Windows-8

For a long time my keyboard input language sometimes changed for no apparent reason. I have two languages installed, and windows seemed to switch between them at will. It happened almost exclusively while using SQL Server Management Studio, and I wrote it off as an annoying bug in that product. Then, last night, it happened during a presentation. While the consensus of the audience feedback seemed to be that this was a common occurence, one guy suggested it might be because of an unfortunate keyboard shortcut. ...

Haskell is fascinating, but getting started can be a bit rough - especially if you are on Windows. Here are some necessary steps to get you over these initial stumbling blocks when running the Haskell Platform (2012.4 or 2014.2) on Windows. It is quite obvioius that a lot of the users of Haskell are on other platforms, and as a Windows-user you quickly run into some problems not experienced on other platforms. This is doubly frustrating as a newbie because you haven’t had time to develop the necessary intuition about where to look for solutions yet. It also certainly does not help that Haskell error messages are known to be misleading. ...

I had been trying to get the open source instant messenger client Pidgin to connect to Lync using SIPE. However, they wouldn’t play nice. The Pidgin GUI kept saying “Web ticket request to https:// webdir0e- ext.online.lync.com:443/ CertProv/ CertProvisioningService.svc failed” while the debug log from running pidgin –debug ended with an XML containing “Web ticket request error - SIP URI mismatch” - after confirming username and password to be ok. My environment was Pidgin 2.10.7 and SIPE 1.15.0 on Win8 connecting to Office 365 (no local AD). ...

SSDs are great (except they can also be the worst of drives), but they usually have less capacity than modern conventional drives. In 2013, 128GB is still a common size, and even a 256GB drive can only hold so much. At the same time, main memory is increasing and 8GB of RAM is quite common. The increasing main memory will often reserve unnecessary space on your drive for hibernation and paging. This guide shows how to reclaim that space on Windows 7 and Windows 8 (but should work for any windows with minimal changes). ...