From my experience, using the traditional way of bookmarking in multiple browsers ends in a complete mess. I've spent countless hours in getting my bookmarks in sync between my computers at home, at work and elsewhere and all the different browsers I use. The more my list of bookmarks grew, the more tedious the process of synchronization got.

But, as for most issues, there are several ways to solve it.

First, you may use one of the countless online services or social bookmarking sites such as delicious.com or diigo.com to get your bookmarks organized. While some of them have great features and functions to share bookmarks (if this is your intention), I never trusted them. It's far to easy to create a nice profile of you and your interests, just by analyzing your bookmarks and how often you click them. Now, call me paranoid, but I bet that's what most of these free services are doing in order to sell data to market research companies and the like. Anyways, if you don't care about this, I'd recommend having a look at delicious.com or Google Bookmarks.

Another way to get your bookmark stuff organized and synchronized between browsers is the use of tools, made for this specific task. In an quite old article "25+ Ways To Synchronize Your Bookmarks" over at mashable.com you'll find many of them listed and explained. And lately the maker of browser have begun to integrate synchronization support directly into their browsers, for example Firefox Sync or Google's sync functionality in Chrome, which is great if you're using the same browser everywhere.

Personally I have chosen another tool to organize my bookmarks. Since I am running my own website with database support, I am in the fortunate position to host my own online bookmarking services. In my case I'm using the not so well known tool Online-Bookmarks by Stefan Frech, which is quite excellent for this task.

Unfortunately development of “Online-Bookmarks” has been put on ice a while ago. Nevertheless, all the functionality you expect from such a tool (except for tagging) is available and works flawlessly. And if you, like me, are used to work with an hierarchical organization of your bookmarks (i.e. keeping them in folders and subfolders) rather than tagging them, there's nothing you'll be missing.

So, if you have the necessary prerequisites and want to keep your bookmarks private, yet not giving up the advantages of an online bookmark service, you should check it out. And if you like it, drop the author an email to let him know. Maybe it encourages him to continue development on this nice project.

And just in case you wonder: I've currently 2228 bookmarks in my database :-)

When it comes to webservers, my favorite is Apache. Today, however, I needed to install Microsoft’s IIS on my Windows 7 notebook for a bunch of compatibility tests of some Python web applications I wrote.

Installing IIS on Windows 7 is normally a very painless task. You just go to “Start > Control Panel > Programs” and select “Turn Windows features on or off” from the dialog box that opens. Thereafter you simply select IIS and the additional components you’d like to install. After a few moments IIS is installed and ready to use.

But today, once more, Windows did its best to cod me…

After clicking “Turn Windows features on or off” the upcoming dialog box, that should list these features, was empty. No matter how often I re-opened the dialog, it remained empty and it turned out to be a pretty stubborn problem.

I tried:

• Reboot the computer
• sfc /scannow
• Return to a system restore point created a few days ago

None of these steps helped, the list of components remained empty.

After some research on the web, it turned out that this problem has been around since quite a while and both, Windows 7 and Windows Vista, are affected. Microsoft has described the effects in its knowledge base article 934538 but the steps described there didn’t help to fix the problem. Many desperate users seemed to have reinstalled their systems because they didn’t find a solution for this issue.

Fortunately I came across a comment, which led me to this Knowledge base article, which – at a first glance – has nothing to do with this problem. However, after installing the described “System Update Readiness Tool” for my version of Windows (in this case Windows 7 x64), the problem was fixed and the list of components was properly populated.

I haven’t investigated this whole issue any further, since I had to get back to my actual task. But I thought I leave a few words about it here, just in case…

As in previous versions of Microsoft Office, there’s an option in Office 2007 that turns on additional feedback sounds. The additional sounds needed for this feature to be activated, can be downloaded from this page at Microsoft's website.

Unfortunately the installer insists on having an older version of Microsoft Office installed and refuses to work if you have Office 2007. But there’s a rather simple solution to get it installed anyway. Here’s how:

1. Download the file sounds.exe from the web page above
2. Open an execute dialog by pressing the keys WIN + R or by selecting “Execute” from the Windows Start Menu.
3. Enter this command (note that c:\download in this example has to be replaced with the path where you stored the downloaded file):
   c:\download\sounds.exe /t:c:\officesounds /c
   This will unpack the installation files and store them in C:\officesounds
4. Go to the newly created folder C:\officesounds, execute sounds.msi and follow the instructions of the installer.

All what’s left to do is to turn on the sound feedback in one of your office programs. For example, in Microsoft Word you would click the Office-Button, then "Options" and "Extended", scroll down almost to the end of the dialog and turn on the option "Provide sound feedback".

Enjoy :-)