I bought this book to introduce my son to programming. I had read a couple of reviews online and looked forward to this book after I  bought it online. It arrived in a couple of days, and I eagerly opened it.
This is an excellent book for anyone who is new to programming and wants to learn. The language is very easy to follow for someone who hasn't done any programming. There are plenty of diagrams, example programs and humorous references that make it really easy to learn programming concepts.

This laptop came installed with Windows-Vista. Due to some software applications that run only on Windows-XP, I had removed Vista and installed XP on it.
Most of the installation went well, but the audio was not functional. With some Google search and research I found the solution.

While I do most of my work on Windows-XP at home, there are things which I prefer to do in a Unix-like environment.
 
For example, I find Windows version of GNU-Emacs much more convenient for editing text files, while browsing directories and viewing other files. I also use the bash-shell within the Emacs-shell to run Unix-commands from my Cygwin installation.
 

If you set up a poll on your Drupal site and intend to get votes from both anonymous visitors as well as from authenticated users, you need to make sure that "vote in poll" action is permitted for them.

To do this, go to Administer -> Permissions and scroll down to poll settings.

In the same way, search action is also disabled by default. So you if want visitors to your site to be able to search for content, then you need to enable it.

As I am re-imaging my Windows-XP notebook after a crash, I am try Microsoft OneCare as an alternative to other virus/spyware protection software. So far, OneCare appears to do its job well for this purpose.

OneCare also has a data backup feature. I have been using Norton Ghost 9.0 for backing up my PCs at home for a couple of years. I haven't felt the need to upgrade to Ghost 14.0 so far.

I have been using a Sony VAIO notebook computer with Windows-XP for a couple of years. This has been my primary "home-PC" which I used for things like managing finances, preparing taxes, wordprocessing, video- and photo-editing, and playing with software such as home-design, etc. I have also been doing a bit of Perl and C++ programming, besides tinkering with MySQL, PHP and Drupal.

All this was running on a mere 512Mb RAM that came with the PC!

I recently enabled caching in a Drupal site and could notice improvement in page-loading performance. Drupal can be compute-intensive, so a cache goes a long way in making your site more responsive to visitors.

There are a few options to choose from when you enable cache. One of them is the 'Minimum cache lifetime.' This defaults to '' and I think it does so for a good reason. With this setting, any time you post a content, all cached pages that are affect by that post expire immediately, so you can the effect of the post right away.

Do you have a Picasa Web Album and would like to share it on your Facebook profile? You can use the Picasa Gallery Slideshow application on Facebook. Here is how to set it up:

1. Install the Picasa Gallery Slideshow application on Facebook.
2. Log in to Picasa and open the album that you want to create the slideshow for.
3. Click on “Link to this album.”
* You will see some HTML code in a box below the words “Paste HTML to embed in website.” Copy this to your Facebook Picasa Gallery.