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Last week , Rocky R. asked how to turn on the AutoComplete feature found in Internet Explorer. A quick recap: what is AutoComplete? When enabled, the AutoComplete feature remembers (and completes) frequently used form data on web pages. An example ... of a form might be one that asks you a name and password, such as the login form used at Hotmail.com. After providing instructions on how to enable / disable the AutoComplete in last week's newsletter, I furthered the discussion by introducing a dilemma of my own. My problem was that I sometimes have to revert back to an old image (backup) of ... (view more)

Whe w! I've been so busy with the web site change-over that I wasn't able to compose a single newsletter last week. There's lots of new stuff to tell you about -- and it's a bit technical -- so bear with me! I'll do my best to explain it in simple ... English. First of all -- did you notice something different about this newsletter? The format of the newsletter has been completely overhauled and now contains new headers and user subscription information. The new format allows me to write only 1 version of the newsletter, and yet produce 2 separate versions for delivery in either HTML or text ... (view more)

I'm finally making some leeway on the web site transformation. I spent a good part of this weekend working on a web script that is going to completely automate newsletter subscriptions and removals, plus allow me to manage changes in subscriptions ... so that I can *finally* implement a text-version of this newsletter. This solution will give readers the choice of receiving the Gazette twice or three times a week! It took me about 8 hours to figure out how to dereference a multidimensional array which points to another array structure in PERL (a web script programming language). This is pretty ... (view more)

Today I received an interesting question from Thomas V. in New York. He writes: " Dear Dennis, I would appreciate your thoughts on a problem I am experiencing. Windows Media Player keeps skipping and cutting out intermittently whenever I play ... Internet Radio. The slider is moving, time is advancing, and the readout shows that something is playing ... but I don't hear any sound. I also noticed the same problem some times when I play CDs. Got any ideas? " My response: Off the top of my head, I have a few things that come to mind. Internet Radio suffers from intermittent lulls because ... (view more)

Much has been happening since I last wrote to you about the web server upgrade. If you want to read up on what's been happening, here's Part 1 and Part 2 . A quick recap Due to an increased in the amount of visitors hitting the infopackets web site, ... I had to upgrade the web server. I am now leasing a lightening fast Pentium 4 1.7 GHz Apache Web Server with 512 Meg DDR RAM a 60 gig hard drive. My web server package includes a "T1 Connection" which allots a continuous flow of 1.5 megabits of bandwidth per second at any given moment. The saga continues! Since the server has been ... (view more)

" How can I make my computer faster? " The simplest answer to this question is to add more RAM to your PC. RAM allows your computer to process things faster by holding frequently used information for a longer period of time. The longer data is held ... in memory, the greater chance that this data will be used again for computation. The end result is that data is loaded and unloaded at a faster rate, which saves you time. In order to answer the question of how much RAM is required for a computer, we need to inspect two main areas of interest: how much RAM is already inside your machine, ... (view more)

Have you ever had a RAID before? RAID is a technology used to increase hard drive performance and fault-tolerance. What is fault-tolerance? The hard drive inside your computer is responsible for storing programs and user data. RAID performance ... refers to the time that it takes the hard drive to read and write information; fault-tolerance deals with the means to protect data stored on the hard drive. RAID is an acronym which stands for Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive (or Independent) Disks. Generally speaking, the word 'Array' is a techy-term which represents related information formed in a ... (view more)

Since we're on the hot topic of hackers and hacking lately, I thought I'd share with you another great resource that Eric B. sent me. The web site is called myNetWatchman . The myNetWatchman program (agent) gives users a heads-up that they have a ... security problem, if their system becomes infected with an Internet Worm virus. There's also some super-cool reading on their web site (RE: ' Windows Forensics ') which shows how multiple non-hostile applications combined can lead to a hacking threat. I'm not going into great detail because I don't want to spoil it for you; however, I will say that ... (view more)

Tracert.exe? Ping.exe? What the heck is that? Trace Route (tracert.exe) is a DOS command line utility program that traces connection pathways along the Internet using the TCP / IP protocol. Ping (ping.exe) calculates how long it takes to transfer a ... packet of information from origin [you] to destination [a web site] and back again [to you]. What is TCP / IP? The TCP / IP protocol is a method used to communicate computers on the Internet. Any computer using the TCP / IP protocol has a unique address, referred to as an IP (Internet Protocol) address. An IP address can be thought of as a special ... (view more)

Have you ever "burned on the fly?" No -- I'm not talking about burning an insect with a magnifying glass like some of us did when we were younger (kids can be so cruel!) Burning on the fly is a technical term that essentially means writing directly ... to a CD recorder from another source other than your hard drive. Usually when a CD is burned, it is read from the hard drive and then written to the CD burner. The important thing to note here is that a hard drive can retrieve information must faster than any other source-medium of information. An example of burning on the fly might be ... (view more)