Dell Days of Deals for October 2008 : Day 2 has great Dell 5100MP DLP 1440×1050px projector at $1200 off

October 7, 2008 – 8:54 am

Dell Canada Inc -- Dell 9 Days of Deals 120x90

They’re back, and I’ll only be putting up blurbs if there are somewhat notable deals. Their deals are always a good buy, but the “regular” price that they show during these DoD specials are…. to be examined a bit closer.

Today they have the excellent 5100MP Native SXGA+ DLP projector which will put out great images for both a moderate size business conference room and since it supports video feeds up to 1080i, it could double nicely for watching video. It supports 3300 ANSI lumens which is pretty incredible considering that a native SXGA+ resolution (1400 x 1050) with that much brightness would have been $4K+ just 2-3 years ago. It also autosyncs up to 1600×1200 but remember that as with LCD screens or projectors, it’s best to drive them at their native resolution.

It’s got a decent set of inputs ; Composite Video, S-Video, Component, HDMI and of course BNC - but no Display port. It also has a built-in speaker (which, in all honesty should be used only as a backup!) and best of all…. free shipping and 3 year advance exchange service (they ship a replacement to you prior to exchange!)… all for $1699 !

A great buy for a business meeting room and don’t forget the nice Elite VMAX 100 UWH2 electric projection screen with IR and 12V remote operation capability and 100″ diagonal size (this is a steal at under $200 IMHO!)….

The 1TB external drive at $150 is also a good one.

By Robin | Posted in Deals | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)

The image cannot be displayed, because it contains errors - Skype extension for Firefox causes major bugs

October 6, 2008 – 7:30 pm

Well, I was baffled for a few weeks there. I had upgraded my Firefox browser to the 3.0.3 version (which is great BTW) and noticed a LOT of strange behaviour, akin to Javascript-based sites refusing to redirect correctly and getting “The image (…) cannot be displayed, because it contains errors” when trying to view images on websites within Firefox directly as the image file. The situation was turning out to be unbearable as many key sites were in essence unusable for me.

I finally got frustrated enough to begin researching the issue (hey, I wasn’t going to migrate to IE6/7/8 for my general purpose surfing needs!) and found out pretty quickly that it was most likely the Skype Extensions for Firefox based on several blog reports.

So off I went to disable the Skype extension for Firefox (v 2.2.0.94)… restarted FF and voila! All was well.

The most amazing part is that these errors were reported as far back as May of this year and even back in 2007.

In a comment about this bug over at gHacks, a user named Nick suggests getting the latest beta release of the Skype toolbar (which as of writing is 2.2.0.95) but for me, I’m not really that keen on getting it.

The Skype extension for Firefox is of limited interest to me, even if the latest beta supports skypeifying not just phone numbers, but recognizing Skype contact names on web pages and creating Skype links to them. I suspect this must add significant overhead to the browsing experience…

While I love Skype, the extension basically skypifies phone numbers on web pages to make them click directly to Skype to phone the number… cool, but far from essential.


And here I thought it was the DIGG, StumbleUpon, Google toolbars or (more likely) AdBlock Plus….

By Robin | Posted in General | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Official Launch of Google Toolbar 5 for Firefox - straight from St. Petersburg, Russia Google office - beta download

October 5, 2008 – 10:23 pm

Well as I mentioned earlier Google had released the Google Toolbar 5 but only for Internet Explorer a few months ago… FireFox were left running either one of the third party Google Toolbar or the official Google Toolbar 3.

Well, now, it’s official; Vladislav Kaznacheev of the Google office in St. Petersburg, Russia announced the official availability of Google Toolbar 5 for Firefox. Now, it’s important to note that it is a beta release, but I’m pretty confident that it’s relatively stable enough to at least try out.

Several cool new features - the one I like most is a greatly improved Autofill which now allows for multiple profiles (Robin @ work, Robin @ home) with different contact information saved for autofilling web forms.

By Robin | Posted in Software, Web 2.0 | Tagged , , , | Comments (1)

32-bit vs 64-bit ; SharePoint Administration Toolkit download stats from Zach Rosenfield on MSDN

October 4, 2008 – 10:28 pm

Zach Rosenfield, the program manager for MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint server) at Microsoft posted some interesting download stats for the Microsoft SharePoint Administration Toolkit - despite the 64-bit version being available for quite a while now, the 32-bit downloads still surpass the x64 version by almost 4 to 1. This is even as recently as September!

Microsoft SharePoint Administration Toolkit download stats for 32-bit vs. 64-bit versions

Zach provides some interesting (and pretty logical) reasons to go 64-bit with SharePoint and all it’s related componentry …

I wonder, though, if doesn’t reflect a more cautious approach on the part of enterprise customers in putting x64 versions of Windows Server 2003 and 2008 into production environments.

By Robin | Posted in Software | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Dell 2408FPW for $499 shipped again! A great S-PVA LCD monitor at a nice discount sale price.

October 4, 2008 – 8:53 pm

Dell Canada Inc

Yup, the Dell 2408WFP monitor for $499!

A good deal on a great monitor, with every possible connection type: 2 DVI, VGA, HDMI, Displayport (yes DisplayPort the latest to replace HDMI eventually), component, and RCA video (although I dunno why you would plug in an RCA video source… hmmm original Atari 2600 perhaps ? It also has 4 USB ports and an integrated card reader. Also a 6MS response time, 3000:1 contrast ratio and the color fidelity is impressive at 110% for CIE1976 and 102% for CIE1931 (the latter is of importance for photographers or Photoshop folks.

Since this is revision A01 of the monitor it is an S-PVA LCD panel which means great photo quality and a 178 degree viewing angle.

During this deal it’s $499 with the MR9?9X6WF2ZR2V coupon code. As I was writing this, they only had 59 left in inventory so…. if you want a FullHD 24” monitor, this is the one for the next few days.

By Robin | Posted in Deals | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)