I just recently rebooted my Windows XP after downloading the latest patches via the built-in automatic Windows Update Service when I suddenly noticed that I could not get any internet connection via Firefox any longer. Ping and tracert worked, though.

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On Saturday, 5th of July, 2008, I had my scheduled dental implant for my missing tooth “34″ that was extracted last year. Normally, I have no fear of the dentist, but this was something totally new to me, so I was quite excited when I got there.

But what can I say? I feel awesome!

After the dentist anesthetized “Area 34″ in my mouth, I had to wait a little longer, because another operation took place at the same time that seemed to last longer than expected.

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As I am still trying to make my website load faster, I thought about getting rid of some plugins - mostly those who hook into the header action to write some statistics-related stuff into the database.

Popularity Contest is really a nice plugin - but I must admit that I never really looked at the results so intensely.

I also got rid of WP-PostViews, as most stats plugins have a hitlist, anyway…

… and speaking of stats plugins: FireStats also had to go and has been replaced by CyStats.

This really had a nice impact on my database as well as on the file count.

Thanks to Tim for providing the link on how to make Gmail the default mail client in Firefox 3:

gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/power-tip-set-gmail-as-your-default.html

After you’ve done as suggested, Gmail will open up when clicking on a “mailto:”-link.

Nice!

As of 17th of June, 2008, Firefox 3 is now available on mozilla.com.

I just installed it a couple of hours ago, and so far, I have a very good impression about this new version. It seems to be pretty fast.

The only thing I hate with upgrading is that you will always have to wait until all your beloved addons will be updated and working again. Some can already be tweaked a little and will then work with FF3 - unfortunately, some won’t… I guess I will have to wait a little longer.

At least, an upgrade is always a chance to get rid of old addons that you hardly ever used.

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Image courtesy of icanhascheezburger.com.

Those who like to stay informed of the latest Amazon offers for their most beloved products should take a look at the Amazon Pricewatcher. With this nice tool, you can look up every item in the Amazon catalogue, check prices and build your own little library which can also be exported and imported, which is useful when you have this program installed on more than one computer. » read more…

When you write a WordPress plugin, there is almost no way around executing queries to the WordPress database. The $wpdb class provides all the necessary tools to do so.

Now, I wondered how one could figure out if there was a MySQL error while executing a query - be it a typo in the actual query, an error while establishing a connection to the database or a missing table.
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Today, I seemed to have disconnected my PocketPC too early. After this, I couldn’t get it to sync with Microsoft ActiveSync 4.5 on my XP SP3 installation any longer: it said that the USB device could not be recognized.

If this happens to you, try the following:

• deinstall ActiveSync,
• restart your PC,
• reinstall ActiveSync,
• restart your PC again (important!),
• reconnect the PocketPC.

It should work fine again now.

The first time, I forgot to restart the PC after reinstalling ActiveSync - which ended up with the same USB device failure, so be sure to restart your PC before reconnecting your device.

Just found this one inside my “My Pictures” folder…