Following the changes related to Internet Explorer and the Eolas Technologies and the Regents of the University of California v. Microsoft patent case (Eolas v. Microsoft), Microsoft released an optional update to Internet Explorer 6 on February 28th 2006, which made somewhat of a modest change to the behavior of how pages with ActiveX are rendered. This change was visible even in the Beta2 preview (MIX 06) build of Internet Explorer 7 and the widely available Beta2 released this week. However if it's permanent in the case of IE 7 remains to be seen. I hope the IE team makes changes to their handling of ActiveX before they release it later this year.
Once the update is applied users cannot directly interact with Microsoft ActiveX controls loaded by the APPLET, EMBED, or OBJECT elements. Users can interact with such controls after activating their user interfaces. To activate an interactive control, either click it or use the TAB key to set focus on it and then press the SPACEBAR or the ENTER key. The most visible/annoying change is that it prevents Flash objects from receiving mouse & keyboard messages. Obviously this makes many flash objects loose their value as many respond to hover event of the mouse.
And although Microsoft promised to give developers an extra two months to modify their pages to ensure a smooth transition.But since the touted update; scheduled to be made critical in June, is only a month away. I guess why not share a simple workaround that I recently used myself, courtesy Amara Software.
You need to create a JavaScript file with the following code in it:

   1: theObjects = document.getElementsByTagName("object");

   2: for (var i = 0; i < theObjects.length; i++)

   3: {

   4:   theObjects[i].outerHTML = theObjects[i].outerHTML;

   5: } 

Now, include the file just below the last <object> in your HTML page.
e.g. Say you had saved the file as ieupdate.js

   1: <script type="text/javascript" src="ieupdate.js"></script>

I know that xHTML purists will say that the page will fail XHTML validation. For such people the solution is SWFObject.
To read more about this issue and see other solutions available, please visit:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/ieupdate
http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/activecontent/articles/devletter.html

I want a life exactly like Scott Hanselman's. He has 13 years of software development experience, and he is the among the most popular and most respected writers on ASP.net. He is a primary contributor to “newtelligence DasBlog Community Edition”, the most popular open-source ASP.NET blogging software hosted on SourceForge. And he recently became father to a baby boy. I remember an instance in early December when my parents happened to glance at his website soon after the birth of Zenzo Quincy while I was showing them color corrected versions of a few pictures we had taken recently. My parents are what people have traditionally called a mixed couple. My Dad is a Protestant Bengali while my Mom is a Roman Catholic Malayali… both very rich but fairly distinct cultures, besides the obvious difference of languages. When they saw pictures of Hanselman with his wife and newly born baby on a open tab in my browser. They said that it's nice that more Americans are getting married outside their race/culture. I was a bit surprised as to why such a thing would still surprise my parents as I thought it was a non-issue in a liberal society like that of the United States especially not in the new millennia.
So while I saw this post by Scott this week I was wondering what warranted a need to mention things like… "More and more on TV there are interracial couples that aren't called out as The Mixed Couple." But as I educated myself a little more on the topic I discovered a couple of nuggets on acceptance of interracial couples by the general American population.
»On Star Trek, when Lt. Uhura and Capt. Kirk kissed (against their will) in 1968, it was heralded as the first interracial smooch on television.
»And when Norman Lear featured a black woman and a white man as married neighbors to 1975's The Jeffersons, it was considered groundbreaking.
The article on USA TODAY went on saying… "In real life, the gap slowly is narrowing. According to the most recent Census, interracial marriages grew from less than 1% in 1970 to nearly 6% in 2000."
But is it really such a big difference? I don't think so. Even after more than 30 years this percentage is nowhere close to 2 digits. I've never shared the overtly utopian vision of mankind as envisioned by Gene Roddenberry. But am I expecting too much? Seems to me the majority of United States is still living in Black & White.

I have a pretty busy life that doesn't leave much room for family and friends. And I already have my share of tensions and worries; thank you very much! So I don't blog about much about Socio-Political issues. Though I totally respect Miss B for that. But whatever time I am able to pull off every so often and plan to go out and socialize… Migraine kills almost every chance I get to live a few moments as a normal person of my age.

Take the Easter weekend for example, so I had sort of told this girl that I will see her in Church on Sunday, she's an awesome woman and I kinda have a thing for her. I mean, who could resist a pretty lookin' Church going gal? Right!
But Saturday night I'm struck down by the worst Migraine in 2 months and rendered hapless even until the following morning that I couldn't go to the Church.
OK I get that my migraine is nature's check on me so that I don't turn out to be a classic bad boy running off to Night Clubs or Rave Parties every other night because almost everybody who knows me keep tellin' me I have the potential to turn bad the first chance I get. And no they don't mean it like Anakin Skywalker turning into Darth Vader. But c'mon, do I not deserve to go out? Meet new people, seek some fun in life?

CNET's news.com is reporting that Aero will require WGA (aka Windows Genuine Advantage) even though your Windows version is among the high-end versions of Vista: Home Premium, Business, Enterprise or Ultimate. But the most interesting thing in the 44MB early draft of the Vista product guide is that it tells you the exact memory bandwidth your GPU (wether card or onboard) must have to run Aero. Now I don't know if the Graphic Card manufacturer's do the same fancy number twisting like the hard disk manufacturer's so I don't know if 1.8 GBPS will be accurate, even the draft guide specifies the bandwidth as 1800MBPS.
Don't know if this helps anyone since Microsoft already has publicly said the graphic chips must be DX9 compatible. And most GPUs (even intel's 9xx series onboard chips) are 8 times the specified bandwidth.