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I’m having a major bout of monitor envy. At work, after my suggestion, they upgraded the office so everyone is on LCDs and as part of the deal the Geek gang got swishy new 19″ widescreen Viewsonics. They’re awesome. With a native resolution of 1440×900 it has 1.6 times the screen real estate of a 15″ 1024×768 screen, has lots of width to place windows side-by-side (useful for code comparisons) and doesn’t make you crane your neck to look from top to bottom, unlike some larger screens. One really cool feature is that if you have two computers available, one with a regular 15-pin VGA connector and one with a swishy new DVI connector, you can have both of them connected simultaneously and just press a button on the screen to switch between them, so using this I’ve got both my Mac and beefy PC ready to go as needed. I will definitely say that the DVI output from the Geforce 6800 in the PC is far superior to the VGA from the Geforce 4 MX on the Mac, the text is much more crisp. To give you even more screen envy we got them for about $216 with free shipping and a $20 rebate brings the price to under $200, a third of what we paid for our 17″ LCD a few years back! NewEgg is where we got them and to make life easier for you here’s a link to search their site with the various options we went for:

• http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.asp?Submit=ENE&N=2090190020+1109917096+1233214217+1233314219&Subcategory=20

The (IMHO) world’s best spam filter, SpamAssassin, is a tricky beast to get running under Windows due to its UNIX-focused application structure. Thankfully a company has put it together with a lovely graphical interface for use on Windows and calls it No Spam Today. To make it really useful you need to add on an extra product called SpamMover which moves all messages marked as spam into a separate folder. Easy-peasy. NoSpamToday is available with a free 10-mailbox non-commercial license or you can try it for free for 30 days to see if it works for you, but unfortunately SpamMover only works with two predetermined test mailboxes before you buy it. In total you’re looking at $399 for 50 mailboxes for NoSpamToday and another $100 per server for SpamMover, so $500 for 50 mailboxes, and the best thing is that there are no annual charges for either, you get free minor updates and can buy the major updates if you decide you want them, unlike most “enterprisey” software that require an annual subscription in addition to the software price. Well worth trying.

If you are testing out Kaspersky Security for Exchange 2003 but decide you want to see how Exchange’s built-in IMF works in comparison without first uninstalling Kaspersky Security, do not set the Kaspersky services to disabled, do not pass Go, do not collect $200. If you do this simple step you will bask in an email-free workplace for many relaxing hours until such time that either a) you realize your mistake and re-enable it, b) someone else realizes your mistake and reenables it, c) someone from HR comes by your desk with a cardboard box.
Note: it wasn’t me X-)

After the last few weeks I’d like to mention, perhaps re-itterate, two reasons I particularly dislike Microsoft Exchange:

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A little tip if you’re trying to get fixed positioning to work in IE6. One problem with IE6 and older is that they ignore the perfectly valid position:fixed; style, which is often used along with either top:0px; or bottom:0px; to have a static header or footer respectively. Luckily someone else has spent a vast quantity of time fiddling with Javascript to get this to work, so you and I don’t have to. Enjoy.

• http://www.doxdesk.com/software/js/fixed.html