Is there water on the Moon?

NASA has made an attempt to answer this question once again by sending an empty rocket part that weighed as much as a small SUV crashing into the moon. The target was a crater that they thought might contain some deposits of water that they hoped they could analyze the results to determine if there really is water located there.

While the picture to the right is not a image of where they dropped the rocket part, it could have looked like any one of these hundreds of craters that you see in the picture.

I am always interested in what NASA is doing because I grew up with Space as being our last primary frontier for Man to conquer. It has always captured my imagination. If this particular experiment shows that there really are water deposits that we could take advantage of. This will help make our going back to the moon even more viable.

It is going to take several weeks for them to analyze the images they captured. Hopefully we will get some good news.

I was printing in Photoshop and I got a Scratch Disk Full error.

Question: What is the Photoshop Scratch Disk? How Do You Fix "Scratch Disk Full" Errors?

Answer: The Photoshop Scratch Disk is referencing the virtual memory or memory swap space on your hard drive when your system does not have enough RAM to perform an operation. You can change drives that are being used for your scratch drive and if you use a second drive other than the one your operating system is on for your scratch drive it should run more efficiently.

If you have a problem and Photoshop crashes in the middle of an editing session this can leave some pretty large temporary file behind on your scratch disk. Photoshop’s temp files are typically named ~PST####.tmp on Windows, where #### is a series of numbers. These are safe to delete.

Other notes from http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/photoshop/f/scratchdisk.htm gives these hints:

Clear Disk Space

If you're getting an error message that the scratch disk is full, it usually means you need to clear some space on whatever drive is defined as the scratch disk in Photoshop Preferences, or add additional drives for Photoshop to use as scratch space.

Defragment Your Hard Disk

It is also possible to get the "scratch disk is full" error, even if the scratch disk drive has free space. This is because Photoshop requires contiguous, unfragmented free space on the scratch disk drive. If you are getting the "scratch disk is full" error message and your scratch disk drive does show a good amount of free space, you may need to run a disk defragmentation utility.

Scratch Disk Errors When Cropping

If you are getting a "scratch disk full" error when attempting to crop an image, it's likely that you inadvertently have size and resolution values entered in the options bar for the crop tool, or you entered values in the wrong units. For instance, entering dimensions of 1200 x 1600 when your units are set to inches instead of pixels is going to create a huge file that could trigger the scratch disk full message. The solution is to press clear in the options bar after selecting the crop tool but before dragging a crop selection.

Windows 7 Taskbar Features

ZDNET is a great source for tech news and How To functions that help me learn how to use different features of applications that I use everyday. Ed Bott has been running a short series of Windows 7 functions that when you take them as a whole will give you some good reasons for wanting to move into and start using this new operating system. I know that I have fallen in love with it and I would have to be dragged kicking and screaming to go back to any of the earlier versions of Windows now. Watch the video above to get a feel for what the new taskbar features provide you in this new interface.

Microsoft plans monster Patch Tuesday next week

The magic number this time around is 13 patches. The first patch for Windows 7 is included in the group. What is being covered? All the Windows operating systems, Internet Explorer, Office, SQL Server and some developer tools and Forefront Security client software. Eight are listed as critical. For more details click on the link below.

Microsoft plans monster Patch Tuesday next week

Add a popup window to a PowerPoint slide | Microsoft Office | TechRepublic.com

Susan Harkins has an interesting blog entry in TechRepublic that you  might be able to use. Susan shows you how to embed a graphic that triggers a popup window when pressed. If you need this kind of function you will want to read this article you will want to jump to the link listed below and read how she does it.

Add a popup window to a PowerPoint slide | Microsoft Office | TechRepublic.com

Can you find me Hard Drive Encryption software that will protect the hard drives if my notebook is lost or stolen?

Here is a great free product that will allow you to encrypt a partition, drive or a storage device like a flash drive. If you want to protect your data from prying eyes this is a great product. Take a look at it at: http://www.truecrypt.org/

Windows 7 Now in Distribution

We finally are seeing product hitting our distribution points. SO… if you are interested let me know. Here are the different version with a cross reference of their features. Upgrades and Retail boxes only. OEM isn’t out yet, darn, so we aren’t building yet.