Roaming in the computer world

In Windows 7, if you pin a program to the taskbar, then when you launch the program, Windows 7 will group your program’s window icon into the taskbar icon and change the taskbar icon’s style so you can tell that an instance of the program is running. However, I recently noticed that Windows Live Mail does not follow this rule. When you launch Windows Live Mail, a new window icon is created in the taskbar, so there are two Windows Live Mail program icons in the taskbar. See the attached screen shot.

However, Windows Live Writer does follow the rule. Maybe it is a minor bug in Windows Live Mail. I will report this issue to Windows Live Team to see what they explain.

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Do you have this experience that your application has been running fine on one computer, but suddenly gives you an error as follows when you publish it to another computer?

Calling LoadLibraryEx on ISAPI filter “C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.21006\aspnet_filter.dll” failed

This error is very common on x64 OS computer with IIS 7 installed. The reason is that the default application pool (or the application pool your application uses) on IIS 7 does not support 32-bit application. The fix is very simple: just enable the support of 32-bit application for the application pool that your application uses.

1. Launch IIS Manager

2. Select Application Pools, then right-click DefaultAppPool (or the application pool your application uses) from the Application Pools list and select Advanced Settings

3. Change Enable 32-Bit Application to True, then click OK to exit

You are done. The error should go away.

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I came across to this simple free on-line tool from Dynamic Drive to make small icons. It can be used to create favicon for your web site, or normal small icons.

Here is the link:

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If you are a Windows Live Essentials user as I am, then you should give the new Windows Live Essentials beta a try. The beta product was released to public last week and finally I decided to install it. Among all Windows Live Essentials products, I use Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Writer, and Windows Live Sync, especially Windows Live Mail and Writer, I use them almost every day. The beta version includes some new features, which I will not waste your time to describe them and you can read them here if you are interested. What is very attractive to me is the new user interface of Windows Live Mail and Windows Live Writer. Windows Live Mail new interface looks very similar to Microsoft Outlook with the famous task-oriented ribbon on the top of the window, and a calendar and event side bar on the right.

Windows Live Writer new interface looks similar to Microsoft Word, a task-oriented ribbon is placed on the top of the window with easy access to many commonly used features. The old side bar on the right was removed because all features are included in the ribbon. Finally, the blog post properties bar is moved up to be just underneath the ribbon area, which I think is more user friendly.

I especially like the new interface of Windows Live Writer that makes blogging much easier and faster, and I would recommend it to every friend of mine.

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Chase bank decided to drop Google Chrome and Opera from their supported browser list and only supports IE 6 and higher, FireFox 2.0 and higher, and Safari 3.0 and higher. As a matter of fact, after July 18, 2010, if you browse Chase web site with an unsupported browser, you will get a “Page Not Found” error, so you will have to use those supported browsers to be able to access your account on-line.

Chase justifies their decision with two primary reasons: security and popularity. It is funny that they think IE 6 is more secure than Google Chrome and is still on their supported browser list, while Google officially stopped supporting IE 6 back in March and many web developers held a funeral for IE 6. As for the popularity, Chase argues that it is based on the types of browsers that customers used to access their site, and their data shows that 95% of customers used the supported browsers. However, to me both reasons are lame, and I think the real reason is that they are lazy. Firstly, IE 6 is anything but a secure modern web browser and should be removed from the supported browser list. Secondly, even though according to their own data, Chrome is not a “popular” browser, the usage of Chrome already exceeded Safari based on every source of web browser statistics. So Chase should embrace Google Chrome, instead of giving a lame “popularity” reason for dropping Chrome.

Web browser statistics:

Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Browser Market Share

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When I was asked to create a custom header with collaged photos by one of my customers for his business web site, the first thing I did was to Google for a free good collage tool. Not surprisingly, I found a list of free collage software that seem to be very promising, such as Shape Collage, Scrapbook Flair, and E.M. Free Photo Collage, however, none of them works for me because they either don’t have the important Mask feature, or implement the Mask feature in a complicated way.

