Changing the timeout of the tooltips (or disable them)

If you would like to change to timeout of the tooltips, you'll have to change the value of the DWORD BalloonTip in the key [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion
\Explorer\TrayNotify]
Setting it to 0000001E will change the timeout to 30 seconds.
You don't feel comfortable changing this value yourself? Download the regfile here.

If you would like to disable the tooltips, change the value of the DWORD ShowInfoTip in the key [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion
\Explorer\Advanced] to 0.
But you'll still have tooltips for the minimize, maximize and close buttons. Those can be disabled in the key [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\]. In Windows 9x you'll have the key UserPreferenceMask, in more recent versions it's named UserPreferencesMask.
Default the value of this key is "BE 00 00 00". In this case, you can change it to "3E 00 00 00".
If your key has another value, you can calculate the new value by substracting "80 00 00 00" in Hex. You can do this easily using the Windows Calculator (in Scientific View and Hex mode).

A little example:
If your key is 9E3E0080, just substract 8000000, the result is 1E3E0080

There's some more explanation on this key at http://www.virtualplastic.net/html/desk_reg.html#mask

GIF animation is stopped when clicking on a link

This looks like normal behaviour to me, but recently someone asked how to prevent this as he just called a Javascript function in a hyperlink. Something like this:

<a href="javascript:DoSomething()"><img src="animated.gif" border="0"></a>

He didn't want the animations to stop when clicking that link, so we rewrote this line to:
<a href="#" onclick="javascript:DoSomething();return false"><img src="animated.gif" border="0"></a>

Yahoo email storage reaches 1GB

Almost a year after Google's Gmail service started public testing, Yahoo has matched the 1GB of storage it offers for free email accounts.

Yahoo on Tuesday said it plans to once again boost its free email storage limit — this time to 1GB, the same amount offered by archrival Google.
Beginning in late April, Yahoo will upgrade free users to the new storage limit of 1GB, up from its current 250MB. The company said it will take about two weeks for all Yahoo Mail users to see the boost.
Yahoo's storage upgrade comes a week after Google started offering Gmail accounts to random visitors of its home page. This has led to heightened speculation in news articles and blogs that Google plans to open Gmail's doors to the public on 1 April, a year after it launched in its current test form.
Brad Garlinghouse, Yahoo's vice-president of communications products, said in an interview that Yahoo Mail's storage upgrade was not in response to Google's latest moves. Instead, he said Yahoo is "paying attention to what users are doing and how they're using their in-boxes".
Since Gmail premiered last year, free email has changed. Popular Web mail services such as Yahoo and Microsoft's Hotmail had offered strict storage limitations to their in-boxes, and required people to pay extra for additional space.
Shortly after Gmail was released, Yahoo announced plans to boost its storage to 100MB from 4MB, and then upgraded it again to 250MB in November. Subsequently, Microsoft said it would implement its own storage boost to 250MB.
Besides the 1GB of storage, Yahoo Mail will offer antivirus scanning. The service currently uses Symantec's Norton Antivirus to detect viruses, but prohibits people from opening the attachment instead of ridding the file of its infection.

(source: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/0,39020369,39192436,00.htm)

Why is it so quiet here?

I haven't published a lot in the previous weeks. This is because we had fire in our apartement, due to a short circuit in our dishwasher.
It'll take probably some more weeks until everything is finished... Good thing there's something called 'insurance' ;-)
You can take a look at some pictures at http://forum.khsw-be.net/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=169