New Dell and Sonic Update Manager

Brand new Dell Dimension 1100; after removing a bunch of the bundled software, I kept getting a Windows Installer message after bootup asking for the Sonic Update Manager disk.  "1" was listed in the "look in"/disk location.  The solution can be found here:  http://forums.us.dell.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=sw_other&message.id=48777&view=by_date_ascending&page=2

Which points to the following:  http://consumer.installshield.com/kb.asp?id=Q111006

I just downloaded and ran the first program listed.  Then ran the second program listed on the installshield.com web page.  The message never reappeared since....

Source of tech news: digg.com

www.digg.com  is a great source for lots of science / technology news.  A number of the links that I've posted on this blog have be found via digg.com

Open source Linux home theatre software: freevo and A/D converter

Home theatre software which Incorporates lots of open source projects including MythTV: http://freevo.sourceforge.net/about.html

How to build a Linux analog to digital converter:  http://linuxgazette.net//118/chong.html

Gmail 'operation' aborted in IE

Using Gmail, I have come across some emails that kill Internet Explorer if I open them.  The emails that do it for me are ones from financial institutions, but I've heard that others have the same issue with emails from different origins.  What happens is that when you open the 'bad' message, IE pops up it's "Security Information" box and says: "This page contains both secure and nonsecure items.  Do you want to display the nonsecure items?".   It doesn't matter if you select Yes or No, because IE will give an error message: "Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site https://mail.google.com/mail/.   Operation aborted"   Then once you click OK, you get either an "Action canceled" or "The page cannot be displayed" errors.

This seems to happen only when using gmail via SSL:  https://mail.google.com/mail   You can view the message without any problems via gmail and standard http - http://mail.google.com/mail   The problem only seems to happen in IE;  using https://mail.google.com/mail  via FireFox, I have no problems opening the emails.  Another way around the issue is to open the email in a new window: turn on the keyboard shortcuts for gmail and then do a shift-o to open the message in a new window; it will open just fine that way.   Sometimes just trying to open the message after a few times will get it to open successfully.  Another thing that works is to open the message first using the standard http interface: http://mail.google.com/mail,  then without closing the browser, change the URL to secure http - https://mail.google.com/mail  then view the message without a problem.

The above was tested using fully patched IE6 on Windows XP, SP2  and using FireFox 1.5.  It may act the same way with different versions of both IE and firefox.