How to change the regional keyboard input

Sometime, my computer is changing the keyboard settings (supposedly after hitting a sequence of keys without intent) and I am ending up with strange characters showing up when I am typing, either on Internet Explorer or in a Microsoft office document. For example, " instead of @, É instead of ?, etc...

Reverting to the normal input is tricky but here is the solution (here for Windows Vista):

- Go to the Control panel

- Open the Clock, Language, and Region

- Open the Regional and Language Options

- Select Keyboards and languages

- Click on "Change keyboard"

- Open the tab "Advanced Key Settings"

- Now you can select shortcut to switch between keyboard settings, such as Ctrl+1 and Ctrl+2 by selecting the language and clicking on "Change Key Sequence"

- Click Apply or OK and you're done!!

If you're locked in a strange language, you just have to hit the shortcut (Ctrl+1 or Ctrl+2) to come back to the original language...

Old technologies not supported anymore...

Here is an interesting list regarding Technology and Operating systems that are not supported anymore... (all versions included)

O/S
-Microsoft – the following versions are not supported anymore: Windows 3.x, Windows 95, Windows 98 and 98 SE, Millenium Edition, Windows NT Workstation 4.0 and Windows NT Server 4.0, Windows 2000 SP2, SP4, Windows XP SP1, SP2, Windows XP 64bits SP1 and version 2003, Windows 2003 RTM SP0, R2 SP0, Windows 2003

- SUN Solaris - all versions before ver.8

- HP-UX - all versions before ver.11.00

- IBM AIX - all versions before 5.1, 5.2 et 5.3 

- SGI Irix - all versions before ver.6.5

- Tru64 - all versions before 4.x

- Debian - all versions before 5.0 (Lenny)

- Mandriva - all versions before 2009, all versions Corporate server before ver.4.0, Multi Network Firewall 2.0 is not supported since June 21, 2010.

- RedHat - all versions of RHEL before ver.3

- SUSE/Novell - all versions of SLES before ver. 9.0

- Fedora -  all versions N-2 is supported for 1 month after each new version N.

- FreeBSD - all versions before ver.6.x. The current versions 7.3 and 8.1will not be supported after March 31^st, 2012. The versions 7.4 and 8.2 will not be supported after February 29^th, 2013.

- OpenBSD – all versions before ver.4.7

- NetBSD – all versions before ver.4.0.

- Apple – all versions before ver.10.4 (Tiger)

Databases

- SQL server – all versions before SQL 2000 SP4, SQL server 6.5, SQL server 7.0 SP4

- Oracle Database – all versions before 9i

- MySQL – all versions before ver.4.1

WebServers

- Microsoft IIS – all versions before ver. 5

- Apache – all versions before ver.1.3

- PHP – version 4 is not supported since the end of 2007

Office

- Microsoft Office suite – Office 2000 and 97 are not supported. Office XP will not be supported after July 12^th, 2011

Some Vendor web sites:

http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/

http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq5.html#Flavors
http://www.freebsd.org/security
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/fr/index.html
http://www.mandriva.com/security/productlifetime.html

Twitter ultimate guide, tools, how to, TinyURL and bit.ly

For twitter starter, this page just gives very practical information on how to use Twitter. A bunch of nice tools as well. http://bit.ly/bqxFqV

How to: Disable the "Do You Want To View Only the Webpage Content that Was Delivered Securely" Security Warning

How annoying it is to have this security warning all the time with IE "Do You Want To View Only the Webpage Content that Was Delivered Securely"

So here is the trick:

• Launch Internet Explorer.
• Click on Tools -> Internet Options.
• Go to Security tab.
• Select Internet zone (default selection).
• Click on Custom level… button under “Security level for this zone” section.
• Under “Miscellaneous” branch, for Display mixed content parameter, select the radio button of Enabled.
  “Disabled” will always stop loading on unsecured components in secure web page.
• Click OK when done, and click Yes when prompted are you sure you want to change the settings for this zone.

Voila!