Ok, so there ARE other aircraft flight status reports, but I like this one as it is graphical.

It does require Adobe Flash Player to be installed, which is a problem for some people.

Melbourne Airport – Live Flight Radar

Back in February 2008, I wrote about what disk fragmenting was.  A reader then followed up with

“Well, what are my choices for a Windows disk defragmenter?”

Here is a list of some of the choices out there, if you don’t want to use the built-in Windows defragger.

Free

Not free

This is the list of presentations from the Tech-Ed 2005 DVD set.

And this is the final post in the series.

Tech-Ed 2008 had the most number of presentations (701), followed by Tech-Ed 2005 (543), Tech-Ed 2006 (434) and then Tech-Ed 2007 (442)

543 presentations spread over 4 DVDs in the Tech-Ed 2005 DVD set.

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In addition to my “2 and a bit reasons to wait for Windows 7″ post, these are 3 features I really like in Windows 7.

Problem Steps Recorder
User has got a problem that they can’t describe in words?  Get them to record it with the Problem Steps Recorder.

To run Problem Steps Recorder, enter PSR at the run prompt.

Don’t display empty removable drives
I have one of those 52 in 1 USB Smart Card readers.

Connecting it to a PC, before Windows 7, meant getting all 4 card slots being assigned with drive letters in Explorer.

By default, Windows 7 hides those card slots which are empty (ie. the ones that don’t have a card in them.)

Windows Display Colour Calibration Wizard (DCCW)
Cheaper than using a Spyder for display monitor calibration, DCCW might be good enough for every day users.

To run DCCW, enter DCCW at the run prompt.

This is the list of presentations from the Tech-Ed 2006 DVD set.

436 presentations spread over 4 DVDs, making it the smallest of the four Tech-Ed DVD sets I have.

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Ironic, when I think about it.  That I’m still supporting an operating system I first supported in 2001.

Today’s support query,

I have an ActiveX which prompts the user to install it.
Is there any way to make the ActiveX install silent, and not visible to the user?

Short answer, you need to have Administrative or Power User rights; AND the site needs to be in the Trusted Zone.

Slightly longer answer: if you pre-install the ActiveX to the PC, even a normal user can use it.

Long answer, consider this table.

In conclusion, a user with “User” Privileges cannot install an ActiveX.  The solution for this user is to pre-install the ActiveX to the PC*.

Vista, and later Microsoft Operating Systems, have an ActiveX Installer Service, which gets around this problem.

* How to register an ActiveX control (.ocx) manually

This is the list of presentations from the Tech-Ed 2007 DVD set.  The second smallest of the sets, with “only” 442 presentations.

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Things were getting slow around here, as you can see with the results from ismyblogworking.com.

Now WordPress, in versions before WordPress 2.5, had a GZip compression option.  It was removed in v2.5 because WordPress thought it was better to implement compression at the OS level.  All fine and good, but by default, my hosting provider does not do compression.

The quick performance fix was to enable compression.  But how???

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Back in October 2008, I provided you with a spreadsheet listing of the Tech-Ed 2005 – 2008 Conference Presentations, which were on the DVD sets.  Tech-Ed 2008 DVD Set had 701 presentations.  That’s a big mob of value.

I’ll be presenting the lists from Tech-Ed 2005, 2006, 2007 & 2008; over a series of posts.

Note that the spreadsheet has additional details about each of the presentations, such as the description of each presentation (abstract), so the spreadsheet is still worth grabbing from the post link above.

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Some minor changes to the blog:

• WordPress 2.8.2
• Fixed WordPress Mobile Edition problem.
• Enabled GZip page compression (have written more about this the "Make it go faster!" post).