Mozilla Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 is out

Mozilla Firefox 3.5 Beta 4
has been released April 27th, 2009.

"This is the sixth development milestone and fourth beta release of Firefox 3.5, the upcoming version of the Firefox web browser."

Coward that I am, I only installed it in my virtual box... quite some extensions still not ready for it, e.g. Cooliris, Context-Search and Delicious, so keeping it contained in the vbox is OK for now.

Rejoice: Ancient Greek Spell Checker for OpenOffice

So the last reason that kept you guys from using OpenOffice.org is finally gone:

Ancient Greek Spell Checker | OpenOffice.org repository for Extensions:

Spell Checker for Ancient Greek based on Morpheus word list (provided by the Perseus Project).
This is an alpha version.
Known issues:
1. Hyphenation is not yet supported.
2. Apostrophe is considered an 'ignored character'.
3. Retrieval of long words is quite slow.

At least it proves that OpenOffice.org DOES have proper language support...

OpenOffice Reader for S60 smartphones

officereader - Google Code:

"For the first time ever, it is now possible to read your OpenDocument files from OpenOffice.org, KOffice, AbiWord and Lotus Symphony on your Symbian Smartphone using Open Source software"

So there ... I've downloaded it to my Nokia E71 and managed to open various OpenOffice documents (presentation, spreadsheet & text) and it works quite well so far, especially on text and spreadsheets (presentations don't really make a lot of sense on the small display).

So, if you are an OpenOffice.org user (or you work with OpenDocument documents) and have an S60 phone, go an get it here.

24 bit RDP under Windows XP

Just recently during (probably my last) Sunray/VDI demo installation I ran into the problem that we could not get 24bit color depth on the virtualized Windows XPs.

The SunRay part of the installation (i.e. the Desktop Unit (DTU, aka. ThinClient) itself could not be the problem, because they always are 24bit (incl their respective X session on the SunRay Server),
we also ran the RDP client (uttsc) with the -A 24 option to force it to 24bit (which it would default to anyway) ... but to no avail.

Of course as always google is your friend; several people have posted and blogged this already: under Windows XP you have to explicitely enable 24bit for RDP. So in the Windows XP image (or template) open the registry and change

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server\WinStations\RDP-Tcp\ColorDepth

to the value 4.
Not sure if you have to reboot the virtual machine (VM) then, but since rebooting a virtualized XP is quite fast anyway, just reboot it...

Did Nokia learn from Palm after all ?

Just found this tip for my beloved Nokia E71 (via twitter):

A Few E71 Tips For Sending Texts, Music Player, Contacts, And More:

"Type To Start A Calendar Or Alarm Entry
Lastly, when you launch the Calendar or Clock application don’t fiddle with options to start what you need to add. If you’re adding a calendar entry start typing the subject and it will begin your entry. When setting your alarm just start typing the time you want and push OK. Done!"

Sounds remarkably like the unmatched ease-of-use of Palm to me...