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So my search continued on, and finally, a program called Picture Collage Maker showed up in my search result. It is not freeware, but the single personal license fee of $29.90 is reasonable. What attracted me is that it supports the Mask feature, besides other useful features. For example, it comes with about 80 free collage templates for you to choose to create a photo collage, a calendar, or a greeting card. Besides the mask feature you can use to decorate your photo, you can also add text, frames, clipart, and photo effects, such as blur, grayscale, mirror, and more.

Therefore, I decided to give it a trial and downloaded a 15-day trial version from their web site. The installation went smoothly and the user interface is simple and clear. You will be prompted with four options when you launch the software:

I chose Create Blank Collage to enter the main design area of the software:

The user interface of the software is very simple, clean, and straight-forward. You can easily add a photo, clipart, text, or calendar by clicking the Add menu, and you can also easily change the background to use a different image or color fill . There are 59 built-in Masks and can be easily dragged and dropped onto the photo that you would like to apply mask.

The last feature but not the least is the Share feature. You can save your collage as picture format, or use your collage as your desktop wallpaper, or email your collage to friend to show off your creativity.

Now, to celebrate 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa, let’s see how easy it is to use Picture Collage Maker to create a World Cup collage:

1. Choose collage_22 from the built-in template list

2. Add your favorite photos to the template

3. Save the collage as picture (the trial version inserts a watermark on the output picture)

4. Show off time

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Google released Google Voice to public(well so far for people in US only) free of charge today. If you have not heard about Google Voice and want to know what it is, then watch this video below:

Once you sign up and choose a Google Voice phone number, you can add your home, work, or mobile phone to your Google Voice account, then once someone call your Google Voice phone number, all phones that you add will ring, pretty cool. Also, you can set up your voicemail in Google Voice and have your voicemail transcript sent to your email account. All your phone call history, including voicemail, text message, etc, are stored in Google Voice account.

For more features, check the feature page of Google Voice. If you already have a Google account, then just go to www.google.com/googlevoice and sign in to get started.

Have fun!

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You may already know that once you sign up a Hotmail account, the Hotmail account automatically becomes your Windows Live ID which enables you to have access to all Windows Live services, such as Live Messenger, Mail, etc. But do you know how much free cloud storage space you can get after sign up?

• Windows Live Hotmail: 5 GB (not available to some regions)
• Windows Live Workspace: 5 GB. A service competing with Google Docs
• Windows Live SkyDrive: 25 GB. An on-line storage service
• Windows Live Mesh: 5 GB. An on-line storage service with the file synchronization ability among connected computers

So you will get up to 40 GB of free storage space after signing up a Live Hotmail account, pretty cool. However, the services above are separate and requires you to activate the interested service with the same Live ID. Once the service is activated, a separate storage space will be created for you.

Microsoft has been working to integrate those services by using Windows Live SkyDrive as the centralized storage and will upgrade Windows Live Workspace to Live SkyDrive soon to give user more space. Windows Live Hotmail team will soon upgrade Hotmail service with some new features, and one of them is to use Windows Live SkyDrive to store photo and file attachments, according to a sneak peek email from the Hotmail Team:

Send hundreds of photos without worrying about size limits
We’ve built a way to send up to 10 GB of content via a single message—up to 200 photos or 200 files of up to 50 MB in size each. When you hit send, we deliver a nicely formatted email with a link to where the photos are stored on your password-protected Windows Live™ SkyDrive™. Recipients can then easily view your photos as a slide show or download them to their computer.

A beta version of Windows Live Sync is also being offered, and will more likely replace Windows Live Mesh (beta) at some point, though many users are complaining. I have been using Windows Live Mesh for a while and I really like it, and I will be very sad too to see it go.

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An article of mine is published on Experts-Exchange web site.

How to Create a 20 Page Microsoft Word Test Document in 5 Seconds

Hope you find it helpful.

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