I discovered last night that my newly re-installed Windows XP installation has sound in programs like Windows Media Player, iTunes, BSPlayer, Windows Media Center, etc. but no sound otherwise. No sound from the browser, no speaker icon in the tray. This is incredibly bizarre. I played with it for a long time and have found no solutions. It was working correctly but some Windows Update I installed broke it. I have no idea how to fix it (tried stuff for hours, very difficult to Google this problem). I found others with the same problem but no solutions. I guess I will be re-installing. Again. I am really considering just buying a Mac but I would rather spend the money on a Plasma HDTV. Oh well, we’ll see.
I decided to make a page on my website for Wallpaper Scramber. Which brought me to the next topic…
While I was making the page for Wallpaper Scrambler I noticed that many of the links on my home page are broken (just re-show the home page). I don’t know how I didn’t notice this before, but it has probably been like this for several months. After some research, I realized the problem is that PHP (which I use a touch of in my home page) has a setting named register_globals and the default for this setting changed in 4.2.0. This change can dramatically change how a page behaves if you aren’t aware of it (and I wasn’t). Anyway, I finally noticed this today and all is back to normal. I understand WHY they changed the default value for register_globals, it just seems like it could cause more problems than it solves — most people will probably just set it the way it used to be set so there is little security gain.
Install Linux, problem solved 😉