Archive for February 19th, 2007
Driving blog traffic?!
I have been trying to post more often (as you can obviously tell.) I am going to continue scanning the newsletters and magazines that I receive to share any interesting articles/news with you guys. However, I am still looking for other things to blog about. Would you guys be wanting to hear more about school related things? Parallels? Google Collaboration related threats?? Any tips and hints are welcome, please comment!!
Y2K – take two: The daylight-saving drama
There has been a lot of talk about potential problems with the new “daylight-savings law” passed by Congress last week. The law decrees that daylight-saving time would start three weeks earlier and end one week later, beginning this year. Congress decided that more early evening daylight would translate into energy savings. The problems many are afraid of today are somehow reminiscent of the Y2K scare.
Cameron Haight, a Gartner Inc. analyst said “it might force transactions occurring within one hour of midnight to be recorded on the wrong day. Computers might serve up erroneous information about multinational teleconference times and physical-world appointments.”
Sam actually wrote about a problem he recently had on his blog. While trying to schedule an appointment, with several attendees, in Outlook it failed to show up at the desired hour on everybody’s calendar.
It seems like this time around, while the actual problem doesn’t appear to be as significant, many people could run into considerable problems organizing meetings and scheduling automatic queries. Thursday, I downloaded an update for my vista partition that is supposed to fix the issue, but I have not heard of a similar fix for Mac yet. However, I am sure it is bound to be released soon.
It is interesting also that the problem won’t only show up in computers. It will affect plenty of devices that store the time and automatically adjust for daylight saving as well. But I guess, in those instances the results will be a simply annoyance – you could either adjust the time manually or wait three weeks 
Parallels – New Beta Build
I just downloaded the newest beta (build 3170) from the Parallels website. It is running smoothly so far. On first sight, there are improvements to running Vista in coherence mode. Also the support for USB 2.0 devices is much better. Finally, Parallels is recognizing my printer and I can actually print and scan documents (both in coherence mode and fullscreen mode.) I have also hooked up my web-cam (which by the way does not support Mac) and used it successfully in Windows Messenger.
I am still having some trouble with the sound and graphic performance, but I have contacted Parallels beta support and I am working on that issue.
According to the parallels website, support for using Apple’s Boot Camp partitions has been improved, but I have not had a chance to try that out. I will though soon. On a similar note, something, which I would like to see incorporated in Parallels would be support for the isight camera. Maybe that will be in the final build?
