go back to the drawing board with IE? Firefox won't. They's already implemented a lot of HTML5. I believe Safari and Chrome has started as well.

After saying all of this, I do think you should download Internet Explorer 8 though. Even if you are on a Mac. I never said install it though. I downloaded IE8 on both of my Mac's and my PC. I didn't install it.

Microsoft has this thing going on where they will donate 8 meals to Feeding America for every download of Internet Explorer 8. You can read all about it here. So, please, download IE8. It's a win-win situation. Microsoft get's to boast about how many times IE8 was download (even though it wasn't installed) and you mke Microsoft donate 8 meals to feed the hungry.

[Update 12:49PM]: I just realized something. If you look at the source of "Windows Internet Explorer 8: Get the facts", you will see IE specific hacks for IE7 and IE8. This contradicts their point on compatability. Why would you need IE8 hacks if it is so compatable?

Prime numbers are a lot less common than you realize. In fact, the only way to discover new prime numbers is to use a computer. The most common way is to use distributed computing from the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) project.

On April 12th, 2009, the 47th known Mersenne prime was discovered and verified. It is a 12,837,064 digit number discovered by Odd Magnar Strindmo from Melhus, Norway.

Odd Magnar Strindmo is an IT professional whose computers have been working with GIMPS since 1996 testing over 1400 candidates. This calculation took 29 days on a 3.0 GHz Intel Core2 processor.

This is the 13th Mersenne prime found by GIMPS in its 13 year history.

According to Wolfram Alpha, what is best in life is to "To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women."

Below is the screenshot of the search. Or click here to see the results yourself. You can even download the search results as a PDF. How cool is that!

On a little bit of a side note, you should check out Wolfram Alpha. It's a pretty interesting project.