Tech Spot

Registering a domain name is like trying to sign-up for and find the real cost of a cell phone plan. I couldn't find a good, unbiased and up-to-date domain price comparison (some try to funnel you to sign up for a particular registrar so they can earn a commission; I have affiliate links, but my chart is sorted by price alone!). This was pretty comprehensive, but out-of-date.   Now, this one is pretty close (Sept. 2012) , but didn't include pricing. So after personally visiting a bunch of registrar sites, I came up with the price list below. For today's post, I'm reserving comment about the quality or morality of most of these registrars, but I highly recommend doing an online search or checking a site like Better Business Bureau to make sure you're not going with a bait-and-switch type of company. These are all for a .com name, 1-year registration ignoring the introductory pricing (in other words, these are the year 2 and onward prices). These were checked...

This happens to me from time to time. Attempting to cut or copy text from within my VirtualBox guest (Windows XP) fails to work on my host's clipboard. The quick-and-dirty solution is to end the VBoxTray.exe process in the Windows guest's taskmgr (if your guest is *nix, you'll need to find the PID in 'ps' and kill it by PID), and then run VBoxTray again from the Guest Additions directory (for example, C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox Guest Additions) Came across this tip from the following VirtualBox bug ticket #6150 trail: https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/6150

What is the deal with these MEElectronics earbuds?  I see them in various daily deal sites (Groupon, etc.) and e-mails which make them out to be deep discounts, but I think this is their whole marketing plan: set a really high MSRP and then sell them on deal sites as 50%, 60%, 70% off.  I finally got riled enough to check out their reviews and see that they actually aren't that bad.  But there are better ones out there (check out the really affordable Panasonic RPHJE120 , which I own).  If you're still curious, there's a decent review over on CNET  for the MEElectronics A151 buds.

Wow - one of the largest banks in the world -- JP Morgan Chase -- has a website outage in the prime U.S. business hours of the day. The company I work for is substantially smaller, but we use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that hosts a friendly maintenance page whenever our "origin" web server farm goes down for planned maintenance or an unplanned outage.  In addition, some top-tier DNS providers also have the capability to re-route web traffic to a fail-over/DR site to maintain up-time.  Even if this is a DDoS attack, there are some technologies (including those in the aforementioned CDN) that can discard velocity attempts based on IP, geographic region, browser user-agents, etc.  If it's a botnet, well certainly then the traffic can be a lot harder to discern from legit traffic. I'd be happy to consult with them for a tiny fraction of any lost revenue or negative dollar impact of this outage to help them improve their web architecture.  Ha!

I had an issue where a Windows 2003 to 2008 upgrade (non-R2 since R2 does not provide an upgrade path from 2003) kept freezing at the graphical startup screen (black background with green scrolling status bar).  I was sure that it was an issue with choosing the OS type, but I tried both 2008 32-bit and 64-bit, and no dice.  Various forum posts on the VMware Communities didn't help, but the one thread below gave me an idea.  I changed the number of vCPU to 1 and then restarted (note the OS selector was set back to 2003 32-bit).  This worked, and got me back into the second part of the 2008 upgrade! http://communities.vmware.com/message/922147 The other thing which may have helped to resolve the "STOP:0x0000008E." BSoD was to manually edit the .vmx file with the following setting: piix4pm.smooth_acpi_timer = TRUE http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1897287

Skype 5.5 is quite possibly one of the most infuriating software releases ever.  As a monthly paying customer, I am quite disappointed.  Here are a list of my issues: Update reminders are too frequent and furious (clicking 'Not Now' is taken literally.. because a few seconds later it is no longer "now" and it asks you to update AGAIN). Volume slider has been moved inside the connection guide (why?!  there is PLENTY of space in the call window to leave it there). Dial tones (DTMF) are buggy.  If you frequently dial in to conference calls or bridge lines, you will probably have to keep trying or key in the tones slowly (very slowly). Solution: Downgrade to Skype 4.2.  I have been using it for a few days now and the dial tone situation is much improved.  I also have squelched the reminders (Tools > Options > Advanced > When a new version of Skype is available... [uncheck Automatically download, uncheck Notify me]). Skype 4.2 download link fro...

I just recently upgraded to Outlook 2007 (in 2011, I know).  The calendar reminders weren't working even though I made sure default reminders were turned on.  I missed a meeting or two. :(   What worked for me was to close Outlook, then open a Command Prompt (Start > Run > cmd).  Then go to the directory containing outlook.exe to clean the reminders database.  Type the following (in bold ) from the command prompt: C:\Documents and Settings\User> cd "\program files\microsoft office\office12" C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12> outlook /cleanreminders Start Outlook and your reminders should pop up.  If not, follow this link to an in-depth article for more troubleshooting: Outlook Reminders Problem