The users for one of my clients started com­plain­ing about not being able to use the Out of Office Assis­tant for Out­look 2007. They recently upgraded to Office 2007 from Office XP. This was after they upgraded to Exchange 2007 about 6 months prior. I did not do the ini­tial setup for Exchange 2007 and the other server upgrades, but I’ve been com­ing in now and again to cleanup problems.

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As reported on Almost Done, Apple appar­ently has its own iPad-specific web frame­work, which Jim Hoskins has dubbed AdLib. If you don’t own an iPad, you can still have a look at it by spoof­ing the user-agent cour­tesy of Life­Hacker.

Mozilla/5.0(iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B314 Safari/531.21.10

I tried Fire­fox and Chrome using their respec­tive user-agent switcher plu­g­ins, but didn’t get very far. So go into Safari and select Develop->User Agent->Other… Paste in the above string, click OK, and make sure it’s active. Next nav­i­gate to iPad User Guide and check it out. Here’s hop­ing Apple will be releas­ing it inde­pen­dently or as a part of the SDK. Here’s also hop­ing it’s iPhone-compatible.

I went to Florida for my Christ­mas hol­i­day. In order to not stress out the cat too much, the cat stayed home rather than go to a ken­nel. No pro­fes­sional pet sit­ter was avail­able where I live. So I opted to cre­ate a home sur­veil­lance sys­tem from hard­ware I had lying around and free software.

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I’m in the mar­ket for a new lap­top and I pur­pose­fully waited for the new Mac­Books to be released. I priced out a Dell XPS M1330 and once the fea­tures are matched up as close as I can make them, there’s a $60 price dif­fer­ence in favor of the Dell. $1599 vs $1533. The Mac­Book comes out ahead in GPU, FSB, and oper­at­ing sys­tem (OS X > Vista because of Unix) and the Dell comes out ahead in terms of con­nec­tors (HDMI, Firewire, card reader, Express­Card slot, etc.). I tried to con­fig­ure a com­pa­ra­ble Ubuntu machine, but the proces­sor speed is fixed at 2.0 GHz and eas­ily went over com­pared to the $1299 Mac­Book. The only com­peti­tor now is a late model 15″ Mac­Book Pro which for refurb starts at $1349—a very tasty price indeed. The MBP matches the advan­tages of the m1330 and has a bet­ter GPU, screen size, and res­o­lu­tion than the new Mac­Book. How much bet­ter is the GPU? Let’s see.

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