When I reinstall XP (which I do too often) I always round up my customizations (which I can do in under 10 minutes blindfolded... sigh) with a bunch of tweaks inside of Tweak UI. Normally I never fuss with that "Repair" area, but for some odd reason I decided to click "Rebuild Icons" this time around. It didn't appear to do anything at first until I connected to my machine via Remote Desktop (which is how I connect to most of my machines...)
It had somehow messed up and all my icons in the taskbar, "Save As..." dialogs, desktop, etc. were all in 16 bit color. I even tried installing XP SP3 RC to see if it helped. I followed numerous suggestions about "tricking" Windows into re-caching the icons, deleting the icon cache, etc. Nothing fixed it. Finally, I came across a forum post (well, actually it was the first result in Google but this particular suggestion was the last one I tried) that had the magic fix. It's a simple .reg file that resets some icon settings somewhere. It was the only thing that seemed to do the trick, and I have decided to host a copy of it just in case that link ever goes dead. So, thank you to "wissnx01" at That Computer Guy's forums.
To fix the issue, download this zip file and merge the .reg file inside of it. Reboot (or maybe even just logout and log back in) and voila. Fixed.
Weak. I wanted to buy some MySQL IPO if it ever came out and get rich... oh well. Hopefully only good things will come from this, Sun's been working hard to shed their propriety-ness it seems, contributing resources to memcached, supporting OpenSolaris, and hiring on Ian Murdock, the founder of Debian.
Thank god for Postfix. Simple to configure. Damn near secure. So much nicer than messing with sendmail or qmail. Not to mention numerous papers on security, and it looks like he's also worked on patches to introduce taint checking into PHP. Not to mention creating the TCP wrappers library. He's all over the place.
His website here: http://www.porcupine.org/wietse/
We discovered a couple little annoyances with IE6, and I thought it would be useful to publish their workarounds.
Issue #1:
Random text would "disappear" on a page. It actually was still there and would show sometimes after hovering over it. The fix turns out to be setting the CSS for the text in question to "height: 0.01%" - it's so simple but so needless. It shouldn't have to be done. It should just work.
Issue #2:
<a href="javascript:anything" onclick="something()">
Won't work. It will just act like a dead link (or perhaps just ignore the onclick...) This will work however:
<a href="javascript:something()">
Note: Typically I try to keep my href's to be plain "javascript:;" if I need to use anchor-based links, and then chain events off of it using the element's ID and jQuery.
He's created one of the most useful tools in web development: Firebug. Also created the iUI (an iPhone-optimized UI) library. Of course Facebook has him on payroll now as well.
His personal website here: http://joehewitt.com
The PHP team deserves all the kudos in the world. I love PHP, and for the most part PHP has loved me. Between the four of these guys, you've got a large portion of PHP, Xdebug, APC and countless other related projects and modules. They've made web development a joy for me, when I don't have to write for lame projects that is.
Their personal websites: http://lerdorf.com/ (Rasmus), http://derickrethans.nl/ (Derick), http://netevil.org/ (Wez), http://ilia.ws/ (Ilia)
Back when I was trying to tune MySQL more, I wound up on Jeremy's site a lot. Yahoo has him on payroll, and he probably gets paid for being a general technical genius with specialties in MySQL and LAMPish development.
His personal website: http://jeremy.zawodny.com/
Steven has spearheaded a lot of great work with the memcached project. Not only that, but his insights on the mailing list have been interesting to read. Steven and his team at Facebook have made great improvements to the memcached project and have also helped with various PHP related modules (APC for instance.) Of course, it is always fun to read more information about their architecture too.
LiveJournal used to be the king. Nowadays with Facebook and Myspace it's moved down the totem pole. However, being king for a while did produce some cool stuff that Brad (and team) has been graceful enough to share. Probably the most popular is memcached, but MogileFS is pretty damn cool too. I also get a kick out of reading the history of their crazy LiveJournal server architecture.
His personal website: http://bradfitz.com/
Jan must write C and Lua in his sleep. He's behind Lighttpd, MySQL Proxy, XCache and who knows what else. He seems to be working on multiple projects all the time and making advances in them constantly. Not only creating new features out of need, but also just to see if it would work...
His personal website: http://jan.kneschke.de/