I've recently noticed the problem, and customers have reported, that websites that use a Flash based file upload control don't work.  The example I have been analyzing today is Magento eCommerce, uploading images into the catalog.  The older HTML style input type=file control works fine of course.

The short story is that the latest vesions of Flash 10 player, embedded into your browsers, essentially broke this, and apparently it has been quite a debacle.  While some web application developers have updated their software to work around it, not everything has been updated, and sometimes upgrading a webapp on a production server takes significant time and can't be done quickly just to resolve one issue.

A workaround I have verified, for Magento at least, is to uninstall the Flash Player 10 from Add/Remove programs, and then install this one:

http://haveabyte.com/flash9.msi

Here is the IE version:

http://haveabyte.com/install_flash_player_active_x.exe

This is version 9.0.124.0 and it solves the problem for Magento (tested with version 1.1.6.). I apologize that I didn't keep the original URL I downloaded this from, but I'm pretty sure it was from a direct Adobe URL, posted by someone into a Magento forum thread, and it has been scanned with the latest versions of Avast and Spybot S&D (and I'm running it so that should tell you it's safe.)

I hope this is helpful.

I'll take the position 
assume the missionary part 
you work by committee 
you had me pegged from the start. 
I'll be pounce pony 
phony maroney 
pony before the cart. 
I'll be pounce pony. 
this ceremony 
only fills my heart. 

who cast the final stone? 
who threw the crushing blow? 
someone has to take the fall 
why not me? 

a punch toy volunteer 
a weakling on its knee. 
is all you want to hear 
and all you want to see. 
romantically, you'd martyr me 
and miss this story's point 
it is my strength, my destiny 
this is the role that I have chosen. 

This thread is an ongoing discussion happening in near real time.

Amy
Today at 11:49am

If you feel as compelled as I did when I found out about this to do something, please email your friends and family, or better yet, call them NOW! Time is of the essence! If you aren't online, the phone numbers for your senators are in the phone book.

Friends,

There is a bill called the Generations Invigorating Volunteerism and Education (the GIVE ACT) that is being debated on as we speak in the Senate. It would require our youth aged 17 to 25 to serve the government in any form of the government's choice for three years. They wouldn't be paid and so is considered involuntary service which is supposed to be protected by our 13th Amendment rights. To me it equates to slavery!

[Erik: Read more for my analysis of the bill and Amy's claims.]

This is an old article I wrote years ago, and I've continually been surprised at how much traffic it continues to receive via one of my old domains.  I've decided to migrate it here to my main blog.  I've done some very minor editing and link fixing but it pretty much looks the way it was years ago.  It is basically a highly irresponsible experiment in how lean you can make a Windows XP installation, while still retaining a fair amount of usability (take that word with a grain of salt), only for highly adventurous people.  Unfortunately due to recent server migrations I have no way of knowing how old this article is.  My sense is that it is more than 4 years old.

Building a Windows XP Chopper

(or, how to make Windows XP use less than 32 MB of RAM)

by Erik Knepfler

   The term Chopper originally came from the early days of motorcycling, when financially disadvantaged motorcycling war veterans (read, "broke bikers") would chop up and remove their unfixable bike parts instead of replacing them.  It made their bikes leaner and lighter for the races, hill climbs, and infamous duels in the Circle of Death ("C'mon!  I just swept the Circle of Death!").  Thus, the Chopper was born.  Later the whole Chopper thing mutated and became crazy, but I digress.

    At some point, Windows XP change from being a fairly quick, efficient, stable improvement over Windows 9x to being a virus and spyware infested beast with more services running than most people have teeth.  Memory use hit an all time high - some people just boot their machine and it's already using 200+ MB of RAM!

    A Windows XP Chopper is an OS chopped to be the leanest, meanest, most trimmed down version of itself possible.  The purpose of this is to create an XP operating system that is dedicated to executing ONE TASK AT A TIME, guaranteeing full attention to that application at hand, with as few background processes running as humanly possible.

    I warn you.  This is not like other guides.

Once upon a time, I wrote a time tracking application for an employer which remained in use for nearly 10 years after I wrote it, counting up hundreds of thousands of billable man-hours of time for our OEM customers.  I loved writing it but I absolutely hated using it.  Like many engineers, I preferred getting work done to the tedious bureaucratic task of entering my time into a sheet, no matter how easy I made it to use.

Now, as a business owner, I recently started having some difficulty sticking to the schedules I set for myself and realized that a big part of the reason was due to a lack of time tracking.  I decided to bite the bullet and give it a shot.

The first thing you need to do is find a tool:  Sure you could use Excel, but it's certainly not ideal.  I did a quick search and found a great free application called ActiTime.  Their software runs locally or on a web server, powered with MS Access or MySQL under the hood.  It's fast, simple, and takes about 5 minutes to set up and start using.  It has simple reporting and exports CSVs into Excel for any kind of charting or analysis you can dream up.

The first week was a bit of a mess.  When you get excited about it you start imagining how wonderful it would be to have a detailed log of every minute spent, properly categorized into various customers, projects and categories, and end up with too much information.  Having had some practice, I decided to start over and began with a much simpler list of broad task categories.  This is the final list I came up with:

• Billable Work
• Branding
• Business Development
• Business Improvements
• Customer Support
• Marketing
• Money Management
• Networking
• Prospecting (In-Person)
• Prospecting (Online)
• Prospecting (Phone)
• Self-Improvement

Since this is a time tracking system for business, I decided to leave off anything personal that did not have any tangible benefit to the business.  This list is working out pretty well.

Here's an actual data-entry screen from ActiTime, it's pretty easy to use: 

Do you track time?  What have you learned?  Do you have any broad categories that I neglected to mention?  What software are you using?

Tweet @HaveAByte to share your experience.  Now if you'll excuse me, I need to track 15 minutes of my blogging time into Marketing, since I am spreading this around the TwitterVerse!